Mourning Grows in Hoyas’ Mold : College basketball: In his senior season, center has delivered Georgetown a precious commodity: leadership.

After 20 years of coaching basketball at Georgetown, John Thompson has seen hundreds of players come and go. He has watched the premature and angry departures of freshman Michael Graham in 1984, John Turner in 1989 and Charles Harrison this year, all defectors who could not abide his idiosyncratic coaching style and the school’s academic demands.

He has watched others endure and survive his rigorous tests and become, like New York Knicks star Patrick Ewing and Denver Nuggets rookie Dikembe Mutombo, college graduates and millionaire franchise players in the NBA.

It’s a peculiar symbiosis that develops between Thompson and his players, a relationship that is part father-son, part teacher-student, part five-star general-buck private.

Soon he will lose another of his charges. This time it will be one of his most prized players, a 6-foot-10, 245-pound mass of chest and arms and legs and basketball fury whose scheduled graduation this spring and likely selection in the first round of the NBA draft will leave a gaping hole in the Hoyas’ roster next year.

Senior center Alonzo Mourning, whose single-handed dominance has led the Hoyas to a surprising first place in the Big East, will bid farewell to his teammates at the end of this semester.

He will leave behind a memorable college basketball career, one that showcased his muscle under the basket as well as some youthful mistakes that once came close to ruining his years at Georgetown.

In the end, Mourning will depart as a model of the Thompson credo, a young man who recognized the errors of his ways and chose to follow the coach’s rules about avoiding contact with notorious drug dealers -- Mourning briefly befriended Rayful Edmond III, now serving three life sentences for drug charges -- as well as his pet peeves about doing school work, wearing coats and ties on road trips and working one’s behind off for a spot on the team.

Not everyone can tolerate the Thompson system. And now, with Mourning leaving, the question is, will Thompson find somebody who can replace him?

“I will hate to see him go as I hate to see all of them go,” Thompson said in a recent interview. “But life goes on. Somebody pops up and does the job. There always has been somebody leaving and always somebody coming. And there always is somebody that people say turns out to be better than people thought he was.”

Left in Mourning’s wake will be a 1992-93 team made up of six sophomores, six juniors and a yet-to-be named assortment of freshman recruits. The only high-school player to sign with Georgetown so far is 6-10, 195-pound Duane Spencer, a forward from New Orleans who is averaging 27.6 points per game, 13.4 rebounds and 4.2 blocks this season.

Bigger fish are available, and there is talk that Georgetown is energetically in the bidding for Othella Harrington, the No. 3-ranked high-school player in the country according to some basketball guides. Harrington, a 6-9 1/2 center from Jackson, Miss., will not sign until this spring, however.

Thompson is characteristically mute on the subject of whom he is watching. “We brought in Spencer and we’re pleased with him,” he said, offering no other specifics. But he was more effusive on the subject of his critics, who have suggested in recent years that Thompson has lost his interest -- and edge -- in recruiting.

“If our recruiting is so bad, why did John Turner (who attended Phillips University, an NAIA school in Oklahoma after leaving Georgetown and now plays for the Houston Rockets) go in the first round? Why did Dikembe go in the first round? And now we have another first-round pick (Mourning),” he said.

“We have idiots running around telling people we’re not recruiting and they haven’t had a first-round pick in their life.”

There is no doubt that Thompson enjoys reminding his doubters that his “no-name” recruits sometimes become great players. He loves to point out that former Boston Celtics guard Charles Smith and Houston’s Sleepy Floyd, two of his signees, were not high-school all-Americas.

“We have not tried to get people that other people thought were good,” Thompson said. “We’ve tried to get people that we thought were good. We haven’t changed our recruiting pattern at all. We’ve tried to identify people who we felt would help us. Sometimes mothers don’t give birth to seven-footers. And if mothers don’t give birth to them, we can’t go and manufacture them.”

While sources in the Big East said he has stepped up his recruiting this year in anticipation of Mourning’s departure, Thompson said he is content with a lineup that at the moment has no obvious NBA prospects. Sophomore point guard Joey Brown, he said recently, is as good defensively as “any all-American in the country.” If 6-1 freshman guard Irvin Church works hard enough, Thompson said, he might eventually warrant comparisons to Smith and Floyd.

“I kind of think (freshman forward) Lonnie Harrell is a good player, I kind of think (freshman guard) John Jacques is a good player, I kind of think (freshman center) Don Reid is going to develop into a good player,” Thompson said. “I also think that to win the Big East we’re not going to run out here and just grab anybody and everybody to prove that we can win a recruiting war. That’s not what Georgetown University wants and it’s not what I want.”

Furthermore, Thompson said, even star recruits can turn out to be duds. “Regardless of the time you spend recruiting, you don’t know them until you get them on campus and you see if they are capable of handling it,” he said.

Thompson said he hopes that when Mourning leaves college he will have learned enough to handle the salary and fame that await him. “You know one day they’re going to leave,” Thompson said. “It’s part of the process. You just hope you can prepare them as much as you can for where they’re going.”