The Punch Page 7

  These days Tomjanovich never would have been allowed to walk off the court. An EMS unit would have come on court, his head and neck would have been immobilized, and he would have been taken off on a stretcher. He would not have been allowed to move at all, much less stand up.

  But this was 1977. On the Lakers bench, Dr. Clarence Shields, who worked with longtime team physician Robert Kerlan, could see that Tomjanovich was going to need to be looked at by a doctor in the locker room, so he followed Tomjanovich and Vandervoort as they left the court. Ball boys were still trying to mop the blood off the floor.

  “It was all so out of context,” Mike Newlin said. “The whole scene. One minute we’re playing a basketball game, the next he’s lying in this pool of blood. We’d all been in fights, seen fights, seen blood. But nothing like this.”

  No one had been in more fights or seen more blood than Calvin Murphy. He was completely beside himself as Tomjanovich left the court. He and Abdul-Jabbar were longtime friends, dating back to their eastern roots (Abdul-Jabbar, New York; Murphy, Connecticut). Tears in his eyes, he turned on Jabbar. “How could you let that happen, Kareem?” he screamed. “Why didn’t you grab Kermit? Why didn’t you stop him? How could this have happened? How?”

  Abdul-Jabbar knew Murphy was angry and upset and there was no sense explaining to him that he’d had his hands (literally) full trying to get Kunnert out of Washington’s way and had never even seen the punch.

  When he later looked at the tape, Murphy refused to buy Washington’s explanation that he reacted on pure instinct. “Your first instinct is to protect,” he said. “You hear someone coming from behind, you turn and get your hands up. Then, if you need to throw a punch, you throw it. Kermit turned, saw Rudy clearly, and threw the punch. He was angry. He wanted to hurt somebody. Not the way he did, I know that. But this wasn’t an act of self-defense. If it had been, he would have just been covering up.”

  Kunnert, who had shaken his wooziness during the stoppage in play, had a dull pain above his eye but was able to stay in the game. “I didn’t want to, though,” he said. “All the emotion of the basketball game was gone. I didn’t want to be out there. I was just too upset by what had happened. I’m not sure if I did it consciously, but I fouled out of the game….I got three quick ones the next few minutes. I just didn’t want to play.”

  Neither did Abdul-Jabbar. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you if we won the game that night,” he said. “And I can remember the outcome of most games I played in. It was as if we were all in the middle of a bad dream.”

  The Rockets won the game. While most of the players floated through the rest of the night like zombies, Murphy was a man possessed. He took it upon himself to win the game for his roommate. “I was so angry, unbelievably angry,” he said. “I just kept telling myself there was no way I was going to have to tell Rudy we lost when I talked to him, because I knew he’d never forgive me for that.”

  Lucas remembers being scared to get anywhere near Murphy. “He was so wound up that whenever he scored, he would run down the court and try to slap your hand so hard he hurt you,” he said. “He sprained both my thumbs because he hit my hands so hard. I finally ran away from him whenever I saw him coming. I thought I was going to get seriously hurt. He had a look in his eye that no one wanted to mess with.”

  Tomjanovich had more to worry about than the outcome of the game at that point. The first time he actually saw Washington was when he got into the hallway under the stands. Washington was outside the Lakers’ dressing room, adrenaline still pumping from the fight. The writers who had come downstairs remember him pacing up and down, still wound up, when Tomjanovich came into view. Seeing Washington, Tomjanovich pulled the towel—a second one, the first already blood-soaked—off his face for a moment. That was when he demanded to know why Washington had hit him.

  When Washington screamed something at him about Kevin Kunnert, Tomjanovich was infuriated. Fortunately there were enough security people in the hallway to keep them apart.

  In his autobiography, A Rocket at Heart, Tomjanovich says that it’s a good thing the security people separated him from Washington, because “he [Washington] certainly would have won the fight because he had better boxing technique than me—since I had none.”

  Losing the fight would have been the least of Tomjanovich’s troubles if Washington had delivered another punch. No one had any idea how fragile Tomjanovich was at that moment. “With good medical care, administered quickly, patients in his condition will usually pull through,” Paul Toffel, the doctor who later performed multiple surgeries on Tomjanovich, said. “Anything less and you lose them.”

  Another punch and Tomjanovich probably would not have made it.

  Once he and Washington were kept apart, Tomjanovich went up the hallway and around the corner with Vandervoort and Dr. Shields. NBA locker rooms aren’t open to the media during a game, so the writers, who had witnessed the exchange in the hallway, couldn’t talk to either player—not that Tomjanovich was in any condition to converse.

  “Let’s get this done quick,” he told Vandervoort.

  Vandervoort nodded, turned him over to Shields, and went to call Sophie Tomjanovich in Houston, figuring she would be listening to the game on the radio and would be terrified, wondering exactly what had happened to her husband.

  Sophie Tomjanovich wasn’t listening to the game. She had listened to the first half while getting the children, four-year-old Nichole and one-year-old Melissa, ready for bed. The game had started at nine-thirty Houston time. With the girls in bed by half-time, Sophie did what any young mother left alone with two children would do: she dove into bed.

  “I remember Rudy was having a great shooting night the first half,” she said. “I also remember I was exhausted. I couldn’t stay awake another minute.”

  It was sometime shortly after eleven o’clock when the phone rang, waking her from a sound sleep. As soon as Sophie heard Vandervoort’s voice she knew something was wrong—a lot more wrong than he was implying.

  “Rudy got hurt in the game, I didn’t know if you were listening,” he said. “But he’s okay.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s probably a broken nose. That’s it, a broken nose.”

  “A broken nose. That’s all?”

  “Probably. The doctor is looking at him now. We’ll probably send him to the hospital for X rays. But he’s okay.”

  Sophie Tomjanovich knew it wasn’t all that simple, and her gut told her it wasn’t just a broken nose. “Dick sounded too tired, too drained for it to just be a broken nose. I kept saying over and over, ‘It’s just a broken nose?’ But he wouldn’t tell me anything more. He said he would call again when he knew more.”

  While Vandervoort was on the phone, Tomjanovich was lying on his back on a training table as Shields examined him. Shields asked him to open his mouth. He couldn’t. His back teeth were stuck together. “Oh damn, the caps on my back teeth must have come loose,” he said, through what he was now aware were clenched teeth.

  Then it hit him: he didn’t have any caps on his back teeth.

  “That freaked me out,” he said. “I mean, what was going on with that?”

  There was also the matter of the bitter taste in his mouth. Shields told him an ambulance was going to take him to the hospital. He had already paged Toffel and told him he needed him to get to the emergency room at Centinela as soon as he possibly could.

  Tomjanovich was still someplace between fear and rage. The look on Jerry West’s face, the taste in his mouth, his teeth sticking together, were all clues that something was seriously wrong. But there was also the notion inside him that you don’t go to the hospital in an ambulance just because someone decks you with a punch, even someone as strong as Kermit Washington. He was still waiting for Vandervoort to come back and tell him he could stanch the bleeding with some gauze and get him back on the court.

  But that wasn’t happening. Instead he was being led out of the building to the ambula
nce Shields had talked about. Tomjanovich kept thinking the same thing over and over: “This is crazy. I’ve got a game to play. This can’t be real.”

  In 1977 most people got the bulk of their sports news out of the morning newspaper. Most local late-evening news shows gave their sports anchors between two and three minutes to recap the day’s events. Taped highlights from that night’s games were rare. The sportscasters read as many scores as they could, perhaps threw in a quick taped interview with a local athlete, and tossed it back to the news desk. There was no taking highlights off a satellite, no such thing as the Internet. If you lived on the East Coast, your paper probably didn’t print West Coast box scores until two days after the game was played. The outcome of a Rockets-Lakers game played in L.A. on a Friday night would not be known to most on the East Coast until Sunday morning.

  News traveled much more slowly. The notion that the highlights of a regular-season basketball game, especially one played on the West Coast, might show up in any market other than the two whose teams were playing was pretty much out of the question.

  Back at the arena, the writers were told that Tomjanovich had been taken to the hospital for precautionary X rays and he appeared to have a broken nose. All the writers were on deadline, especially tight ones since the game had been delayed by the incident, so their stories the following morning didn’t hint in any way that Tomjanovich’s condition might be more serious than that. The subheadline on George White’s story in the Houston Chronicle said “Tomjanovich’s nose broken in fight.” Ted Green’s story in the Los Angeles Times described the fight and the scene on the floor when Tomjanovich went down, but he could not say anything more than White could in his story.

  Once he was finished writing, knowing he would be expected to follow up on Tomjanovich’s condition for Sunday’s paper, Green drove to Centinela Hospital. “The funny thing was, in those days the notion of a sportswriter going to a hospital to check on an athlete’s condition was kind of foreign,” Green said. “Imagine if something like that happened today. There would have been ten camera crews outside the hospital, reporters all over, PR people handing out releases, and some hospital spokesman coming out to brief the media every thirty minutes or so. That night I just walked into the emergency room, found a nurse, and asked if I could find out how Rudy was doing.”

  What the nurse told Green stunned him: “He’s in intensive care.”

  Intensive care? With a broken nose? Green asked for more details. Could he talk to a doctor? No, none was available to talk to him, the nurse said. Green asked the nurse if she had seen Tomjanovich when he came in. She nodded.

  “What did he look like?” he asked.

  “It was as if his face was inverted,” she answered quietly. “It really did not look good.”

  Tomjanovich’s entire head was swollen by the time he reached the hospital, and he felt as if his eyes were starting to swell shut. He was still going from rage to confusion to fear when Toffel walked in, introduced himself, and began to examine him. That was when he asked the question about playing the next night in Phoenix.

  Toffel knew he had to answer the question directly and gently. He had dealt with patients who had been through similar trauma to what he was seeing at that moment, but they had been car accident victims or people who had been hit over the head with baseball bats. The instant he looked at the X rays, he knew he was going to be dealing with a patient who had just suffered a life-changing injury. The fact that the victim was a professional athlete, someone who wasn’t used to being unable to do things physically, made the situation that much more delicate.

  Toffel was acutely aware of just how emotionally painful insensitivity could be in a hospital setting. In 1965, during his first year of medical school, his father had gone in one morning to open his shoe store in south-central Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Watts riots. The neighborhood was still under curfew, but Mike Toffel opened the store every morning, ready to work. Only on this morning he was held up at gunpoint by two robbers. Paul Toffel, working a summer job outside town, got a phone call from the people who ran the business next door to his dad’s.

  “They told me he’d been shot and taken to the hospital,” he said. “I thought he had probably been shot in the arm or something. My dad was such a tough guy. He’d had throat cancer a few years earlier, lost his voice box, and just kept on going. I didn’t think anything could really hurt him. I got to the hospital, went to the front desk, and said I was there to see Mike Toffel. The guy looked at his list and said, ‘Oh yeah, Toffel, that’s the DOA in room six.’ He’d been shot right through the heart. I never forgot how that felt.”

  Now Toffel had to explain as gently as he could to a basketball player that the least of his concerns at that moment should be when he was going to play basketball again.

  “Rudy,” he said, “you aren’t going to play in Phoenix tomorrow night. You aren’t going to play for a while.” He paused, knowing what he said next would hurt. “You aren’t going to play again this season.”

  If Tomjanovich’s eyes could have opened, they would have been as wide as can be. His emotions, which were bouncing off the walls of the examining room, bounced back to anger. He was raging again, wanting a piece of Kermit Washington, regardless of his condition, regardless of his ability (or inability) to actually hurt him. In the instant that Toffel said he wouldn’t play again for the rest of the season, all he wanted to do was lash out at Washington.

  Toffel understood all this. When Tomjanovich told him he needed an hour to go track Washington down, it was clear that his mind wasn’t in a logical or reasonable place at that moment. “The natural thing, especially for someone that competitive,” Toffel said, “is to think revenge, getting even. But there was no getting even. The only thing I could help him with was getting better. I had to get him away from those angry thoughts to thoughts about his condition, on how he was going to start getting better.”

  Toffel was reading Tomjanovich’s mind. All he was thinking about at that moment was what Washington had just taken away from him—for no reason. This was supposed to be The Year for the Rockets. They were going to move up a notch from where they had been a year before—one or two plays from the finals, perhaps a championship. Now this young doctor was looking at him with great concern and telling him as calmly as he could, no more basketball this season. What the hell could possibly be so wrong? A broken nose doesn’t put you out for the season. What in the world was going on?

  Toffel had to get Tomjanovich to focus on what was ahead, not what had already happened. He knew that for Rudy, as it was for anyone dealing with major physical problems, his mental health was going to be important.

  So he asked about the bitter taste he knew Tomjanovich had to be experiencing in his mouth. Yes, Tomjanovich answered, what the heck was that?

  “Spinal fluid,” Toffel said. “You’re leaking spinal fluid from your brain, Rudy.” He then explained how serious his condition was.

  He could see by the look on Tomjanovich’s face that he had his attention now, so he plowed on. When he said “ICU,” he knew Tomjanovich was no longer thinking about Kermit Washington. “We’ve got to get you neurologically stable,” he said. “In other words, we’ve got to see to it that we get your brain capsule to seal. Then we’ll start working to get your face fixed.”

  The rage bounced out of Tomjanovich, replaced again by fear. “Are you saying I could…” His voice trailed off. He couldn’t say the word “die.” Knowing he had made his point, Toffel turned encouraging.

  “We’re going to get you through this, Rudy, but it’s going to take a while. You can’t waste any energy on negative thoughts. Small victories, one at a time, that’s what we’re going to go for. I want you to appreciate every good thing that’s going to happen and not even think about what’s already happened. It accomplishes nothing. Celebrate victories, okay, Rudy?”

  He understood. He had to flush the rage, but that wasn’t easy. The fear helped put the rage aside, but
it didn’t remove it completely. Before they sent him to ICU, they got him a telephone. It would be the middle of the night in Houston by now, but he had to talk to Sophie. He knew Vandervoort had been calling her, but she would need to hear his voice for reassurance.

  When Sophie answered the phone—wide awake, waiting for the call—his rage came out again. “Real anger,” she remembered. “Lots of cursing, lots of how could this happen, lots of can you —— believe this? He wasn’t even making a lot of sense he was so angry and, I assume, because he had some painkillers in him by then. But the anger was almost good for me to hear, because if he had sounded scared, I would have been scared.”

  Once he finished talking to Sophie, Tomjanovich knew he had to make one more phone call before he went upstairs. Calvin Murphy was pacing in his hotel room, unable to sleep; sick with fear; sickened by the sight he had seen; wanting to lash out at someone because he hadn’t lashed out at Washington when he had the chance.

  “I had gotten to the point where when something went wrong in my life, with basketball, with my family, whatever it was, the person I talked to was Rudy,” he said. “I needed to talk to Rudy that night about how angry I was, but he wasn’t there. I was losing it.”

  And then the phone rang and Rudy was there. He was trying to tell Calvin he was okay, he was hurt, the doctor said he was out for the season, but he would be back. He didn’t say anything about spinal fluid or the ICU. Now it was Murphy who was raging. He was screaming into the phone that this wasn’t fair, that Kermit Washington had to be thrown out of basketball, that he would get him and he was going to get anybody else who even touched one of his teammates, breathed on one of his teammates.