Game Over 
Rudy Awakening
Last year he preached togetherness and the Houston Rockets responded with an NBA title. But this season Rudy Tomjanovich faces a greater challenge: getting his team to play like champions.
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“That helped big-time,” Tomjanovich says, the edge in his voice barely noticeable. It helped Rudy T call upon the inner resources he had developed entirely on his own and make an authority figure eat his words. By his senior year in 1966, Tomjanovich was one of the hottest offensive talents in the state, and he received a scholarship to the University of Michigan. Again he had to build a reputation from scratch. “Everybody was saying I was a skinny weakling,” he remembers. “So my first varsity game was against Kentucky, and I go out and get twenty-seven rebounds and thirteen blocked shots. I jumped around so much that I ripped the arch in my foot.”
Tomjanovich rewrote the Michigan record book. Forty-eight points in one game. Thirty rebounds in another. The leading career rebounder in school history. Yet little national attention was paid to the Hamtramck star forward. It was the age of Lew Alcindor, Pete Maravich, Elvin Hayes, Bob Lanier, and Calvin Murphy. In the 1970 NBA draft, when the three-year-old San Diego Rockets selected Tomjanovich instead of Maravich as the second overall pick, San Diego fans were outraged, and the headlines screamed, RUDY WHO?
“That hurt,” he says. But the $100,000 contract was big money for a Hamtramck boy, and so he and his newlywed—Sophie Migas, a good Polish girl from his hometown—packed up their belongings and drove west, determined to make believers out of the San Diego skeptics. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the chance. Rockets coach Alex Hannum kept his rookie on the bench that first year—”A political deal that I don’t want to get into,” Tomjanovich told me. The only recognition he got that year was at a team banquet, when he was awarded a trophy for having the worst mustache in the organization. Rudy T didn’t think it was funny, then or now. “It was a bad mustache,” he concedes. “I looked like Hitler. But that’s what I got a trophy for, and it made me so mad.’’
In the summer of 1971 Rudy T got the news on television that the Rockets had been sold to a group of businessmen in Houston. Sophie Tomjanovich was dismayed. “My whole vision was cattle and tumbleweeds,” she says. “And when we flew there, my God, it was so hot.” But Houston turned out to be a godsend. The new Rockets organization fired Coach Hannum and replaced him with Tex Winter, a college coach who didn’t even know the NBA rules. But he knew fundamentals, and while the young forward was lacking in this area, Winter also knew talent when he saw it. “We worked on drills, all the things I needed, all the things I believe in today,” says Tomjanovich. “Tex Winter saved my career.”
The Tomjanoviches moved into a townhouse in Westbury Square. They fell in love with the neighborhood, where they could window-shop on weekends and walk to nearby restaurants every night. Playing ball in Houston was something else. It was a football town, and the fans paid the new basketball franchise little mind. The games at Hofheinz Pavilion were sparsely attended, while the occasional games staged at the Astrodome were utterly forlorn experiences. Tomjanovich was getting his minutes, and as usual he desperately fought to prove himself. “I was so damned hyper and just couldn’t relax,” he says. “Every power forward in the league wanted to fight me because I wouldn’t stop, just climbed everyone’s back to get the offensive rebound.”
The Rockets had the great University of Houston center Elvin Hayes and the diminutive star Calvin Murphy, and the ball seldom came Tomjanovich’s way that first season in Houston. He responded by working like a demon on his shooting touch, sneaking into high school and college gyms and tossing in jumper after jumper while Sophie dutifully chased down the ball and threw it back to her husband. After Hayes was traded in the summer of 1972, Rudy T led the Rockets in scoring. A season later, he was an NBA All-Star; he would retain the honor for four successive seasons. Tomjanovich became one of the deadliest outside shooters in league history. Yet the critics still dogged him. He was too slow. He couldn’t play defense. “I used to look forward to the negative press—it would just fire me up to work harder,” he says today. But the burning inside was at times too intense. “He wanted to be in every minute of the game,” says Carroll Dawson, who joined the Rockets as an assistant coach in 1980, when Tomjanovich was still a player. “He hated the guy who came in to substitute for him. He was the worst that way.”
On December 9, 1977, Rudy T was forced out of the game, and nearly for good. While trying to separate players during a fight in the middle of a game against the Los Angeles Lakers, he was sucker-punched in the face by Laker Kermit Washington. It took three towels to mop up the blood from the single blow. Tomjanovich spent the next four days in intensive care while doctors fought to repair his two broken cheekbones, broken jaw, fractured skull, impaired vision, loose teeth, and lacerated mouth. He couldn’t bear to see his misshapen face in the mirror. Because one of his tear ducts was blocked, the doctors made an incision on the side of his nose, so that Rudy T could cry.
More than the physical damage, what would rankle Tomjanovich about the punch from Washington was that the much-publicized incident threatened to overshadow his many hard-earned accomplishments. Today no subject gives Tomjanovich more discomfort. His words are clipped and evasive. Did the punch affect the trajectory of his career? “No. The reason being, I wasn’t going to let it.” Did he, as reported, have lingering sinus problems? “Who knows why you have sinus problems, living in Houston?” Was it true that he and Washington now speak to each other? “I talk to him like I talk to you. I talk to every man. All the emotion, the craziness, the racial connotations”—Washington is black—”all the publicity. You move on.”
Seven months later, Rudy T was back on the court, scrimmaging in the summer leagues. He returned to the Rockets in 1978 and was again an All-Star. But Rudy was injured early in the following season, and the new Rockets coach, Del Harris, opted for a brawnier lineup. After Tomjanovich recovered, he found himself not starting for the first time in nine years. When the Rockets reached the NBA finals in 1981 for the first time ever, he sat glumly at the end of the bench as the Rockets lost to the Boston Celtics in six games. “Del said to me, ‘I’m going to go with these guys, you’re just an insurance policy,’” he recalls. “He’s an intelligent man, and his system was working. I have to give him credit.”
But riding the bench drove Rudy T nuts. He spent the off-season “killing myself lifting weights,” contemplating the upcoming two years left on his contract, and thinking, “There’s no way I can sit on the bench for two years and collect money.” A trade with Utah was discussed. At first the prospect interested him. “Then,” he says, “reason came in. I said to myself, ‘Why move your family because you have to prove that you’re a tough son of a bitch?’” The Tomjanoviches stayed in Houston, and on October 2, 1981, Rudy T ended his eleven-year career.
For two months he sat at home, driving his pregnant wife and two children crazy. What to do in the next life? He enjoyed writing and playing guitar, but John Updike and Eric Clapton were not tossing in their beds fearing the competition. An office job would not suit him. He had to be able to move. And yes, he realized: He had to stay around the game.
Rudy T visited the office of Rockets general manager Ray Patterson. “Can we work out a deal?” he asked. Patterson sent him on to Del Harris, the coach who had cut short Tomjanovich’s career. Harris thought about it. Then he asked, “Would you like to scout?”
Tomjanovich was back in basketball. The pay was terrible—not only compared with his $250,000 salary as a player; compared with anything. They paid him by the game, and that first year he ended up losing money on the deal. Then there were the hours. He was on the road every day, scouting both college and pro teams while paying his daughter Nicole to tape games off the home satellite system. “Rudy, this is nuts,” Sophie told her husband. “I hope you like this, because it’s crazy.”
In 1983 the head coach was Bill Fitch, a well-respected but highly demanding man who had never been a professional basketball player and looked down on coaches who had been. Once again, Tomjanovich had something to prove. “He immediately applied his hard work ethic to scouting,” remembers Carroll Dawson. “I’d check his reports before Coach Fitch read them because Fitch was a very meticulous coach, and after about a year I didn’t even worry about it because Rudy never did anything wrong. I thought he was the best scout in the league.”
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