Commentary : Secret of Georgetown’s Success Well-Kept

Just because Georgetown lost a basketball game and won’t be playing in Seattle doesn’t mean the mystique is dead.

Last week, Coach John Thompson said, “I get suspicious of people who keep saying I do things right.”

But he must be doing some important things right because we don’t hear of things going on at Georgetown that go on at Kentucky or Oklahoma. In times such as these the logical assumption is that if a school is hiding something, it must have something to hide. Georgetown people keep too much of the good stuff secret.

They should be an example for college sports.

“There are some things you keep for yourself,” said Ralph Dalton, who served as guide through a conversational tour of basketball life at Georgetown.

Dalton, 27, was in the same recruiting class as Patrick Ewing, tore up his knee before the first game and stayed on as Ewing’s backup. He got an MBA degree and currently sells federal bonds on Wall Street. He was a student-athlete, which is only what they all should be.

But when Dalton, 6-10, goes to work he meets immediate suspicions that the term student-athlete was a contradiction in terms. “People ask me,” he said, “ ‘What is Georgetown like? Are you dumb? Are the people you associated with dumb?’ ”

Apparently, Georgetown players are qualified to attend a very good school, and they actually go to school; we’re told they have a high graduation rate. At a time when athletes often can’t speak the language, Georgetown players are seldom heard because of barriers the program establishes.

The program says it’s nobody’s business what players’ major studies are. Players’ ages are state secrets. Players are discouraged from speaking of anything other than the game. Mary Fenlon, the assistant coach in charge of academics, flees from interviewers.

Thompson concedes that the press is obligated to play watchdog for college sports, but then he pulls his own curtain down protectively. Dalton will lift just the corner.

“Georgetown doesn’t protect you,” he said. “It gives you the opportunity to do things you have to do.”

And where is the joy of competition and of being 20-year-olds, the joy that shows they’re college students and not merely Hessians?

“I was a college kid having college fun, having the same experience on campus everyone else did,” Dalton said. “It was complemented by the success of the basketball program. I didn’t say basketball was complemented by school success.”

Recent surveys show athletes spend more time practicing than studying, but then few college students spend all their free time studying.

Fenlon’s greatest function may be in helping freshmen learn to manage time, to be able to have the social life that’s essential to growth. “Our school requirements were the same for athletes,” Dalton said. “It’s not easy. It’s manageable; it’s not impossible.”

Questions were raised when Georgetown won the championship in Seattle in 1984 and Michael Graham and Reggie Williams couldn’t speak a coherent English sentence in a post-game TV interview. It embarrassed Georgetown students -- past and present.

“We watched that interview,” Dalton said. “I think it was the excitement. Reggie actually was a good speaker.” Graham, however, was at Georgetown on a high school equivalency diploma and was gone the next year. He is the smudge on Thompson’s recruiting record.

Dalton thinks it’s a blessing not to be interviewed in depth -- especially after a game. “The worst thing is worrying about what you said on TV,” Dalton said. “The wonderful thing about the system is that it keeps you from being concerned with that.”

Georgetown does not have special dorms for athletes. “It was wonderful being part of the ordinary student population,” Dalton said. That was the priority. Priority doesn’t include being observed having fun.

Georgetown’s public face is as gray as its uniforms. “We do some things that we don’t share with you all,” Thompson said when the Big East championship was won.

When Georgetown played the Final Four in New Orleans, Georgetown stayed in Biloxi. When other teams were seen exploring the experience beyond the basketball games, Georgetown was out of sight.

Dalton calls that priorities. He said they did the things the others did -- some of the things, anyhow. “If we stayed at the Hilton in New Orleans, people would have been knocking at our doors all day,” he said. “We saw the French Quarter on our own. We went to the horse farm in Kentucky. We saw the locks in Seattle.”

They did it under careful monitoring. “It comes at that time of the semester,” Dalton said. “Papers were due whether you were in the NCAA or not. I carried my big black book bag. If I’m in New Orleans, where am I going to do my paper?

“John Thompson didn’t lock us up. He provides an opportunity to do the things you have to do. You all call it ‘hiding.’ You have to draw the line someplace. The best thing that happend to me is that Coach Thompson provided that line for us. I’d do it again. While I did it, I had fun.”

While Thompson has railed against that which he feels is unfair to black athletes, he has not had a white player for several years. He did not contact Danny Ferry, who was the outstanding high school athlete in the Washington area, Georgetown’s back yard.

Dalton said the issue was never a subject among his teammates. If they were as aware of everything else as Dalton said they were, not discussing it would have been impossible.

“I don’t ask,” Dalton said. “I can’t say, ‘This is because of ... ‘ And I’m not sure I want to know his logic.”

I wouldn’t consider accusing Thompson. His record is so good otherwise. He has refused to be drawn into that discussion in public.

I’d like to know his thinking on a lot of things. He mocks the observation that he has created an us-against-them mind-set among his players, but he does not dispel it.

He doesn’t have to toady to the needs or wants of the press. His obligation is to serve the needs of the school and the concept of student-athlete.

If Thompson and Georgetown have developed a system that makes student-athletes truly student-athletes, bottle it. Write a textbook.

Let the world know and expose the other schools and other coaches that don’t even try. That would be more valuable than going to the Final Four.