Thompson: A Celtic Soul, With a Hoya Heart

John Thompson has never put much stock in individual awards. “Popularity contests,” he says, have never meant anything to him. The work is the reward, more than MVP or coach of the year awards. Achievement should need no further amplification. But the Hall of Fame? That’s different. That’s the exception of all exceptions, the validation of a career, the place where the folks who truly mean something to the history and culture of basketball are celebrated forever.

“This is important to me,” Thompson said Friday, the morning of his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. “It’s like being buried in Arlington Cemetery. I drive by Arlington Cemetery and I envy the guys who have accomplished the honor worthy of being buried there.”

It was appropriate that the ultimate honor was bestowed on Thompson here in this New England manufacturing town, 75 miles or so west of Providence, R.I., where Thompson went to college, and about the same distance southwest of Boston where he played for the Celtics, made friends that have lasted a lifetime, and learned so many of the lessons that helped shape a coach and a man.

It was easy to get nostalgic in such a setting, and fortunately for all of us, Thompson was in such a mood Friday. All we needed was a campfire and some marshmallows. The best thing about being with Thompson in New England is that people recognize him as a Celtic far more than we do in Washington. You mention Thompson’s name in D.C. and you elicit recollections of Ba-Ba Duren, Sleepy Floyd, Patrick Ewing, McDonough Arena, Alonzo Mourning. You mention Thompson’s name up here, somebody is likely to spill forth Celtics war stories, the days of Auerbach and Russell, Sam and K.C. Jones, Satch Sanders and Tommy Heinsohn.

“My Celtic life,” Thompson said, “has more significance to me than to others. That’s because I didn’t play much. I talked to Russell about three times this week, mostly fussin’ at him for something he wasn’t doing that I want him to do. But he told me has this picture of me, him and Willie Naulls on the court at the same time. I told him, ‘I know that picture is a collector’s item because I never got on the court.’ I said, ‘Russ, I wonder what the score of that game was.’

“Really, it was the relationships with guys from being a Celtic which affected me. We had a lot of bright people in that locker room. When I first came to the team, Walter Brown [the owner] asked me how much I thought I was worth. I told him, ‘I don’t care how much you pay me; I just want to make the team. Let me make the team and I’ll come back and tell you what I’m worth.’ ”

Brown died before Thompson could come back after making the team. And in the owner’s old chair, Thompson found, “a guy smoking a cigar, eating Chinese food.”

That would be Red Auerbach. “And that was my first lesson,” Thompson said, “in the notion of getting something in writing.”

But once in that dressing room, he was inside a cauldron of riveting conversation and exchange. “The level of intelligence in that room was amazing,” he said. “I can remember Satch Sanders in the whirlpool, reading a book for hours. His entire body was submerged; he was totally covered except for his hands and the book.”

He spent a coaching lifetime telling kids to come early to practice, recalling that Russell’s ankles, Heinsohn’s ankles, K.C.’s ankles were all more important than his. His ankles needed to be at practice early. These are the kind of lessons they call “old school” now. Thompson has learned a million of them, and taught just as many. “They are great, great memories,” he said with a reverence you rarely sense from Thompson. “Those experiences helped me, without me even realizing it then, become a better coach.”

If coaching was all that was under consideration, Thompson would have been in the Hall of Fame before now. But it’s tough for a man who can be as combative as Thompson to win those popularity contests. He knows that, too. He believes his public stances delayed this day, and he is not alone in that belief. Hopefully, too, he knows its those very public stances that irritated so many have cemented who he is, and why his enshrinement here is so important.

Of course there’s heavy irony in the fact that the man who earned his way into the Hall of Fame as a coach is now a broadcaster. A “jouuuurnalist,” Thompson likes to say, drawing out the word. He does miss coaching. He misses the gym, the teaching. It came as a shock to me that he even misses the recruiting, one of the things many of us assume helped drive him away. “There’s one thing I don’t miss: pushing kids to the point of graduation,” he said. “Monitoring, fussin’, cussin’, insisting, making sure the things they need available are available. That’s the hard, consuming part of coaching I do not miss. If you are concerned about helping kids move along toward graduation, it’s a heavy, heavy burden. (A coach) is held more responsible than the kid’s own parents. That’s a tough, difficult responsibility.”

But because he negotiated the most difficult responsibilities with unswerving toughness, common sense, and ultimately great results, John Thompson the basketball coach has arrived at the Hall of Fame, a place he always wanted to be.