After Disappointment, U.S. Players Come to Defense of Thompson

The members of the 1988 U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team went to Seoul burdened by the greatest of expectations and returned decorated by the least of rewards -- bronze medals.

However, after becoming the first U.S. players to come home without at least a silver medal, they did so without embarrassment, without guilt and without criticism of Coach John Thompson. When the players’ various images of Thompson are focused into a single big picture, they paint him as the quintessential players’ coach.

“I think he’s gotten a bad rap, saying it’s his fault that we lost,” guard Bimbo Coles said. “It’s everybody’s fault. No one person should take the blame.”

“I love Coach Thompson,” forward J.R. Reid said. “He’s a great man. I really enjoyed the time we had together with him.”

“It was a great experience,” guard Dan Majerle said. “I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot about basketball, and the way he related to you as a player was special. I liked the way that he pushed us, the way that he showed that he cared about us.”

In the weeks since the Olympics ended, The Washington Post interviewed six of the 12 players on the team and asked them to talk about their experiences under the coach. The players said Thompson worked the team hard. He maintained a high level of discipline and protectionism. But when the United States lost to the Soviet Union in the semifinals, he was compassionate and caring, they said. And that was important.

“He pretty much said we had no reason to be ashamed,” former Pitt forward Charles Smith said. “If you didn’t do all you could do, then you could be ashamed. We gave it our best shot and came up short. Things like that happen.”

“That loss hurt more than any other because we had trained so hard and so long,” Coles said. “One day after we were at Charlotte (N.C., for the Carolinas Invitational), we practiced for six hours straight.”

But that is not to say the players found Thompson or his training regimen too harsh.

“I think I anticipated that he would be rough, rugged ... that he would be a dictator or a brute,” guard Hersey Hawkins said. “Actually, he was lot nicer than that. He did get on us, but not a whole bunch like people expected.”

“People think John Thompson is a military type of guy, but (he is) not really,” Coles said. “He gave us time off. He just said, ‘Don’t go off and do something stupid.’ We had a good time, but when it came time to play, it was all business.”

That meant knowing defense and knowing how to play hard -- all the time. “(I learned) to play hard constantly no matter what,” Hawkins said. “That is something every player has to learn eventually, and I think I learned that from him.”

“He wants the ball pressured, the rotation precise and on time,” Smith said. “He wanted everybody to help each other out. A guy might get beat and we’ve got to help him out.”

To that end, Reid said, Thompson made sure each player would be willing to play a role he might not have in college.

“He brought everybody into his office during the summer and asked if we could accept the role of coming off the bench,” Reid recalled. “He really didn’t know the starting lineup until he got to Seoul.”

Some critics said Thompson’s decision to rely so heavily on defense -- a complex, team-oriented aspect of the game -- made victory impossible for a team of collegiate all-stars that had been together for just a few weeks. The players disagreed.

“It was very easy to adjust to his style,” guard Jeff Grayer said.

Majerle also seemed to have little difficulty adjusting.

“Both my coach at Central Michigan and Thompson are very defensive oriented,” he said. “The transition to Thompson was easy.”

“Nobody was saying (anything) when we were beating teams by 40-50 points,” Reid said. “The defense was fine until we lost the game and all of a sudden it’s complicated.”

He added of the loss to the Soviets, “On that day, it wouldn’t have mattered who the coach was. They shot extremely well. We played as hard as we could.”

Smith’s recollections of that game also seem to reflect a certain degree of helplessness in the face of an onslaught by a team that had been playing together for a long time.

“I was out there playing defense,” he said. “Plenty of times one big guy would set a screen for the other and the ball was in flight for them already. The big men would get the rebound, and they knew the guard was already upcourt. They didn’t even have to look. ... I don’t know how good any of those players would be if you took them from the network. They knew what each one was going to do. They all play real well together.”

Perhaps no one felt more helpless during that game than Hawkins, the shooting specialist the Americans appeared to need so desperately. Earlier in the Games, he had injured his knee, and it was Thompson -- aware that Hawkins had not yet signed with the Philadelphia 76ers -- who decided he would not play.

“I possibly could have made a difference,” said Hawkins, who was chosen sixth overall in the draft by the Los Angeles Clippers and then traded to the 76ers. “I know I could have helped.

“It was basically (Thompson’s) decision for me to not play,” he said. “We met with the doctors, and they said that I could play, but there was the risk of reinjuring it. Of course I wanted to play, but I had to think about my future, my career in the long run.”

Hawkins added, “(Thompson) is willing to go out and show players that he’s interested. I think he is in a class by himself.”