Thompson: Always a Coach Who Stood for Courage

I stopped thinking of John Thompson as a basketball coach a long time ago. Of course that’s what he has done professionally for more than 30 years. And he did it well enough to have won championships, coach the U.S. Olympic team, and earn--hopefully later this year--a spot in the basketball hall of fame.

But to frame him as essentially a basketball coach would be to shoot an air ball, to miss the point entirely. John Thompson evolved into not only a man who changed some very fundamental elements of college basketball but also someone who challenged traditional notions about education, contradicted virtually every stereotype people held about blacks in athletics, and used the moral authority of his position to inspire a segment of urban America thought by many to be unreachable. He changed this town in a way no mere coach ever could, and his departure from the position of Georgetown head basketball coach means metropolitan Washington will never be the same again.

Basketball was John Thompson’s pulpit, from which he could rouse, examine, defy, confront, sometimes all in the same day. Most of all, he forced you to think. When I was this newspaper’s beat writer covering Georgetown basketball, Thompson returned phone calls usually at about 2 a.m. More than once I answered the phone semi-conscious to hear him say, “Son, you want to sleep, or you want a scoop?” Two minutes would be spent talking about, say, Reggie Williams’ development as a ballhandler. The next 58 might be spent dealing with whether standardized tests accurately predict academic performance in college. Or why college athletes receiving “room, board, books and tuition” means they are indeed being paid. Thompson wasn’t looking for an agreement; he loved a forum, the exchange of ideas. I remember him saying, “You shouldn’t care whether I agree with your opinion, son, you might care if I respect it.”

He was willing to be a lightning rod for race and sports in America at a time when almost nobody else had the courage to get the discussion started, because it surely would mean offending some people. Yes, he could be angry and scowling, but he was intensely funny far more often in my experiences. He’s brilliant, complex, eclectic, profane, ridiculously well-informed and a bundle of contradictions that can never be unraveled. That I could hear Thompson called a racist on one side of town, then hear him called an “Uncle Tom” on the other spoke to the contradiction but also reconfirmed he’s neither. I covered him and his teams for five years and while I remember the games, some of which are the most riveting in college basketball history, it’s the conversations I’ll remember most, the intensely passionate answers a questioner could never anticipate.

Like the time in 1982 at the Final Four when a reporter asked Thompson how he felt about being the first black coach to reach this point, and he said essentially that it meant a great many black men before him had been denied the opportunity to do the same thing years earlier. It’s the only appropriate answer to that question.

If the predominantly-black teams and the take-no-prisoners style Georgetown played with on the court made Thompson an idol among young urban men, it was his message of discipline, education and self-reliance off it that seduced the adults. While seemingly everyone else was becoming more permissive, Thompson was as demanding as a turn-of-the-century headmaster. Between 1982 and 1990, he was a cultural force, and of how many basketball coaches would you say that? He seemed tireless and invulnerable to many of us, which must have been an overwhelming burden.

“I’m not the great big idol with the golden head,” he said Friday. “I’m John Thompson who’s fragile and weak and has to address things that pertain to him also.”

Regrettably, it never occurred to me until now.

Thirteen years ago, on the eve of March Madness, I was covering Georgetown basketball when my father died of cancer. When I arrived in Chicago at the funeral home, not having left an address or phone number with anybody, I found two enormous wreaths, the largest arrangements of flowers we received. One said, “From John Thompson,” and the other said, “From Georgetown Basketball.” As if they weren’t one and the same. Thompson had never even met my father.

People asked, as the Hoyas got eliminated earlier and earlier from the NCAA Championship Tournament, if Thompson was slipping. Maybe. How many coaches don’t after 20-some years? But the question doesn’t take into account that after 1985 John Thompson didn’t have the luxury of simply being a basketball coach. A whole lot of folks could coach basketball, so what? But nobody else was the idol with the golden head. Not even Temple’s John Chaney, a man I adore. No amount of protesting will stop a great many people from seeing Thompson that way, even if a problematic marriage and a trying divorce have pushed him away from a life he loved so dearly.

I don’t mean to diminish the basketball contributions. The Big East, with apologies to UConn, Syracuse and St. John’s, owes its popularity first and foremost to Georgetown. Before Thompson hit his stride, Big East basketball was a chummy little club sport paid little attention beyond the Beltway.

Thompson insisted that the Big East schools leave their inadequate gymnasiums for major arenas so the games could be televised and Big East basketball could move into the big time. His pressure defense--and I don’t care who played pressure defense first, Thompson perfected it--changed the way teams played offensively. Georgetown defense made coaches find secondary ballhandlers and rethink traditional ways of getting the ball upcourt. If Thompson didn’t invent the play-10-men game of attrition, he popularized it. There was no more important game on the schedule for most teams than Georgetown.

Whether we’ll see that kind of basketball dominance here again, nobody knows. But I’m less concerned for the moment with Georgetown basketball than with the fear that Thompson, without his vehicle, won’t be heard as frequently, as loudly. Sometimes, complex situations relating to sports cry out for Arthur Ashe’s voice, and we can only imagine. Thompson, fortunately, isn’t even in retirement. Whatever he winds up doing, I hope he just makes sure the new venue has a pulpit.