Thompson Is a Player’s Coach--and a Winner--at Georgetown

John Thompson talks about the youngster who was doing poorly in school, whose father couldn’t read or write, whose mother was concerned about her son’s potential.

She brought him to a professional educator, a doctor who invited the youngster into his office and asked him to identify objects around the room.

“Radio,” the boy said. “Telephone.” Then he froze and fell silent.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” the educator told the woman, “because it’s not your fault. But this boy isn’t educable.”

The boy earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and his master’s degree in guidance and counseling and ultimately became the basketball coach at Georgetown University.

“This little boy,” John Thompson said, “is talking to you.”

John Thompson is far more than simply the coach of the nation’s premier basketball team, the defending NCAA champion.

He is a complex man, an amalgam of emotions.

He is driven to win but even more to excel. He will needle, threaten or bench his star player if he isn’t giving every ounce of effort. He will suspend him if he fails to produce grades in excess of Georgetown’s and the NCAA’s minimum standards. Some critics call him more than driven. They call him an ogre.

He shelters his players, too, protecting them in abbreviated locker-room interviews--sometimes timed to the second by a stopwatch--and often housing them in isolated places on the road. Some critics say he is more than sheltering. They call him paranoid.

He is black, with an exclusively black team at a predominantly white school. Over the years, he has seen and heard everything from subtle allusions to his color to out-and-out racial epithets. He has heard it all since he was a child. If it still hurts, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t lash back.

If he has a credo, it is almost certainly embodied in two rhymes.

One was sung to him in childhood by his mother: “You can do anything you think you can. It’s all in the way you view it. It’s all in the start you get, young man. You must feel you are going to do it.”

The other is a verse from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

Thompson does not take potential lightly. He has seen professional educators overlook it in others--in himself--and he is a professional educator.

From Patrick Ewing on down, his players aren’t attending Georgetown for the sole purpose of winning basketball games.

The Rev. Edward Glynn, now president of St. Peter’s College, was Georgetown’s faculty representative to the NCAA early in Thompson’s tenure. “From Day One, he was dedicated to making sure his players would leave school with more than the ability to shoot a basketball,” Glynn said.

“He’d tell them there are too many people hanging around street corners with nothing but their newspaper clippings, heroes in high school or college and nothing after that.”

For a few of his players, life after Georgetown will mean professional basketball. For Ewing, it means guaranteed stardom and millions of dollars. For teammates like Reggie Williams and David Wingate, it could mean a lucrative pro career as well. It likely will mean the same for Michael Graham. He, too, has potential. But in Thompson’s eyes, it was being wasted at Georgetown.

As a freshman last year, Graham was a major factor in the Hoyas’ national championship. Nevertheless, Thompson dropped him from the team because, he said, Graham wasn’t measuring up to the coach’s academic standards, even though he had met Georgetown’s and the NCAA’s. He said that, in the long run, he would have been hurting Graham by permitting him to play.

This year, Graham attends the University of District of Columbia, sitting out a year before becoming eligible to play again. He won’t talk publicly about Georgetown or Thompson.

When Lefty Driesell, the basketball coach at Maryland, gave his son, Chuck, a basketball scholarship four years ago, Thompson bristled. Young Driesell, who has sat on the bench most of his college career, could have been a starter elsewhere, outside the Atlantic Coast Conference, Thompson said.

He called it “a wasted scholarship for everybody. If I have a scholarship left over, I want to give it to somebody who needs the education, who couldn’t get it some other way.”

And, in a pointed comparison between his own players and the lack of court time given Driesell’s son, Thompson said: “These kids are getting a $60,000 education from a fine institution. They’re going to have to work for it. They’re going to play.”

Thompson also has a son, John, playing college basketball. He could have been a scholarship athlete at Georgetown. He isn’t. He plays at Princeton.

When he recruited Ewing, Thompson knew Ewing’s mother was interested in academics first. They spent the better part of an hour in the Ewing household discussing the subject.

Then Patrick Ewing spoke up. He asked about the social life in Washington, D.C.

“With your schoolwork and the athletics, you won’t have much time for a social life,” Thompson said.

Ewing’s mother made up her mind. Her son would attend Georgetown.

It happened a few years ago, just as Georgetown was emerging as a national power. The season and the tournament were over. The team was returning home on the bus.

In the back, several players were celebrating. From the darkness, one voice floated toward the front: “I guess this means we don’t have to see you tomorrow, Miss Fenlon.”

Mary Fenlon, seated beside Thompson, turned and replied: “The basketball season is over, but you’re still freshmen. If you want to be sophomores, you’ll be there tomorrow.”

The bus fell silent for the rest of the ride.

When Thompson took over at Georgetown, the first person he hired was Mary Fenlon, academic coordinator. She had taught English and Latin at St. Anthony’s High School in Washington, D.C., when he coached there.

She is the Georgetown players’ tutor, their confidante. They trust her implicitly. She declines all interviews, saying they “would impair my relationship with the students.”

She doesn’t call them players.

She has as much say as Thompson about who goes on road trips and who stays home to improve grades.

Thompson says she also is his alter ego, his conscience. At all games, she sits on the end of the bench.

Under NCAA rules, a coach is permitted to take only one assistant on recruiting trips to screen and assess prospects.

John Thompson takes Mary Fenlon.

Since Thompson took over as head coach, 44 of the 46 basketball players who have played four years at Georgetown, 96% have been graduated.

Not all were prime basketball prospects--or prime student prospects. Ed Spriggs, for one, was delivering mail in Washington when Thompson found him. Now, he is a Georgetown graduate and assistant athletic director at St. Peter’s College.

In all, there have been 54 students who have played basketball at Georgetown in the Thompson era. Seven transferred to other schools and one dropped out. That reduces the graduation rate of the school’s basketball players under Thompson to 81 percent.

Still, it is higher than the overall student-body number at Georgetown--and much higher than the average at NCAA Division I schools.

Between 68% and 72% of each year’s entire entering freshman class is graduated from Georgetown within four years. And 80-85% eventually receive a Georgetown degree.

The NCAA said that in a survey conducted last summer, in which about three-quarters of the Division I schools responded, the graduation rate of basketball players was slightly less than 50 percent, the graduation rate of non-athletes about 55 percent.

The numbers--even the discussion of them--anger Thompson. In a lengthy dissertation, he decried the fact that athletes are looked upon as somehow different.

“We have an educational problem in this country,” he began, “and I’m sick and tired of people focusing in on athletics as if that’s the only place there’s a problem. Athletics just reflects a small part of our society. The kids that we have that are participating in athletics come out of society as a whole. I’m sick about all this bull about athletics being looked at educationally. That’s a bunch of hypocrisy. It’s easy for people to discuss athletics.

“I watched a program on television yesterday where they were sitting around talking about whether a kid should play with a 2.0 grade-point average in high school. Big debate! All these people from academic circles. I said to myself, ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I think there are other kids in educational systems who are having problems.’

“Personally, I think the athlete is fortunate. People focus in on him because of the public interest in him. Some little kid who doesn’t play anything and doesn’t have a 2.0, nobody gives a damn whether he has one.”

A fan who had come in contact with some of Thompson’s players came away impressed with how polite they had been. They had used words like “sir” and “excuse me” and “thank you.” The fan complimented the coach for being such an excellent disciplinarian.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Thompson replied. “You’ve insulted their parents.”

Bill Stein, the athletic director at St. Peter’s, used to be Thompson’s assistant at Georgetown. “John recruits only certain types of people,” he said. “I know he’s refused to go after players who wound up as All-Americans.”

“He recruits good people,” said Eric (Sleepy) Floyd (Georgetown ‘82), now a guard for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. “He recruits people with good character. He always gives credit to the parents. He feels very strongly about that.

“I don’t think he wants to be a social worker. I think he just wants to be a coach. I never looked at him as a father figure.” Still, Floyd said, “He also taught me that there’s life after basketball, that there’s more reasons to go to college than to become a pro. He knows better than most people that not everybody makes it on the pro level and that, if you do, the odds are you’ll only play for a while. He’s been through it all.”

Thompson did make it on the pro level--briefly. He was the backup to Boston Celtics’ center Bill Russell for his only two pro seasons. Floyd, degree in hand, worked for a Washington, D.C., law firm last summer and plans to obtain a law degree.

“Hoya Paranoia” is a headline-writer’s dream.

It has its genesis in fact--Thompson’s zealous protectiveness of his players, his program.

After each game, the media guide points out, “the Georgetown locker room will be open for 15 minutes to the press. Precisely at the end of the 15-minute period, the locker room will be closed and no more interviews will take place. Neither Thompson nor the players will be available after the 15-minute interview period is over. There will be no exceptions to this procedure.”

Thompson is stricter than usual in his guidelines, his insistence at times that his team stay in out-of-the-way hotels on the road.

The reaction has been a mixture of pride and defensiveness.

Even before Georgetown won the NCAA championship last year, banners and T-shirts emerged with the slogan: “Hoya Paranoia; catch it!”

But in the media guide, in an article entitled “The Other Side of the Coin,” chronicling the travail the team experienced en route to the national championship, Bill Shapland, the sports information director for basketball, took issue with the phrase.

Of Hoya Paranoia, he wrote: “The term is a bolus of moral flamdoodle and cannot be dealt with until it has a definition.”

Bolus, incidentally, is “a small, round lump or mass, as of chewed food.” Flamdoodle is “pretentious nonsense.”

“Coach Thompson has some very mysterious ways of doing things,” said David Dunn, who transferred from Georgetown after his freshman year and now plays for Georgia. “But that’s why he’s successful. He’s found the way to handle the pressure.

“I respect Coach Thompson,” Dunn said. “I’m not going to put the man down.” But he did acknowledge that “the atmosphere’s a lot looser here (at Georgia) than it was at Georgetown. There it was sort of like the army. Oh, I don’t mean the army. Everybody’s got rules and regulations and Coach Thompson’s got his. It’s just that he’s got more of them.”

When Thompson arrived at Georgetown, there wasn’t much interest in the basketball team. Maryland had a virtual lock on the Washington, D.C., media.

At the time, he was Georgetown’s best resource--a star high school player in Washington, a member of two Celtic championship teams, a coach at St. Anthony’s.

He personally sold the Georgetown program. He told Bill Carpenter, then the general manager at local station WTTG, “Come with us now, because we’ll be good someday and we won’t forget where we started.”

WTTG began televising the Hoyas’ games. There was little viewer or sponsor support. Some station executives considered dumping Georgetown. Carpenter stayed with it. Georgetown has since turned aside other offers and has stayed with WTTG.

“He stresses loyalty,” Stein said. “If you’re John’s friend, you’re his friend for life.”

Thompson is a master of “needling” extra effort from his players.

On one occasion, he halted practice and told a player--within earshot of the others--that some high school kid had expressed interest in Georgetown. “He says he wants to come here because he knows he is better than you and that he will start,” Thompson said, “and you know he’s right.”

Practice begins quietly, players taking direction from assistant coaches while Thompson only observes. “He’s so low key, you wouldn’t know he was there,” said one player who requested anonymity. Fenlon is there, too, observing from a distance.

After a break, Thompson takes over. “Then,” the player said, “he can get pretty loud and abusive.”

“I may tell the players, ‘You’re no good,”’ Thompson said, “but I don’t try and convince them they’re no good.”

Thompson loves to quote military leaders. He feels comfortable with men of discipline and pride. Most of his recent teams have had at least one older member who played on a service team. “They add a sense of maturity and stability that you need with younger players,” Thompson said. This year’s is freshman Ronnie Highsmith, a four-year Army veteran.

It was Thompson’s third year as head coach at Georgetown, one which would culminate in the Hoyas’ first trip to the NCAA tournament since 1943.

He had inherited a team which, the year before he arrived, had won three of 26 games. Now, early in the 1974-75 season, it had won seven of its first nine. But Thompson was not happy.

His players had to sign a book verifying they had attended all classes. His top scorer, Jonathan Smith, had signed, although he had cut some classes. When Thompson found out, he benched his star without explanation.

Georgetown lost six consecutive games. The predominantly white student body was in an uproar.

During one game, a bedsheet was unfurled that called Thompson a flop and using a racial epithet.

The next day, the team called a news conference. Smith revealed why he had been pulled from the starting lineup--and supported Thompson.

“Whether someone’s white or black has nothing to do with it. Whether a person can fit into his program, into the kind of style he wants to play, that’s what matters,” said Stein, who goes further back with Thompson than Georgetown. They were teammates and roommates at Providence College.

“People make a big deal about how he’s a black coach with an all-black team. A white coach with an all-white team, that’s acceptable. Nobody thinks much about it. A white coach with a black team, they’d say, ‘What a great guy.’ ”

Todd Robinson, editor of the Hoya, a Georgetown student newspaper, was talking about how he and Ewing had spoken informally several times on campus. “I don’t know why he won’t do interviews,” Robinson said. “He’s a great guy, very articulate. . . . “

Then he paused. “Y’know, if Patrick was white, would people make a point of saying he’s articulate? I don’t think so,” Robinson said.

“I think a lot of the bad feeling is racially related. It’s a way to get at Thompson because it’s a black team led by a black coach who has something good going. He’s got a lot of power. Some people are still threatened by that.”

Thompson knew, even before Georgetown captured the NCAA title a year ago, that one question would inevitably arise--how he felt being the first black coach to win a national championship. His response was cool, reasoned.

“When you think about it, the question’s insulting,” he said. “What’s implied by the question is a great big blank before the first one came along. And that’s a lie.

“Plenty of other black coaches could have won an NCAA championship if they ever had the opportunity. It’s not the brains and talent that were missing until I came along. Those have always been there.”

Thompson is a bear of a man, 6-foot-10 and about 300 pounds. His countenance generally is more contemplative than menacing. But perhaps because of his size, the way he covets his private life, his insular program, he is characterized as a heavy.

“I’m not going to win many popularity contests,” he said. “I don’t have to explain myself. I don’t do things for other people. The people who know me know the way I am.

“I think sometimes my friends feel they have to explain or apologize for me. That’s unfortunate. I don’t see the need for that, but I feel affectionate toward them for doing it.”