Flak Magazine: Review of The Punch, 12.19.02

On Sunday, May 14, 2000, the New York Times' sports section carried a piece headlined "A Sudden, Violent Moment That Still Haunts a Life." The piece was written by Kermit Washington, who in a 1977 NBA game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets threw a punch that almost killed the Rockets' All-Star forward, Rudy Tomjanovich.

Washington's punch shattered most of the bones in Tomjanovich's face and actually knocked the top half of his skull out of alignment with the bottom half. Spinal fluid leaked into his mouth. Tomjanovich missed the rest of the '77-'78 season, returning the following year, and he eventually won $3.25 million in a lawsuit against the Lakers. The money, however, couldn't drive away the nightmares and headaches. Tomjanovich eventually retired at the relatively young NBA age of 33.

But Washington's gripping essay revealed another side of the incident.

"Racial slurs about me became everyone's favorite," wrote Washington, who is black. "... Not even the university I attended wanted anything to do with me. Everyone who was once so proud of me now could not even say my name in public. ... In Boston, I had to have F.B.I. agents sit next to me at the games for fear of being attacked. I was warned not to order room service for fear of being poisoned .... I have applied for various coaching jobs from high school to the pro level, but have always been turned down because no one wanted to be associated with my reputation or with me. ... Over the last 23 years, the clip of my hitting Rudy is played every time there is any type of violence in sports ... Everything I've ever accomplished in my life is overshadowed by this incident. ... How do I make people believe that, yes, I did throw a punch that I sincerely regret, but that it was in a fight that I didn't start? How do I change the way people look at me every time there's a violent act in sports?"

Sports talk icon Jim Rome read the piece and was hungry for more. He booked Washington on his radio show and interviewed him for a marathon three segments. John Feinstein, the widely respected sportswriter best known for "A Season on the Brink," tuned into the show in Los Angeles and was so captivated he dropped the book he was working on and penned "The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight that Changed Basketball Forever."

Feinstein starts off with the punch, followed by its prelude and its aftermath, before wheeling back in time to tell each man's pre- and post-punch story. Though the book's structure is the best, most obvious way to tell the story, it comes with built-in redundancy. Feinstein and his editors at Little, Brown seem oblivious to this trap, and so we hear several times about how the game between the Rockets and the Lakers was just a regular, run-of-the-mill game between two teams off to slow starts.

The repetition extends to quotes, too. Outtake quotes from the prelude/aftermath sections crop up later in the book in the biography sections. Early in the book, Tomjanovich relates the experience of moving to Houston with his wife, Sophie: "We were sick for weeks. You go outside, it's a hundred and five; inside it's fifty. Hearing about weather like that is one thing, living with it is another." Then, later: "'I think we were sick the entire first month we were there,' Tomjanovich said. 'You go from a hundred degrees outside to fifty degrees with air-conditioning blasting inside everywhere. You were bound to get sick.'"

When Feinstein was interviewing Tomjanovich and heard Rudy launch into the tired, "Boy it's hot in Houston" bit, he must have thought, "Heard this one before ..." Wouldn't he expect his readers to do the same?

A savvy editor could whack at least 20 pages of redundancy out of the book. What's more, notable gaps permeate "The Punch." Though Feinstein painstakingly recounts the draft picks, trades, free-agent signings and injuries that led to the formation of the two rosters who took the court on that fateful night, there's little medical information available on the effects of the punch other than an interview with Tomjanovich's surgeon. (Were there no medical records?) The collapse of Washington's marriage hardly merits a mention, even though both Washington and his wife, Pat, are quoted extensively throughout the book.

Redundancies and omissions aside, Feinstein has crafted a compelling page-turner. Both Tomjanovich and Washington are incredibly sympathetic, likable characters. Remarkably, the two men share many common traits — they grew up in poverty-stricken, broken homes before leaving home for a nearby school, where each excelled athletically and academically. Both married their college sweetheart and maintained close personal bonds that transcended race, which is hardly a given in today's NBA, let alone the one in which Tomjanovich and Washington played. It slowly begins to dawn on Feinstein's reader that the two men might have been friends under better circumstances, an assertion Washington makes late in the book.

Despite its lofty title, Feinstein's book is much more the story of two men than of how basketball was changed forever. Feinstein himself puts forth that the NBA's crackdown on fighting evolved more out of a fight the previous season. And any devotee of the NBA will tell you that the entrance of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and, later, Michael Jordan, into the league played a larger role in reshaping basketball than the third official that was added to NBA crews as a result of the punch. Feinstein's prose is much more arresting when he relates how Tomjanovich's post-punch nightmares were exacerbated by his drinking problem (Tomjanovich is a recovering alcoholic). Or the tensions surrounding the first game Washington and Tomjanovich played against one another after Tomjanovich's comeback. Or Washington's self-described "nutty professor" money-making ideas after his playing days ended, which included a money-hemorrhaging, marriage-destroying bid to operate a restaurant in Portland.

Most touching is Feinstein's relation of how Washington's attempts to transcend the punch dovetailed with his generous nature. Feinstein tells in some detail about Washington's launching two charities: the Sixth Man Foundation, which helped poor kids in the Portland area, and Project Contact, in which Washington and others went to Africa to distribute medical supplies and drugs. In one case, Feinstein says, Washington sold his car to help finance a trip to Africa.

For much of "The Punch," it's easy to sympathize with Washington, who really comes across as an all-around decent guy who happened, in the blink of an eye, to commit one life-altering error. Yet it's difficult to reconcile that view with the Kermit Washington who surfaces in the book's final chapters, i.e., the Kermit Washington who wrote the gripping, heart-wrenching piece in the New York Times.

By the end of the book, Feinstein has established that Washington's version of the fight — that it was started when the Rockets' Kevin Kunnert elbowed Washington in the face, then punched him — is open to debate and interpretation. (Both Kunnert and the NBA official who witnessed the fight have said Washington swung at Kunnert after Kunnert tried to shake Washington off by elbowing him in the shoulder. Washington and his teammate, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, disagree, but have slightly different stories.)

But it's not just the fight's genesis that's in doubt. Feinstein goes on to point out how Washington claimed in the New York Times that he was suspended from the NBA for three months. In fact, his suspension was for two months. Additionally, Washington hasn't "always been turned down" for coaching jobs. He worked as an assistant coach at Stanford under Tom Davis, who offered to take Washington with him to Iowa when he went to coach there. Washington, however, stayed behind and eventually quit the Stanford job. Another coaching gig, as strength coach of the Portland Trailblazers, came and went as well.

What's more, Washington's assertion that his alma mater, American University, didn't want anything to do with him after the punch appears only to relate to his failed bid to become the school's athletic director in 1995. But AU officials actually told Washington they'd be happy to hire him as an assistant to the athletic director, a reasonable offer given Washington's lack of front-office experience. Still, Washington expected more:

"I didn't see why I couldn't be the AD so they could use my name out front and then have someone with more experience be my assistant," he tells Feinstein.

What's amazing is that Feinstein, knowing this about Washington's New York Times piece — and, one assumes, Washington's interview with Jim Rome — wrote "The Punch" without betraying a hint of anger or disappointment or a feeling of having been manipulated by Washington's misguided exaggerations. He plays it straight, letting other sources — most notably Cleveland Cavaliers coach John Lucas, who was Tomjanovich's teammate on that fateful evening and who also counts Washington as a friend — say what so obviously needs to be said.

Because of that triumph, in the last 50 pages of "The Punch" Washington is transformed — without any judgment from Feinstein — from a sympathetic figure unfairly punished for a single accidental act to a pitiable figure unable to accept responsibility for his actions 25 years ago. Tomjanovich, now the head coach of the Rockets, is the guy who required five surgeries to fix his face. Washington, however, hasn't healed and maybe never will.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)