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Take the case of Robert Parish, the longtime Boston Celtic center who now plays for the Charlotte Hornets. While portrayed for years by the image-makers in Boston as a gentle giant who was as large in class and character as in stature, Parish, according to his former wife, Nancy Saad, was a domestic terrorist. Nowhere is this dark side more graphically revealed than in her recounting of an incident on the afternoon of June 2, 1987, hours before the Celtics were to open the NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers at the Forum.
As Saad arrived at the door of her estranged husband's room at the Marriott Hotel near L.A. International Airport, she recalls, she could hear muffled laughter in the room and the voices of a woman and a man, and she could smell the smoke from a marijuana cigarette, Parish's favorite scent. She and Parish had not lived together for nearly a year, not since the day, she says, when Parish, who is 7'1" and 230 pounds, threw her down the stairs of their house in Weston, Mass., and then, as she screamed for help, kicked her as she stumbled out the front door.
On this day in June, Saad says, she had driven to the Marriott from her home in Santa Monica to talk with Parish about several nagging issues: One involved their five-year-old son, Justin, whom Parish had not seen in weeks and who had recently suffered minor injuries in a bicycle accident, and another had to do with the $3,000 a month he was sending her in child support out of his $100,000-a-month salary. "I called him when they arrived at the Marriott and told him I would like to come talk to him," she says.
She says that she rapped on the hotel room door and that Parish opened it as far as the chain would allow and peered down. Then, she says, he asked, "Bitch, what are you doin' here?"
"I've been trying to reach you," she said. "I want to talk to you about Justin...."
"Can't you see I'm busy?" he said. He closed the door, she says, and she knocked again. She heard the sliding of the chain. The door cracked open again, and this time she pushed it with her right arm. "Let me in," she said. "You're not going to keep doing this to me...." Saad looked in the room, she says, and saw a naked woman grabbing a sheet to cover herself. The woman screamed, whereupon Parish opened the door farther and said, "Bitch, are you——crazy? I'll kill you!"
According to Saad, Parish then grabbed her by the throat and threw her out the door, into the hallway, and she remembers being punched and thrown into a wall and spinning and thumping off the door of an adjacent room. The next thing she recalls is falling dizzily to the floor and lying there supine, looking up at a stranger's face, that of an older man with salt-and-pepper hair who was wearing a dress shirt. He said, "What the...!" She remembers saying to him, "Help me...!" And then she recalls hearing Parish's bass voice, slow and deep and rolling over her, still eerie and unclear, saying something to the older man. "I don't know what it was," she says. "The man went in and shut his door." And then Parish kicked her, she says, and he was saying, "Get the——out!"
Eight years later Saad still has no memories of what happened to her immediately after the events of that June afternoon. In fact, she remains uncertain about how she got home that day, and she is unclear as to how she arrived the next morning at Saint John's Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, where she remained for seven days, with a stay in intensive care, and where, according to her hospital records, she was diagnosed with a "closed head injury," impaired vision in her right eye, abrasions around her left eye and over her right cheek, a "large bruise" on her right arm and soreness and spasms in her neck. This battering, according to a medical evaluation written three years later, led to chronic headaches and convulsions. Parish, from whom Saad has been divorced since 1990, declined to comment, according to his representative, James McLaughlin, on this or any other "allegations made by his ex-wife."
While Saad says the beating at the Marriott was the most traumatic she suffered at Parish's hands, it was no isolated event. In fact, she says, the abuse, both psychological and physical, began not long after they started dating in 1980 and persisted throughout their 10-year relationship. There was that night in late '81 when she was eight months pregnant and, she says, "he pushed me down a flight of stairs" because she kept badgering him to tell her why he wasn't coming home at nights. There was the summer evening in '82 when she criticized his erratic driving after a party outside San Francisco, and, according to her, he swung the car to a halt on the shoulder of the road and "took his foot and kicked me out of the car. I was screaming and holding on." She says he left her there, after dropping infant Justin in her arms, to walk for miles in the dark. On other occasions there were kicks to the legs and punches to the face and head, she says, and there were times he took her keys and locked her out of the house, leaving her to make late-night calls for help to sympathetic Celtics and their wives, particularly to Kim and Scott Wedman and to Sylvia and M.L. Carr, now Boston's coach and general manager.
Asked about his and Sylvia's knowledge of the domestic violence in the Parish household, Carr says only, "I've got lots of other positive things to talk about, and I'd rather not comment on this right now." Wedman did not return telephone calls to his home and office in Kansas City. A friend of Parish's who was in Los Angeles that June day says he saw Saad, sobbing and frantic, in the Marriott lobby. Sam Vincent, then a Boston player, says he was in a room next to Parish's and that he heard arguing in the hallway before he answered Saad's knock on his door. Vincent, who now does sports marketing in Orlando, told Saad he did not want to get involved in what he assumed was a marital dispute.
Saad's experience as a battered wife, with its assorted paradoxes and horrors, was singular neither in its nature nor in the dynamics that sustained it. As such it demonstrates why domestic violence is viewed not only as one of America's most critical social issues, as disabling psychologically as it is physically, but also is among the most baffling of social phenomena in its often endless repeated spin cycles of pain, retribution, contrition and more pain. ------------------
One Hundred.
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