Life After Georgetown

When John Thompson accepted an invitation to join the coaches on the bench for a Washington Capitals exhibition game, he had no idea what he was getting into.

“I didn’t even realize that there wasn’t a partition in front of the bench. I’d have never agreed to do it,” the former Georgetown basketball coach said. “Here we are standing up there, and they’re hitting the hockey puck over there near us and I’m saying, ‘Oh, shoot, that thing could come up here!’ ”

Thompson was more stunned by his own behavior in July, when he got caught up in the excitement over the British Open golf tournament. He changed his plans on that Sunday and watched on TV as Jean Van de Velde waded into the water to look for his ball at the 18th hole.

“I never would have done that before, never would have done it,” Thompson said.

Full of laughter, even jovial, the 58-year-old Thompson is like a kid running through the world of sports for the first time. In the 10 months since quitting the Hoyas, he has made a transition from 24-hour-a-day coach to Washington star-at-large that many people are getting to know for the first time.

“He’s just a different man,” said Atlanta Hawks center Dikembe Mutombo, who played for Thompson at Georgetown and remains close with the coach. “You can see the sense of humor. Totally different.”

Thompson will tell you that he hasn’t changed that much. During his 27 years as a coach, he rarely let his private side show. “Hoya Paranoia” became a catch phrase as Thompson closely guarded his program and players.

“The danger in being private sometimes is that you make other people authorities about you,” Thompson said. “And other people believe it.”

Now Thompson’s personality is on display five days a week on his radio talk show on Washington’s WTEM-AM, and he’s just started a new job as an NBA studio analyst for TNT.

The radio show began as a one-month experiment during the NCAA tournament in March and has become a huge hit. Thompson’s big name attracts other big names, ones that are hard to get, and he won’t let his guests get away with typical politically correct answers.

He got media-shy Albert Belle to trash Baltimore Orioles manager Ray Miller, and goaded Hal Sutton into saying that the Europeans should stop whining about their Ryder Cup defeat.

“He’s got so much wisdom and experience,” said Washington Redskins coach Norv Turner, who seized on Thompson’s newfound football enthusiasm and invited him to speak to players in the locker room. “He told stories about the Olympics and about coaching at Georgetown. It’s fun being around people like that.”

Thompson’s humor and combative, sometimes folksy nature comes across in full force on the radio, where he blurts out one-liners like: “Baseball is a man hitting a little ball with a splinter that comes off a tree!”

“I could not do what I’m doing now if it were not me,” Thompson said. “I’ve enjoyed a lot of things that I’ve not let other people know that I’ve enjoyed. Now they have a chance to see some of that, and they express a certain amount of surprise.”

What’s also surprising is that Thompson is now a member of the profession that he frustrated for so long. Covering Georgetown basketball under Thompson could be a tougher beat than following some of the bureaucracies down the road in the Capitol. Player access was strictly controlled, trying to get a one-on-one interview was often a hopeless cause, and any reporter who violated the rules would be banned.

Thompson, for instance, got George Washington coach Tom Penders on the phone for an interview hours before the Colonials played in an NCAA tournament game. Reporter Thompson seems to get the access that coach Thompson never would have allowed.

“I don’t know if that’s absolutely accurate,” Thompson said. “I wouldn’t do extra. But I never missed a press conference. I never missed an obligation. I never missed anything I said I would do. A lot of times people portray me as someone who did not like it to the extent that I would not do it, and that’s not true. What I did was salvage enough time that I could do my job.”

Now that he’s on the other side of the microphone, Thompson says he feels more of an appreciation for the work it takes to get a story and the pressures of deadlines. But if he had to do it all over again ...

“I think I would do it exactly the way I’ve done it before,” he said.

And will he get a chance do it again? Not at Georgetown. His longtime assistant Craig Esherick is in charge now, and Thompson is staying away unless he’s asked.

“Craig needs to be provided with time,” Thompson said. “It’s a difficult situation he was put in, coming in behind somebody like me.”

Thompson quit Georgetown because he was going through a divorce, a distraction that wouldn’t let him continue his blinders-on approach to coaching. He still has difficulty explaining the decision to incredulous fans.

“You’ve got to go through it for people to know,” Thompson said. “You cannot explain it. It was not a question of somebody being mean, it’s the pressure of the whole thing.”

But now the legalities are settled, and Thompson can concentrate on other things. He confessed that his early work in NBA locker rooms for TNT makes him feel “like part of it again.”

The coaching bug is still there.

“Nobody’s offered me a job,” Thompson said. “You evaluate these things when the opportunities are offered to you, then you deal with them. I made it clear all along that I was never dissatisfied with coaching. Coaching is not something that I don’t like.”