ONE-PUNCH KNOCKOUT

VANCOUVER, Wash. —  Just up the road, a universe away, there was a lesson in the heavy eyes that watched the Lakers and Portland Trail Blazers shoving each other around the Rose Garden on Friday.

There was a lesson for those angry athletes who have lately filled our diamonds and courts and rinks--and sometimes our stands--with unnecessary violence.

Careful, the eyes said.

You can throw a punch and be pummeled by it.

*

The most famous jab in the history of team sports has knocked him through 23 years and three teams and countless stares and rejection.

It has knocked him from a Laker uniform to a loud sports bar in a drab strip mall in a tiny corner of the Pacific Northwest.

Here, Saturday afternoon, a woman named Francie Tomacci is eating one of his hamburgers.

She is asked if she knows the owner. She does.

They eventually all do.

“Yeah, he used to play basketball,’ she says. “Wasn’t he the one who hit Tom-jan . . . “

A couple of tables away, a order pad at his side, Kermit Washington shrugs.

A life of 48 full years seemingly reduced to those two syllables.

Tom-jan.

That’s first part of the difficult-to-pronounce last name of a former Houston Rocket, Rudy Tomjanovich, who was nearly killed by an on-court punch in 1977.

Kermit Washington was the Laker who punched him.

Tomjanovich suffered a fractured skull, broken jaw, broken nose and spinal fluid leakage, but has long since recovered to coach two NBA champions and be named coach of the current Olympic team.

Washington suffered no physical damage but still feels as if he is being flattened.

He is a former all-star who wants to return to the game as a coach, but he says nobody will hire him because of the mere connotation of his name.

He graduated from American University with honors, but says the NBA won’t let him help with its stay-in-schools effort because of his name.

Spend an afternoon with him at Le Slam Sports Cafe, where he dotes over middle-aged women and their salads as easily as he banters with young men and their cheese sticks, and it is difficult to imagine this soft-spoken man ever hit anybody.

But the minute people find out who he is, they can do nothing but imagine.

“I’m sure he’s a good guy, but the fight is the first thing you think of,” customer Joel Kissin said.

It scares Kermit Washington that the thought will also be everyone’s last.

“I just don’t want to die like this,” he says softly. “I just don’t want everyone remembering me for something negative.”

Since being shipped out of town by the Lakers shortly after the incident at the Forum on Dec. 9, 1977, Washington has tried mightily to be remembered for something else.

Anything else.

He finished his career as an all-star with the Trail Blazers. He was briefly an assistant coach at Stanford. He helped run Pete Newell’s famed big man’s basketball camp.

He became a Portland-area radio talk show host. He began leading relief efforts to Africa. He bought a sports restaurant.

He says none of it matters.

“Every day, two or three times a day, I am asked the same question,” he says. “People say, ‘Aren’t you the one who hit Rudy Tomjanovich?’ Everybody who looks at me thinks only something negative.”

Since leaving Stanford when his mentor Tom Davis left, he has tried countless times, he says, to rejoin the NBA or college ranks as an assistant coach.

He follows the game nightly on the several large TVs in his restaurant. His 6-foot-8 frame still fills out his clothes better than some current Lakers.

Again, he says none of it matters.

“Nobody will have me,” he says. “I talk to my old teammates who are now in front offices around the league, and they all say the same thing.

“They worry how they would be perceived for hiring me. They say they don’t need any more pressure.”

So last month, he made a move as unusual as any mid-game brawl.

He took a lie-detector test.

He wanted the world to know that 23 years ago, he officially didn’t mean it.

“I want to clear my name,” he says. “I just want all the bad thoughts to stop.”

The test contained what Washington thought were two critical questions.

The first involved the fight between him and Kevin Kunnert that caused Tomjanovich to rush to Kunnert’s aid, which led to the punch.

Were you struck by Kunnert without your having struck him first?

According to noted Portland polygraph expert Stan Abrams, when Washington answered this affirmatively, he was being truthful.

This, of course, might lead to another query, that being, what did any of that matter?

Regardless, the second critical question of Washington’s polygraph was this:

After the fight with Kunnert was stopped, did you hit Rudy because you were threatened by his running at you?

Again, Abrams said that when Washington answered yes, he was being truthful.

But again, somebody might counter with, so what?

The ultimate truth is still that Washington threw a punch that will resonate forever.

Or at least as long as ESPN is in existence.

“Every time there is some violence in the sports world, I know I’ll be seeing myself on ESPN again,” he says. “The same clip, over and over again. People who never saw me play, all they know is that I punched.”

And that is too bad.

It has been 23 years, and he has not thrown a punch since.

The most important use for his hands these days is to rub medicine on the bodies of the diseased Africans he has helped during one of his 10 relief missions to war-torn areas. On three of those occasions, he has sold some of his memorabilia to fund an entourage of nearly a dozens doctors and nurses.

“I saw the video of him on TV, and I couldn’t believe this was the same person,” said Pat Cook, a Portland nurse who accompanied Washington on one of his missions. “He is the most caring, sweetest man. He is like a mother hen.”

It has been 23 years, and he still can’t comment on violence on his morning talk show without somebody phoning him to complain about a double standard.

It has been 23 years, and you look at a replay of a punch that has not lost its chill, and you start to think.

Maybe time does more than heal the wounds. Maybe time creates new ones. Sometimes, maybe, time actually changes the names of the victims.

Several years ago in an interview with this newspaper, Tomjanovich described the fight like this: “It was a stumbling block in my life, but I endured it, and maybe I’m better for it.”

Kermit Washington, it seems, is still enduring.

After an initial meeting and apology after the fight, Washington has seen little of Tomjanovich.

“I think it’s just awkward and embarrassing for both of us,” he said.

The two men last spoke about six years ago in a Portland hotel. Washington was doing his radio show, Tomjanovich was in the lobby.

Washington walked up and stuck out his hand. Tomjanovich took it.

Ten seconds later they walked their separate ways, politeness being brief, violence lasting forever.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected].