The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Jack Ramsay confirms that fact: “We had a choice, our doctors looked at Kunnert’s knee and said it was fine,” he said. “I was the one who wanted Kunnert.”

  “The guy has created his own reality in all this,” Kunnert said. “All you have to do is listen to that tape.”

  Washington has no memory of the specifics of what he said on the radio that day. “If I said I got the rebound, I made a mistake,” he said. “I never did consider myself a fighter. Because of my role, I had to fight sometimes, but I don’t think that makes me a fighter. Kevin can say what he wants about why we ended up on the same team, I think it’s one hell of a coincidence, that’s all I can say. He knows he threw those elbows. But I know he’s never going to admit it.”

  Both men are equally vehement that their version of the truth is the truth. It helped neither one that they ended up living in the same city. If they hadn’t, Kunnert wouldn’t have heard that particular explanation on the radio and would not have been bombarded with stories about Washington in which he was repeatedly quoted as saying the fight was Kunnert’s fault.

  “I suppose I could have gone out and defended myself when he said all those things,” he said. “But I always thought talking about it kept it alive. All I’ve ever wanted is for the thing to go away. But Kermit won’t let it die. Every time I pick up a paper or hear him on the radio, there he is again telling people he didn’t do anything wrong. He talks about how he thought about suing me. There may come a day where I sue him.”

  There is genuine animosity here, fueled by years of frustration on both sides. Washington honestly believes that Kunnert is responsible for what happened that night and for all the pain brought on by its aftermath. Kunnert is just as convinced that Washington has unfairly made him into a villain through the years and has created his own version of the truth to rationalize his actions.

  The 1994 finals refocused public attention on the incident. Amidst the joy that came with winning the championship, Tomjanovich found himself being asked again and again about the incident and his recovery. When he picked up the commemorative issue of Sports Illustrated devoted to the Rockets’ championship, he found a lengthy profile written by Phil Taylor about him. Late in the piece Taylor devoted four paragraphs to the punch, more as background information than anything else. Two years later, in his autobiography, Tomjanovich wrote that “after our first championship, Sports Illustrated included a story on the Washington-Tomjanovich incident. What did that have to do with our championship?”

  There was clear frustration in those words and in the fact that four paragraphs would somehow stick in his head as being an entire story. To Tomjanovich, every mention of the punch was another piece of evidence that, no matter how much he accomplished, up to and including coaching an NBA championship team, he could not escape the shadow of that night.

  “I was still the guy who got nailed,” he said. “That was still who I was to most people. I felt as if I couldn’t escape it.”

  One year later the Rockets repeated in remarkable fashion. Midway through the regular season, with a record of 30–17, they gambled, trading the very solid Otis Thorpe for the spectacular but aging Clyde Drexler, bringing a University of Houston legend home and reuniting him with Olajuwon, his college teammate. It looked for a very long time as if the move had backfired. The Rockets limped to a 17–18 record the rest of the regular season and went into the playoffs as just the sixth seed in the Western Conference.

  They then put together two remarkable comebacks in the first two rounds. Trailing Utah 2–1 in the best-of-five first round, they won the last two games, including a 95–91 fifth-game victory in Salt Lake City, where the Jazz were considered virtually unbeatable. In the conference semifinals they faced Phoenix and quickly trailed 2–0 and 3–1. Somehow they rallied again, winning the last three games of the series, two of them in Phoenix. After that it was easy: a six-game victory over San Antonio in the conference finals and a sweep of the never-been-there-before, wide-eyed Orlando Magic in the finals.

  They had won back-to-back titles. Houston had a new nickname: Clutch City. They were all heroes, and even though they hadn’t faced Jordan, he had been in the playoffs, returning to the Bulls in March, only to have his team lose to Orlando in the second round. The Rockets were the kings of basketball, and their coach was now a big-time star. He may even have become someone other than the guy who got nailed.

  It was a few days after the Rockets won their first title that Tomjanovich was stopped for driving under the influence. The charges were later dropped when a videotape refuted the policeman’s charge that he had weaved across a double line. Tomjanovich was embarrassed by the incident but couldn’t understand why he had been stopped. He had been drinking, sure, but he wasn’t drunk. Or so he believed. When the incident occurred, no one who knew him was shocked. Those who knew him knew Tomjanovich drank—a lot.

  “It got much worse after he became the head coach,” Sophie Tomjanovich said. “He felt a lot of pressure, and he always felt as if he was under the gun in terms of time. It got to the point where he was doing two things: working and drinking. That was it.”

  Drinking had always been a part of Tomjanovich’s life, from age fifteen on. He had never been a problem drinker, had never allowed it to affect his play or his work, and had never been an obnoxious drunk. “I was usually pretty quiet,” he said. “I would just sit there and drink large quantities, then go home and go to sleep. I was never a problem for anybody. I just drank a lot.” Without realizing it, he was becoming his father.

  “I never knew that alcoholism could be genetic,” he said. “I also didn’t know how much I was drinking, because over the years I had developed the capacity to drink a lot without feeling affected.”

  Whenever Sophie tried to talk to him about how much he was drinking, he ignored her. “What did she know? She wasn’t a drinker, she didn’t understand.” He smiled. “That’s what we all say, isn’t it, ‘You just don’t understand.’”

  It was his daughter Nichole who got his attention first. They had gone out together one night, and after several beers Rudy switched over to hard stuff. “What in the world are you doing?” Nichole asked. “Do you realize how much beer you’ve had already?”

  Rudy could see the concern in his daughter’s face and eyes. Still, it couldn’t be that bad. He felt fine at work, felt fine at games. Heck, he had coached two NBA championship teams.

  By the end of the 1997 season, he was slowly understanding that he had a problem. “I would get depressed when things were going really well,” he said. “I didn’t know much about alcohol, but I knew it was a depressant. I didn’t feel good a lot. I tried changing my diet, eating better foods, thinking that would help. Then I decided to try to cut down on my drinking. Instead of drinking every night, I drank every other night. But I could never do any better than that. Putting two or three nights in a row together without a drink was impossible.”

  Early in the summer of 1997, he drove to a park early one morning to take a walk before going into the office. He got back into the car, drove a short way, and passed out at the wheel. Fortunately he wasn’t going very fast when he hit the tree. “I hadn’t had anything to drink at all,” he said. “I was never that kind of drinker.”

  Doctors tested him for anything and everything. They couldn’t find a specific reason for the incident. Even so, after all the test results came back his doctor said to him, “Rudy, I think you need to seriously reconsider your lifestyle.”

  “Doc, I wasn’t drinking.”

  “I know. I still think you need to reconsider your lifestyle.”

  More denial. More “what does he know, he’s not a drinker.” Okay, maybe he wasn’t sleeping all that well and he was tired a lot. Maybe he was still dealing with the dream/anxiety attack in which he saw himself dead and could only see a black void. Maybe it had gotten worse.

  Maybe he needed help. Sophie was almost pleading with him to do something, to seek help somewhere. “A lot of nights when h
e came home he was obnoxious,” she said. “Never anything bad, just not enjoyable to be around. All of us [she and the kids] were concerned. But it is very hard to hear things from your family.”

  The phone call that changed things came from Robert Barr, the Rockets’ longtime strength coach, who had been promoted to team vice president. He and Tomjanovich went way back, had spent long hours together. One day in the fall of 1997, he sat Tomjanovich down and said, “Rudy, Dr. Lowe is very concerned about you and wanted me to talk to you.”

  Dr. Walter Lowe was the team’s orthopedic surgeon. He was around the team a lot and around Tomjanovich a lot. He thought Tomjanovich needed treatment. Barr was the messenger. “Why don’t you just get this taken care of now, sooner rather than later,” Barr said. “Dr. Lowe thinks you need to do it, and I agree with him.”

  Tomjanovich’s initial response was the same as it had been with his family: What the hell do you know? “Robert wasn’t even a drinker, so how could he possibly know if I was drinking too much?” he said. “But after we talked, I finally sat back and put it all together: my family thought I drank too much; a couple of doctors thought I drank too much; Robert thought I drank too much. I finally said, ‘What the hell, let’s just do it.’”

  He checked into a treatment center in Arizona, in the desert outside Phoenix. Even then he didn’t have a clear understanding of what he was dealing with or what he was getting into. “I went in thinking they were going to show me how to drink like other people drank,” he said. “You know, have a couple and stop. Learn to leave a half-empty glass on the table without emptying it. I didn’t see how anyone ever did that, but I figured they were going to show me how to do it.”

  That, of course, was not what the folks in the treatment center had in mind. For the first few days they gave him pills to help his body adapt to the fact that it wasn’t receiving any alcohol. By the fourth day he was being weaned from the pills and he was miserable.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was up all night one night, then again the next night, then a third night. The harder I tried to sleep, the more impossible it became. I couldn’t stand it. No one had told me this was going to be about complete abstinence. I finally got up and called my doctor in Houston in the middle of the night and said, ‘You gotta get them to give me something.’”

  He did. A Benadryl.

  “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” he said. “I finally got out of bed at six in the morning and went and sat outside the director’s office and waited for him. When he came in, I told him I thought the place was great, I wanted to do this, I was committed to doing this, but I hadn’t slept for three nights and I was going out of my mind and couldn’t they just give me something so I could get some sleep.

  “He looked at me and said, ‘You know, when I was in here, it was a week before I could sleep. I understand what you’re going through. But lack of sleep never killed anybody. You need to make sure you exercise a lot today, the earlier the better. Go to all your classes. You’re in my class on spirituality today. That’s really important. You need to understand your spiritual side more. You need to pray. You need to get closer to God.’

  “I sat there looking at him, thinking, ‘What the hell does prayer and God have to do with me getting some sleep? I don’t need to pray, I need a pill or I need a drink.’”

  He went back to his room, lay on his bed, and tried to read the Serenity Prayer, which was posted on the wall of each room in the center, as it is in many rehab centers. (“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”). He read it over and over, trying to find meaning in the words, trying to find something to grab on to.

  Nothing.

  He was seized with desperation. Maybe, he thought, I’ll just get the hell out of here, find a way to get downtown, and get something to drink that will put me to sleep. He thought about that a little longer, then realized he had no car and the desert outside was full of rattlesnakes and tarantulas and coyotes and God knows what else. “They had warned us about wandering around out there,” he said. “I’m a city boy. That wasn’t for me.”

  He sat on the bed a while longer, exhaustion and desperation giving way to helplessness and despair. He had another thought: If he threw himself through the window (he was on the first floor) he’d be cut up and they would have to give him some kind of painkiller. “Then I thought about my face,” he said. “I didn’t want scars. Thank God I’m vain.”

  Finally, in complete despair, he prayed; really prayed for the first time since that awful night in the hospital in Los Angeles twenty years earlier, when he had prayed for the little girl in the coma. “I just gave in and accepted the fact that I couldn’t do it alone, couldn’t beat the system,” he said. “I was in absolute despair and I asked for help. I didn’t even really know how to pray. But I prayed.”

  It wasn’t as if he stood up and was cured, or that the exhaustion and despair disappeared. But he did stand up feeling as if he could go on. He went to his classes that day, followed the advice to listen as hard as he could and to exercise. And that night he slept. Soundly. From that day forward, he felt better. He left the treatment center just prior to the start of training camp feeling like a new man.

  “It was a wonderful feeling,” he said. “As good as anything I’d ever felt in my life. The only problem was, I thought I had taken care of it, that I’d sort of checked it off my list of things to do. Okay, I’m done drinking, that’s taken care of, what’s next?

  “Of course it wasn’t nearly that simple or easy.”

  As he had been advised, Tomjanovich began going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings when his treatment was completed. But he didn’t really take it seriously. He went sporadically, and when he did go, he wasn’t really listening to people. “I was sloppy about it,” he said. “I went because they told me to go, not because I wanted to go or thought I needed to go. I thought I was done with the disease. I thought it was like going in for surgery. You get whatever needs fixing fixed, you recuperate, and it’s behind you. Doesn’t work that way.”

  He learned that fact the hard way the next summer. He was coaching the U.S. team in the basketball world championship tournament in Greece. The job was a major challenge because the NBA had locked out the players at the start of the summer, meaning no NBA players could participate. Tomjanovich had expected to coach a group of NBA All-Stars in the tournament. Instead he found himself coaching a collection of minor league players, Americans playing in Europe and college players.

  “I enjoyed the hell out of the experience,” he said. “The guys we had worked incredibly hard and played extremely well. I was proud of that team.”

  But somewhere, somehow, the pressure of trying to win the tournament (the United States ended up winning the bronze medal) got to him. Sitting in a beautiful seaside Greek restaurant one night getting ready to start the medal rounds, Tomjanovich heard himself say to a waitress, “Beer.”

  To this day, he isn’t certain why he said it. “It was three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “We’d had a great meal, and I was feeling great about things. I was drinking orange juice. The next thing I know, I’m asking for a beer. I woke up the next morning and thought, ‘What the hell did you just do?’ I had been dry for eleven months, I was coming up on my one-year anniversary of sobriety, and I just threw it all away just like that.”

  He got through the rest of the tournament without taking another drink, but soon after he got home to Houston it happened again. Another night out with friends, another slip. That made two. He was now officially frightened, because he now knew enough about the disease to understand what slips lead to. He called his sponsor and asked what to do.

  “You need to get serious about AA, Rudy,” he told him. “I know you haven’t been until now, but that’s where you need to turn. I don’t mean just go to meetings, I mean go and listen.”

  Tomjanovich listened—first to his sponsor, the
n to those speaking at the meetings. Soon after he started attending on a regular basis, he found himself sitting next to a man who stood up and talked about sobriety. “I’ve been sober for a year,” the man said. “I have lost my family and I’ve lost my job during that time. But my life is one hundred percent better now than it was a year ago. I know as long as I stay sober I’ll be okay.”

  Tomjanovich found himself listening and looking into the man’s eyes. “I could tell he meant every word,” he said. “That’s how important it was to him. Things like that made me understand that this wasn’t an option, this wasn’t something I should think about doing, it was something I had to do.”

  And so, finally, he did it. He began going to AA meetings virtually every day. On the road, he would find a meeting and go. He became close to members of his chapter in Houston. For the first time in his life, he began going to church—twice, in fact, every Sunday he was home.

  “I like to listen to the preachers in both the churches,” he said. “I like their messages. They’re different, but they’re both fascinating. I feel like I learn something listening to them, about life and about myself. I always come out of there feeling better than when I went in.”

  He became, in his words, a new person. Since he wasn’t drinking, he felt better physically, but it went way beyond that. For the first time in his life, he felt at peace about who he was. No more self-doubts, no more beating himself up, no more having to prove himself over and over again. No more knots in the stomach. And no more anxiety attacks about death in the middle of the night.

  “That went away completely,” he said. “For twenty years I dealt with that and had really accepted it as part of my life, that I was going to always have to deal with these anxiety attacks. Gone. I feel totally different about myself now.

  “Until I stopped drinking and got involved in AA, if you were making a movie on my life the musical sound track would have to have been the blues,” he said. “That was always the way I felt about it. I always thought I had to outwork everyone because that was the only way to have success. Work, work, work, and nothing else mattered, because if you didn’t succeed at your job you would be humiliated.