The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Washington was thrilled by the opportunity. He flew to Palo Alto to see Davis and go through the various interviews that were part of the hiring process at Stanford. He had gone out to dinner in San Francisco on Saturday night with friends and was flying back to Portland Sunday. He met with Davis on Sunday morning before he left, and the coach told him he was certain he was going to be able to hire him.

  When the two men stopped in Davis’s office before Washington headed for the airport, one of the assistants told Kermit his wife had called. Not wanting to be late for his plane, Washington decided to call Pat back after he got to the airport. At the airport, he called home. As soon as he heard Pat’s voice, he knew something was terribly wrong.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “I’ve been calling everywhere to find you.”

  Without explaining, Kermit, now terrified something had happened to Dana or Trey, said, “What’s wrong?”

  Pat paused, then took a deep breath. “There’s no way to tell you this,” she said. “Chris is dead.”

  “What happened?” he said, somehow finding his voice to get out two words.

  “We’re not sure,” Pat said. “Something about a bank robbery.”

  It wasn’t until much later that Kermit was able to piece together the details of his brother’s death. His financial problems had apparently gotten worse after returning to St. Louis, and so had his marriage. He and Janice had split and, while she and Eric remained in the home they had bought when times were better financially, Chris had moved into an apartment.

  Exactly when or why Chris made the decision to rob a bank, no one will ever know. But he did. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Chris committed his first robbery on December 12, 1983, six days after his divorce became final. The paper reported that he worked selling insurance briefly but lost that job. In April of 1984, he was late paying his apartment rent and he was apparently struggling to make child-care payments.

  On May 4, a hidden camera took a photo of Chris during a holdup at the Clark Mercantile Bank in north St. Louis County. Police later told the newspaper that they were able to make a positive ID of Chris after looking at a newspaper photo taken in 1975 when he was working with the National Alliance of Businessmen in a program that helped find summer jobs for high school seniors who came from poor backgrounds—backgrounds similar to Chris and Kermit Washington’s. In the photo Chris was wearing the same brown suit he was wearing when he robbed the bank.

  The end came ten days later. Police and FBI agents surrounded the apartment building where Chris was living. According to the Post-Dispatch, when they ordered Chris to come outside and surrender, they saw him peek at them from behind curtains. A moment later, a muffled shot was heard. When police entered the apartment, they found Chris Washington with a bullet through his head, the shot apparently fired by a 9mm Smith & Wesson automatic pistol that appeared to be the same as the one photographed in the May 4 robbery. The police found one photograph displayed in the apartment: Chris in his Cardinals uniform.

  Kermit did not fly to St. Louis for his brother’s funeral. Shortly after he returned to Portland, he got a call from his father. Why, he wanted to know, didn’t you take better care of Chris? How could you let this happen?

  “It was all my fault, according to my father,” he said. “I didn’t know what to even say to him. I knew part of it was that he was hysterical, and I understood that. But I wasn’t doing very well right then myself.”

  In fact he was doing very poorly. He decided not to go to the funeral because he knew that it would not go well between him and his father and his sister-in-law. He was angry: angry most of all that Chris was dead, but angry too that he was somehow being held responsible by his family. He knew he wasn’t responsible, but the thought that he might have been able to do something, should have done something, ached inside.

  Even now, when he talks about his brother, Kermit questions himself. “If only he had called me, just once,” he said. “But I know he was hurt because I had told him I couldn’t give him any more money. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe he would have called me if that hadn’t happened. Even after he robbed the banks, I could have saved him. I could have flown there and gotten him a lawyer, and he would have gone to jail, but it wouldn’t have been for too long. He never hurt anyone, never fired a gun, and he had a clean record up until then. It didn’t have to turn out the way it did.”

  Although the two brothers had clashed and had grown apart in the last year of Chris’s life, Kermit felt as if he had lost his best friend. Throughout those lonely years growing up in Washington, his constant companion had been Chris. It had been Chris he had sat with in the little bedroom on Farragut Street when they dreamed about stardom. Both had found it, in a real sense, beyond what they had dreamed. But it had never brought happiness to Chris Washington.

  “I’ve had some tough times,” Kermit said. “But I’ve also had some great times and a good life. It was never that way for my brother. Just when he really started to make it, he got hurt, and it was never easy for him after that. He was so smart when we were kids. He could have done so many things…”

  His voice trailed off as he talked. Kermit Washington talks easily about his difficult boyhood and at length about how he has dealt with the Tomjanovich incident. He has long-winded opinions on everything from religion to politics to the current state of the NBA. But when he talks about his brother, his normally booming voice becomes very soft and the words, normally a torrent, become a trickle.

  “I still miss him,” he said. “He was my buddy.”

  Barbara Washington died that summer. Unlike Chris’s death, her death was not a shock. She had been fighting cancer for months, and Kermit had known it was only a matter of time. “With Mom, there was sadness but also a sense of relief,” he said. “She had suffered for a long time.”

  The good news was that he had a job that was keeping him busy. Being a college coach was brand-new to Kermit. He was learning as he went. The NCAA rule book might as well have been written in Greek as far as he was concerned. “It seemed as if every time I worked on recruiting a player I broke a rule,” he said, laughing at the memory. “I did things that seemed innocent and then found out they weren’t.”

  During that first summer, Kermit was watching a couple of potential recruits during a summer league game. In between games some of the kids asked him if he wanted to play a little pickup. Why not? “I was still in decent shape,” he said. “I could play a little without hurting myself.”

  That wasn’t the issue. The issue, according to the rule book, was participating with potential recruits. A no-no. When he mentioned to Davis that he had played pickup, Davis rolled his eyes. “We’ll have to self-report to the NCAA,” he told Washington. “Don’t ever do it again.”

  Fortunately, because Stanford self-reported and because it was apparent to the NCAA that Washington simply didn’t know the rule, Stanford was let off with a warning.

  College coaching was a love-hate thing for Washington. He loved working with Davis, who he thought was a great coach and a wonderful man. “Tom Davis was so good he didn’t need any assistants on the floor,” he said. “He could teach, he could do anything and everything you needed to do. I never had a bad moment with him.”

  It wasn’t quite that way with the assistants. Whether it was because they resented him for walking into the job without any training as a coach or because Washington refused to show them any respect is hard to tell. “What did they know about coaching?” he said. “They were never real players.”

  That is a familiar ex-jock refrain. If you didn’t play the game, how could you know the game? Of course Davis was hardly a player of great renown, but that was different. Washington had no trouble seeing him as an authority figure, because he had first seen him in that role as a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old.

  Washington enjoyed the players. They were bright and motivated, and when he worked with them in the weight room he could tell they respected him. With goo
d reason: he could outlift them all.

  At this point in his life, Washington was obsessed with weight lifting. He had worked out since the end of his playing career with body builders and was bigger than he had ever been. He enjoyed the weight room aspect of his coaching job so much that he began working with athletes from other Stanford teams, something the athletes liked and the strength coach hated.

  “He thought I was treading on his territory,” Washington said. “But I never went to the athletes. They came to me.”

  He was still sensitive, hypersensitive, to criticism. Davis remembers that he stopped asking him to officiate during scrimmages because he would get so upset whenever one of the players questioned a call. “It was like the days at AU when we figured out we couldn’t yell at him,” he said. “I remember one day he made a call in a scrimmage and one of the kids said something like, ‘No, Coach, you blew that one.’ He took the whistle off, threw it on the ground, kicked a basketball across the court, turned around, and just left. He felt as if the kids didn’t respect him as much as they should.”

  Most of the kids liked and respected Washington. They knew he had been a successful NBA player, and Davis often used him as an example of how much a player could improve from his freshman year to his senior year if he put his mind on it.

  “I enjoyed it there,” Washington said. “It wasn’t perfect, but Coach Davis was great to me and I made a lot of friends among the athletes there. I didn’t really like recruiting very much, and after a while I felt a lot of frustration. Part of it was that I really couldn’t understand how a kid could have the chance to come to a place like Stanford and would ask questions like ‘How often will we be on television?’ The other part of it was that the kids we did get didn’t really need that much help. In the weight room, sure, I could help them there. But these were smart kids, getting a Stanford education. They didn’t need much guidance. I felt like there were other things I could be doing in places where I might be needed more.”

  Davis could see that adapting to the role of coach wasn’t easy for Washington. “He was a good recruiter when it came time to close on a kid,” he said. “Because it was impossible to spend time with him and not like him and be impressed by him. The earlier stages were tougher, because it takes a certain aggressiveness to get in with a kid [and] that just wasn’t Kermit. I think it was tough for him as an ex-pro to adapt to doing some of the things you are asked to do as an assistant coach. But he worked hard at it and kept getting better. I think if he’d had the patience to stay with it, he could have been very good at it.”

  After Washington’s second season, Davis accepted a job at Iowa, opting to return to his roots in the Midwest. He offered Washington the chance to go with him, but Washington turned him down. “I just didn’t think living in Iowa was for me,” he said. “And to be honest, I wasn’t sure college coaching was going to be the right thing for me in the long run.”

  Instead he accepted an offer from Stanford athletic director Andy Geiger to stay on as a weight training coach, working with the basketball team and selected athletes in the other sports, staying clear of football, which was one area the other strength coaches guarded zealously.

  “What made Kermit good was that he was willing to work as hard as you wanted to work,” said Patrick McEnroe, who is now the U.S. Davis Cup captain but then was a member of the Stanford tennis team. “I remember thinking that if everyone had his work ethic, we would all be a lot better at what we did.”

  As much as he enjoyed the athletes, the politics of Stanford ultimately proved to be too much for Washington to deal with. He never seemed to find a niche with the other coaches in the department, to the point that he actually had to go to Geiger to get a key to the weight room. A year after Davis left, he left too. He wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do next. But he had an idea in the back of his head.

  Maybe, he thought, he could be a basketball player again.

  While Washington was trying to find a comfortable niche, Rudy Tomjanovich was convinced he had found his. He had spent two years as a full-time scout for the Rockets. At the end of his second season—1983—Del Harris resigned as coach after another brutal, injury-plagued campaign had seen the team plummet to a 14–68 record.

  One of the reasons for the team’s awful record had been an off-season trade that sent Moses Malone to Philadelphia for Caldwell Jones and the Cleveland Cavaliers’ first pick in the 1983 draft— which the Sixers had owned. With Malone almost certain to leave at the end of the season to be a free agent, Ray Patterson gambled that the Cleveland pick might be the number one pick in the draft, and that might give the Rockets the chance to draft 7-foot-4-inch superstar Ralph Sampson, who was about to be a senior at the University of Virginia.

  The gamble paid off, but in the number three pick. The Rockets earned the number one pick on their own, first by going 14–68 and then by winning a coin flip with Indiana for the top pick. In those days, the teams with the worst record in each conference flipped a coin to see who got the number one pick. The Rockets took Sampson with the top pick and Rodney McCray, from Louisville, with the number three pick. Their college scout wanted to use the number three pick on Dale Ellis, a sweet-shooting 6-7 forward from Tennessee. But he was overruled by the new coach, Bill Fitch, who had replaced Harris at the end of the dismal season.

  “I ended up loving Rodney as a player,” Tomjanovich said years later. “He was a great guy and a very good player. But I loved Dale Ellis. I thought he had a chance to become something special.” What he became was one of the great 3-point shooters in the history of the league, someone whose shooting skills kept him in the NBA for seventeen years.

  When Fitch took over the team, he was given the authority to hire a second full-time assistant. The natural choice was Tomjanovich, so he moved to the bench with Fitch and Carroll Dawson for the 1983–84 season. That was the year the Rockets managed to lose 9 of their last 10 games to finish with the worst record in the Western Conference for a second straight year—though at a much-improved 29–53. Their swoon did two things: it gave them a chance to be part of the coin flip again, and it helped bring about the NBA lottery system for awarding the number one overall draft pick after several teams complained that the swoon had been suspiciously convenient for the Rockets.

  Proving that their coin-flipping skills were peerless, the Rockets won again, this time beating the Portland Trail Blazers, who had Indiana’s number one pick. The Rockets used their pick on Hakeem Olajuwon, who proved to be one of the great players in the history of the league. Portland picked Sam Bowie, another 7-foot center, who did not prove to be one of the great players in the history of the league.

  The Chicago Bulls had the third pick that year. They took a forward from the University of North Carolina who was listed at 6-6 but was really only slightly more than 6-4.

  “You see, Houston and Portland knew what they were doing,” explained Pat Riley, then the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, one night that summer. “Olajuwon is going to be a great player, and Bowie is a seven-footer who can play facing the basket. This kid, oh, he’s really talented, but he’s not six-six, he’s six-four. People in the media and fans don’t understand how important that is, because they don’t really understand the game.”

  The 6-4 kid in question was Michael Jordan.

  “Who knows what would have happened in the league if we had taken Jordan?” Tomjanovich said. “We liked the twin towers concept [Sampson and Olajuwon], because Ralph was really too slender to defend inside. When I saw Olajuwon, I thought he had the potential to be a Bill Russell–like defender. In fact he ended up having much more of an offensive game than I thought he would. In the end, choosing him worked out very well for us. But if we’re being honest, I don’t think any of us really knew that Jordan was going to become Jordan. When I scouted him, I thought he would eventually be an All-Star, but I never dreamed he’d end up being the dominant player in the game.”

  The good news for the Rockets was that Olajuwon be
came Olajuwon. If the Rockets had lost the coin flip, they would have taken Jordan with the number two pick. Portland did not take Jordan with the number two pick, meaning it would go down in history not only as the team that once took the immortal LaRue Martin with the top pick in the draft, but the team that passed on Michael Jordan to take the oft-injured Sam Bowie.

  The twin towers concept did work for the Rockets. In 1984–85, Olajuwon’s rookie year, they won 48 games—a 19-game improvement over the previous season and a 34-game improvement over the 1982–83 season. They lost a disappointing best-of-five first-round series to Utah, losing the decisive fifth game at home. But a year later, after a 51–31 regular season, they made it back to the finals, shocking the Lakers in the Western Conference finals. They won the Lakers series 4–1, clinching when Sampson made a spinning, desperation buzzer-beater for a 114–112 victory in the Forum. Sampson released his shot no more than twenty feet from the spot where Washington had almost killed Tomjanovich eight and a half years earlier. Thus, one of Tomjanovich’s happiest moments in basketball occurred in the same place where his worst moment in basketball had occurred.

  The finals were not all that different from 1981. The Celtics were the opponent again, Bird was the biggest problem again, and Boston again won the series in six games. The difference was that the Rockets didn’t feel as if this trip to the finals had been the product of a fluke or a hot streak. They thought it was part of a puzzle that was being pieced together and would lead to an NBA championship. They had two of the great young players in the game in Sampson and Olajuwon, and the future seemed to have no ceiling.

  Only it didn’t work out that way. Sampson’s fragile body began to break down the next season, and he only played in 43 games. Olajuwon had emerged as the clear star of the team, but without Sampson the Rockets didn’t have that double threat of two big men who could both score consistently. The team’s record dropped to 42–40 in 1986–87, and they lost to Seattle in the second round of the playoffs. The following December, the team gave up on Sampson, trading him to Golden State for Joe Barry Carroll and Eric Floyd. The trade worked okay; the Rockets won 46 games, but they were beaten by Dallas in the first round of the playoffs. That was enough to cost Bill Fitch his job.