# Posted 10:29 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE PUNCH: On my way back from LA, I missed my flight and got stuck at the airport for six hours. Bored out of my mind, I decided to purchase a book from the limited selection available at the newsstand/candy store. (I would've bought a magazine, but the idea of paying three or four bucks for information that's usually available for free online really gets to me.)

Anyhow, the book I chose was The Punch, by John Feinstein. It is the story of "the fight that changed basketball forever." On December 9, 1977 one punch from Lakers' forward Kermit Washington fractured the skull of Rockets' All-Star Rudy Tomjanovich. Tomjanovich almost died.

It is hard to convey the brutal nature of that one punch to those who haven't seen it on film. While I can't remember exactly when I saw it, I'm guessing it was during the Knicks-Rockets championship series in 1994, when Tomjanovich was the Rockets' coach. While I am hardly an avid basketball fan, the viciousness of that one punch stayed in my mind. It provided a shocking contrast to the relative civility of NBA basketball in my time as a fan.

In the late 1970s, basketball was a far more violent game than it is today. In one season, more than 40 fights resulted in a player being thrown out of the game. And to get thrown out at that time, you had to get involved in a brawl, not just throw one punch. Before the 1977-1978 season, the NBA decided that it had to do something about its image by getting tough on violence.

The guinea pig for the experiment was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who shattered his own hand while punching an opposing player in the opening week of the season. Not long after Abdul-Jabbar returned from his suspension/injury, his teammate Washington sent Tomjanovich to the hospital. Unfortunately, Feinstein never tells us how that punch changed the NBA's attitude toward fighting. Instead, Feinstein becomes so fascinated by Washington's life story that all broader context for the story disappears.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Washington had remarkable experiences that deserve to be chronicled. It just isn't what Feinstein promised at the outset. But, hey, this is airport reading. The book is an easy-going page turner that will help you pass the time if you are stuck at an airport. It's a little expensive at $15, but that's what books cost.

If I were going to get all intellectual about it, I would say that Feinstein could have written a fascinating book about the interaction of race and athletics in American life. However, he seems to be a biographer by nature who gets fixated on individual men and women rather than exploring how society as a whole responds to their behavior.

There are brief mentions of how Washington's punch resulted in him receiving death threats, many of them inflected with racial epithets. When a black almost kills a white man anywhere in America, it is news. When a black man almost kills a white man with the cameras rolling, that is a major moment in American cultural life. Then again, that kind of thing is a little bit heavy going for when you're stuck in an aiport. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion