Today’s Unsportsmanlike Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the 1970’s, professional basketball had become known for its rough play and for occasional bench-clearing brawls. Enforcement of the rules was sporadic or nonexistent: During the season opener in 1977, Laker Kareem Abdul Jabbar punched an opponent in the head, breaking the man’s jaw and his own hand. He received no fines or suspensions.
But the NBA was forced to crack down on aggressive players after the events of December 9, 1977. That night, the Lakers were playing the Houston Rockets when Jabbar and Rocket Kevin Kunnert got into a scuffle at mid-court. Laker Kermit Washington waded into the fray and he and Kunnert traded blows.
Rocket Rudy Tomjanovich ran over to try to defuse the situation, and Washington misinterpreted his intentions. He swung on Tomjanovich with a roundhouse punch that connected squarely with the latter’s jaw. Jabbar likened the sound of the blow to a melon being dropped onto concrete. The crack could be heard clear up in the second-floor press box and Tomjanovich was left unconscious on the arena floor in a pool of his own blood.
Tomjanovich regained consciousness and was able to get to his feet and walk. He was dazed and in pain and at first believed that the scoreboard had fallen on him. When he saw Washington on the way to the locker room, he admits he became aggressive and demanded to know why Washington had hit him. It seemed they might get into another fight, but security quickly broke them up and Tomjanovich was taken to a hospital.
The punch left Tomjanovich with a cerebral concussion, broken nose and jaw, and had shattered his facial bones a third of an inch from the skull. The damage was so severe that Tomjanovich was leaking blood and spinal fluid into his mouth. The surgeon who cared for him said he had seen many people with far less serious injuries die, and compared the repairing of the damage to trying to Scotch-tape a shattered eggshell back together. Tomjanovich missed the rest of the season.
Kermit Washington was fined $10,000 and suspended for 26 games. He became a virtual pariah overnight, receiving death threats, being warned by the police not to order room service for fear of being poisoned, and even his pregnant wife was dropped as a patient by her obstetrician. Many of the Rockets players felt that he should have been suspended for at least the entire season, and some people felt that criminal charges were in order.
The NBA enacted strict rules regarding physical contact between players after the infamous game, having had a graphic illustration of the dangers of letting such large men (Washington was six-foot-eight and 250 pounds) swinging at each other. Now any player who throws a punch at another, even if he doesn’t connect, is subject to a suspension for the rest of that game and at least the next one. Also, an extra referee was added to monitor players in close contact; this referee would have called a foul when Washington first became physical with Kunnert by grabbing at his shorts, and the infamous punch would thus never have happened.
Kermit Washington’s 26-game suspension was the longest in NBA history until almost exactly twenty years later, when Golden State Warrior Latrell Sprewell received an 82-game suspension (later shortened to 60 games) after threatening and trying to throttle his coach.
Culled from: Wikipedia
Submitted by: Aimee
Basketball is not supposed to be a contact sport. It’s too bad Rudy Tomjanovich had to be nearly killed before everybody remembered this. – Aimee
Here’s some footage of the punch that I found on You Tube.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgqUZ1IAA_8[/tube]