The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Pat understood Kermit’s thinking but still wasn’t happy about the decision. “I just thought we should be together right then,” she said. “I know Dana missed him, and I missed him too, and it wasn’t exactly easy being alone with the two kids in Los Angeles, even in our house. To me it was a question of basketball or family. In the end Kermit was always going to choose basketball.”

  Having made his choice, Kermit threw himself into basketball completely. There were games to play and practices to go to and road trips to make. But that wasn’t enough. “I needed to get myself back into a regimen, a routine. I needed to get back into the kind of shape I was used to being in. So I ran the hotel steps—every morning and every night.”

  The Sheraton-Prudential was twenty-nine stories high. Every morning before breakfast, Washington ran all the way up and all the way down—five times. Every night he ran all the way up and all the way down—five more times. “It got to the point where I dreaded waking up in the morning because I knew I had to run,” he said. “I dreaded getting ready for bed because I knew I had to run. But I made myself do it. I would never look at the floor numbers, because I knew if I did I’d never make it to the top.

  “So I would just keep my head down, and instead of thinking about how many floors I had left, I’d think about other power forwards. Every couple of flights I’d think about someone different. I’d start with Maurice Lucas and then go to Larry Smith or Danny Roundfield or Truck Robinson or Moses [Malone]—all people I knew I was going to have to guard. I knew if I gave up, they’d destroy me. In fact one of the first games after I came back we played the Suns and Truck just killed me. I think he had twenty-nine. That was my motivation, not wanting to be humiliated by those guys because I wasn’t in shape.”

  Washington was fortunate that Don Chaney, one of his closest friends, had been included in the trade. Chaney had played in Boston for six years and still owned a home there. Since Washington didn’t have a car, Chaney picked him up most days at the hotel and drove him either to practice or the games.

  “My whole life in Boston was practice, play games, and the hotel,” Washington said. “The people at the hotel were great to me. When I’d get back late from a game or a trip, they always had food for me. The housekeeping people would do laundry for me and not charge me, because we’d all become friends. In a sense, for those two months they were my family.

  “And, of course, Red.”

  Auerbach understood when he made the trade for Washington that life wasn’t going to be easy for him, especially on the road. He felt an obligation to keep an eye out for him as much as he possibly could. So whenever he was in Boston, he tried to spend time with Washington if he could.

  “He would come into the locker room after a game and say, ‘Hey kid, you wanna get something to eat?’” Washington said, laughing at the memory. “I was always exhausted, and I knew I had to go back to the hotel and run the steps. I’d say, ‘Mr. Auerbach, thanks so much, but we have to go to New York tomorrow. I think I’ll just go home and go to bed.’ And he’d stand there with that cigar, flick an ash on me, and say, ‘Okay then, the hell with you.’ But the next game, he’d be right back. One time he wanted me to go to some tennis match after an afternoon game. I think Chris Evert was playing. I just said, ‘Tennis match? You?’ And he said, ‘You got something against tennis?’ He was probably the one person during those days who could actually make me laugh.”

  Like everyone else, Auerbach was concerned about Washington’s mental state. “Kermit was fighting a battle he couldn’t win,” he said. “Nothing he could say or do was going to change the way people perceived him because of that one moment. I wanted him to feel at home with us, to feel wanted.”

  Chaney, who had known Washington longer and better than any of the other Celtics, had noticed major changes in his personality since the incident. “His smile disappeared,” he said. “My kids always loved Kermit because he was so much fun for them to be around. He would come over to our house in L.A. and get in the pool with them and pick them up and throw them into the deep end. They thought that was more fun than anything in the world. And he was always laughing and smiling and clearly enjoying himself.

  “After the fight, that all changed. Before we got traded, he was over to the house a few times, but he didn’t want to play with the kids. I mean, he tried, but you could tell it wasn’t fun for him anymore. I’m not sure anything was fun. I was hoping when he started playing again, the old Kermit would come back. But it never did. He was different. So much more serious, as if he was carrying a great weight on his shoulders. That great smile of his just disappeared.”

  Auerbach knew Washington was carrying a weight on his shoulders. He tried hard to get the Boston media to accept, even embrace, Washington, to try to tell his side of the incident. This was especially important in a town not known for racial tolerance. “The key guy was [Bob“ Ryan,” Auerbach said. “Everyone in town respected him. When he wrote a story saying that Kermit was really a good guy who had been involved in one horrible incident, I think it really helped us with our fans.”

  Ryan, the longtime Boston Globe columnist, took the time to research Washington’s history to lend some perspective to who he was and make him into more than just the thug who almost killed Rudy Tomjanovich.

  “You couldn’t not like the guy when you sat down and talked to him,” Ryan said years later. “To me, it was clear that this was a good man who had really been, as much as anything else, horribly unlucky. He never wanted to hurt Rudy the way he did. That was obvious. It was also obvious that he was still in a lot of emotional pain because of what happened. I felt bad for him.”

  Ryan’s piece in the Globe certainly helped. What helped more was that Washington was playing well. Even though he didn’t feel as if he was in shape, he was playing and contributing almost exactly as he had in Los Angeles prior to December 9. For the Lakers, he had been averaging 11.4 points and 11.2 rebounds a game. In 32 games in Boston, he averaged 11.6 points and 10.5 rebounds. The Celtics were having one of the worst seasons in their history— they would finish 32–50 and miss the playoffs just two years after being NBA champions—but Washington was a bright spot. The fans in Boston quickly accepted him because of his work ethic and his effectiveness.

  “I don’t think he ever got booed in Boston Garden,” Chaney said. “Right from the start, the fans seemed to be on his side. Of course if he hadn’t played well, I’m sure it would have been different.”

  On the road people weren’t quite so hospitable. Even though Auerbach kept him out of Houston, he still ran into hostile crowds most places he went. In both Cleveland and Detroit—the latter not surprising, since it was Tomjanovich’s hometown—he received enough death threats to warrant extra security everyplace he went and uniformed officers sitting right behind him on the bench.

  In a sense Washington was in denial about what had happened to his image in the aftermath of the fight. He had the cocoon of the team and Auerbach and his sheltered life of hotel, arena, practice to keep him from full exposure to the outside world. He knew the threats were there and that he needed the extra security. But his daily life during those two months was so narrow and so focused that he had little time to think about what the future might hold.

  “I really was in my own little world,” he said. “Except for missing my family, I enjoyed those two months. The most important thing was that I was playing again. I had my life back. Basketball was my life. If I had ever doubted it, the time away when they wouldn’t let me play confirmed it. Everyone I came into contact with—real contact, not some fans booing me in an arena—was great to me. Satch [Sanders] was great to play for, and the Celtics were great too. I was actually very happy during that time.”

  But storm clouds were forming outside the cocoon. The Rockets and Tomjanovich had filed suit against the Lakers, claiming that the Lakers were responsible for Washington’s behavior and Washington’s behavior had endangered Tomjanovich’s career and done tangible damage to t
he Houston franchise. In the meantime, the tape of the punch seemed to be on TV somewhere, twenty-four hours a day. It didn’t get any less chilling with each replay and, more and more, when he ventured outside the cocoon, Washington would encounter people who would stop and point and say, “Aren’t you the guy?”

  The answer was yes, he was the guy. What Washington wanted to tell those people, though, was, “But that’s not the whole story. I’m much more than that.”

  Most people didn’t wait around for the rest of the story.

  By the time the season ended, Washington was convinced he wanted to stay in Boston. He had performed well under difficult circumstances and he was sure that Auerbach would rebuild what had become a very old team. John Havlicek was retiring at age thirty-eight after one of the great careers in the history of basketball. The roster was filled with players crowding or over thirty: Jo Jo White, Dave Bing, Curtis Rowe, Sidney Wicks, and Chaney were all a lot closer to the end of their careers than the beginning. Cowens wouldn’t turn thirty until October, but his body had taken a pounding after eight seasons in the NBA as a 6-9 center.

  The age of the team made Washington, who was not yet twenty-seven, an important part of the future as far as Auerbach was concerned. “When I made the trade it was with the thought that we’d re-sign him and he would be with us for ten years,” Auerbach said.

  That plan was fine with Washington. His play down the stretch had made him a marketable commodity in the NBA. Dell received feelers from a number of teams willing to sign him to contracts that would pay him considerably more than the $120,000 he had made the previous season. Washington was in the prime of his career and had proven to most that the Tomjanovich incident had not changed him as a player. Only those who knew him well could see that it had affected him.

  “I don’t think he was ever the same on the court after the incident,” Chaney said. “He was still effective because he was strong and a quick leaper and nobody worked harder than he did or was in better shape. But Kermit before the punch had an edge to him on the court. He was an intimidator and he was intimidating. I think after what happened he wasn’t as willing to mix it up with people as he had been, and that changed his game. I think always in the back of his mind was the fear that he might hurt somebody again.”

  Jerry West agreed. “Neither man was ever the same,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t good players; they were. But I don’t think either one of them ever played with the same abandon after what happened. That they did the things they did on the court is a tribute to their toughness and their competitiveness.”

  “He became careful,” said Jack Ramsay, who would coach him at the end of his career, in Portland. “Kermit’s game was about being physical. After the fight he wasn’t nearly as physical. He didn’t want anything to happen.”

  Washington has never bought the notion that he wasn’t as aggressive a player after as he had been before. “If anything, in a strange way, it helped me on the court,” he said. “People gave me more room, they didn’t want to mess with me. I can remember in games when things did start to get physical hearing other players say, ‘Don’t fool around with Kermit, he might Rudy T you.’ I didn’t enjoy hearing that, but I knew it meant that guys were scared of me.”

  Washington was never in another fight the rest of his NBA career. Given that friends, teammates, and coaches all expressed concern about his penchant for getting into fights prior to the punch, it probably isn’t a coincidence that he was not in another fight afterward. No doubt it was a two-way street: Washington didn’t want to fight, and no one wanted to fight him. But those closest to him noticed the change, on and off the court.

  “There was a sadness in his eyes after it happened,” said Stu Lantz, a teammate and later a business partner in what became the Pete Newell Big Man’s Camp. “It was almost as if the specter of Rudy and what happened that night shadowed him everywhere he went. He’s just never been able to escape it.”

  But in the spring of 1978, Washington thought the worst was behind him. He had told Dell to keep him apprised of other offers but made it clear that unless someone came in with an offer that absolutely blew Dell away, he wanted to stay in Boston. He was comfortable there, and he felt he owed it to Auerbach to remain if Auerbach wanted him.

  Auerbach wanted him. At the same time, he was also negotiating with another free agent he felt could help the Celtics at both center and power forward: Kevin Kunnert. Auerbach wasn’t concerned about any past history between Washington and Kunnert. He just felt that each, in a different way, could help make his team better.

  Late in the spring Dell called Washington. The Celtics had offered four years at $250,000 a year. Washington was thrilled. Wait, Dell said, there’s more: you can go to Denver for four years and make $300,000 a year. Back then a difference of $50,000 a year in salary was not a minor issue. Over the life of the four-year contract it would mean an extra $200,000—close to an extra year in salary. Dell asked Washington if he wanted to see if the Celtics would match. Washington said no. He knew Auerbach well enough to know that the money on the table was the best Red thought he could offer and that he would probably be insulted if Dell went back and asked for more. Washington wasn’t leaving the security and comfort he felt in Boston, not even for an extra $50,000 a year. He told Dell to accept the Celtics’ offer.

  “If nothing else, I owed it to Mr. Auerbach to stay,” he said. “And I wanted to stay, because I liked everything and everyone involved with the team.”

  Once the contract was signed, Washington flew to Boston to find a place to live. He was about to make a deal to buy the house Charlie Scott had lived in while playing for the Celtics when he got a message to call Auerbach. There was also a message that Dell had called. They both had the same news: don’t buy a house yet. Something was going on that might change things.

  What was going on was one of the stranger ownership maneuvers in the history of sports. Irv Levin, the owner of the Celtics, was a California guy. He wanted to live on the West Coast, not in Boston. But the basketball team he owned played in Boston. There was no way he could move the Boston Celtics—not and live to tell about it. The Buffalo Braves, on the other hand, could be moved. They had been in Buffalo for eight seasons, and while they had experienced some success, they were hardly an immovable franchise. They had finished the season 27–55, and attendance had dropped considerably along with the team’s win total.

  It was David Stern who suggested the idea of a swap to Levin: Levin would swap the Celtics to John Y. Brown, the owner of the Braves (and the future governor of Kentucky). Then Levin could move the Braves to California, specifically to San Diego, which had not had a team since the Rockets’ exodus to Texas in 1971. The league liked the idea of getting back into the San Diego market and was not brokenhearted to leave Buffalo. Brown got the prestige of owning the Celtics, and Levin could have his team less than a hundred miles away from his home in Los Angeles.

  Levin and Brown finalized the deal at the league meetings (held in San Diego) in June, just as Washington was about to buy his house in Boston. As part of the deal, in order to strengthen the new franchise in San Diego, several of the Celtics contracts were assigned to the newly minted Clippers. They included a backup guard named Bob Bigelow, forward Sidney Wicks, and two recent free-agent signees: Kermit Washington and Kevin Kunnert.

  Washington was stunned when he heard the news. He called Auerbach and asked him how this could have happened. “If I had known this was going to happen, I would have signed with Denver,” he said. Auerbach knew that was true. But this was out of his control. The deal had been made by the two owners, with the approval of the league. For once he was out of the loop. “I was devastated by the whole thing,” he said. “For one thing, I didn’t want to work with John Y. Brown. For another, the players we lost were really going to hurt us—especially losing Kermit.”

  As it turned out, the Celtics were even worse the following season than they had been in 1978, going 29–53. But dur
ing the 1978 draft, Auerbach had taken a gamble, drafting a player with the number six pick even though he knew the player planned to return to college the next season. The rules then were different. A team could draft a fourth-year college player who had one year of eligibility left as long as he was signed before the next draft was held. Otherwise his name went back into the draft. Few teams took advantage of this rule, especially in the first round, because it meant committing to someone without knowing if you would be able to sign him and knowing for certain you wouldn’t have him for at least a year.

  Auerbach decided this player was worth the risk and took him. His name was Larry Bird. He signed Bird a year later, just prior to the deadline, and in Bird’s rookie season the Celtics were 61–21. A year later they won their fourteenth NBA championship. All was well again in Boston.

  By then Kermit Washington was long gone.

  16

  Recovery

  Christmas 1977 in the Tomjanovich house was one of mixed blessings.

  The most important thing was that Rudy was home. He cried when he saw Nichole and Melissa, which wasn’t easy since he was still going to need surgery to open up the tear duct in his right eye. Just being back in his own home, in his own bed, with his family, wasn’t another of Dr. Toffel’s little victories. It was a big one.

  But the reality of what had occurred sixteen days earlier was very much a presence. Before he left to fly back to Los Angeles, Toffel had to show Sophie how to use the wire cutters to pry open Rudy’s mouth in case of emergency. The act of learning how to work the cutters and the thought of what might be at stake if she had to use her new skill gave Sophie the shakes. “And I knew that if I needed to use them, I would have to stay calm and not panic in a situation in which I would want to panic,” she said.