BOLD SCHOOL TIES

It’s there when the Miami Heat’s Alonzo Mourning dives to the floor for a game-swinging rebound, sheds defenders, then emerges from the pile like a football player who recovered a fumble in the Super Bowl.

It’s there when Houston Rocket Dikembe Mutombo somehow gets his 38-year-old arms and legs moving in the same direction long enough to block a shot late in a game against the Dallas Mavericks.

It’s there when Othella Harrington sweeps in a hook shot for the Chicago Bulls’ first postseason basket in seven years.

There’s a thread that ties these old-school NBA centers together, a link to a coach who could switch from intimidating to caring, a connection to muggy Washington, D.C., summer days when they’d all gather to dispense instructions and insults, and even a bit of debt to the “Jane Fonda’s Workout” videotape.

All three players went to Georgetown. All three stayed at Georgetown the full four years. All three convened at Georgetown in the summers at McDonough Gym.

Now they’re all getting it done, so many years later. Mutombo is 38. Harrington, 31, the least heralded of the three, is working on his ninth NBA season. Mourning, 35, is the most remarkable story of all, capable of scoring 21 points and grabbing nine rebounds in a playoff game less than 1 1/2 years after receiving a kidney transplant.

“At this point in my life, this is very satisfying for me,” said John Thompson, who coached them all at Georgetown. “It’s certainly satisfying as a teacher to see your pupils succeed. I can’t take full credit for their accomplishments, but I share in it.”

This list doesn’t even include another Georgetown product, Allen Iverson, who just produced only the fourth game of at least 35 points and 15 assists in NBA playoff history. He’s only 29, still in the prime of his career, separated by youth and position from the tree of Georgetown big men.

What should be the collective noun for this group of centers? You know, there’s a pride of lions, a pod of whales, a gaggle of geese. I like a word that was in the news last month: “college.” A college of centers. It sure sounds appropriate for these guys.

“I always take pride in our institution, the program that we came from, the man who gave us the chance and the opportunity to play at the college level and the highest level of basketball, who taught us all the things to help us to succeed,” Mutombo said. “I think that’s why all my thanks go to John Thompson. He made us what we are. He made us understand what we can do to make a good living.

“I think it has to do with our work ethic. That’s it. I think that’s something you get when you go to Georgetown. You might not make pro, but the work ethic you get from the institution can help you and guide you and help you succeed in a lot of places. I’m proud to see all of my alumni, my friends are doing so well, from basketball to off the court.”

The professor-student relationship didn’t stop just because they left campus. If the television cameras capture them misbehaving, or if the word gets back to Thompson through his vast network, the phone will ring. (And with Thompson, that could be at any hour; he returned a call for this column at 1:40 a.m.)

“If you get in trouble, you know the first person you might hear calling you is John Thompson, before you even heard from your mother,” Mutombo said. “He would be like, ‘Son. Sonnnn.’ You’d be like, ‘Oh, ... ‘

“When he is not calling you, you’re fine. I always hate when he said, ‘Dikembe. This is Coach Thompson. Call me back, son.’ That means that something’s wrong.

“If he says, ‘I’m just calling to see how you’re doing, I’m proud of you,’ [it’s OK]. When he said, ‘This is John Thompson. Just call me back,’ you know he heard something about you or you’re not doing well with your game.”

Mourning is flourishing for the Heat right now because he didn’t heed Thompson’s advice. Mourning suffered from a potentially fatal kidney disease called focal glomerulosclerosis. It’s why he retired in November 2003, then had the kidney transplant a month later. When Mourning still had the urge to play again, Thompson told him not to.

“He and I talked extensively,” said Thompson, who left Georgetown in 1999 and now is a commentator on TNT. “I felt he had accomplished an awful lot in his life. He had his family. And not [a good reason to] take the chance. Even now, when he’s out on the floor playing, I’ve got my heart in my mouth. Every time he falls, something could happen.”

Patrick Ewing, the godfather of the Georgetown centers who made the program a national force when he arrived in 1981, tried to talk him out of it as well. Mourning beat the double-team.

“Alonzo is headstrong,” Ewing said.

Asked why it is so important to risk everything just to play basketball, Mourning steps back and shakes his head, indicating, you just don’t understand.

“It’s kind of hard to explain to anybody that hasn’t played at the level that I’ve played at, gone through all the work that I’ve gone through and the adversity I’ve gone through, for all of the years I’ve played this game all the way back to college and high school,” Mourning said. “I know my career is coming to an end, and I know I’ve been given another opportunity to do what I’ve been doing a good portion of my life. I just want to leave my mark on this game the right way.”

Said Ewing: “If you ask any athlete, they want to leave the game on their terms. They don’t want to leave because of an injury or a health condition. They want to leave when it’s time for him to go.”

Recently, Thompson e-mailed Mourning to let him know how proud he was, to reveal that every game Mourning played was the equivalent of winning a championship. Once again, Mourning respectfully disagreed.

“I sent an e-mail back,” Mourning said, “and I told him I didn’t just come back for that, just to say I’m a transplant survivor and I’m doing well and I’m just able to play. I didn’t come back for that. I came back to win, man.

“Yes, I’ve dedicated the season to all those transplant patients and dialysis patients and all the chronic kidney disease patients out there. I’ve dedicated the season to them. But I want to get something out of this. I want a reward at the end for my efforts. I worked my butt off to get myself back right. I remember fighting and trying to overcome the feelings and the medications....” He pauses for an audible exhale. “It was rough.”

There’s one trait all the Georgetown centers invoke immediately when asked what defines them, and that’s their work ethic.

“You can only work with what the player gives to you,” Thompson said. “They had the desire. That’s what makes coaching fun, when you have guys like that.

“You recruit guys who have a desire to be good and you tell them what you have to do in order to be good. But they have to have a desire to achieve it.”

They showed it on their own time, in the summer, when the pros would come back to McDonough Gym on campus and play.

Harrington, the baby of the group, remembers “just how intense it used to be, how much fun it was. Just how much I learned being around those guys, watching them prepare for the season.”

Ewing, now a Houston Rocket assistant coach, said, “The games would be just as intense, just as exciting as a playoff game. Even though it didn’t mean anything, to us it did. I felt that it helped myself, it helped them get as good as they got. I just think it was great for us.”

There was extensive trash talking and constant bickering over calls. (The No. 1 culprit, then and now: Mutombo. “He hasn’t changed,” Ewing said. “You see him always crying to the refs. It hasn’t changed.”)

They’d get so noisy that Thompson could hear them in his office adjacent to the gym. When it got too bad, he would emerge and declare, “Y’all get off the court.”

Just because they’d finished playing, it didn’t mean they were done for the day. Thompson gave them a “Jane Fonda’s Workout” and had them follow the top-selling aerobics videotape.

“I thought it was good arm exercises,” Thompson said. “People put so much emphasis on legs of players. If you have your arms over your head and start jumping up and down, you can jump far longer than you can hold your arms up.

“A lot of those exercises that she used were arm-strengthening exercises. I saw it and I said, ‘This would be good.’ ”

The giant men who made a living battling for rebounds against Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley were no match for the woman in leg warmers.

“I tell you what, that was a tough workout,” Mourning said. “That

Said Mutombo: “I used to try to do my best, but I used to burn up. It was tough.”

If superb conditioning were all it took to have a lengthy NBA career, teams would simply draft the tallest triathletes they could find.

“You start off using your body a lot when you’re young,” Thompson said. “If you want to have longevity, you have to use your mind.”

Mourning agreed.

“Hard work, preparation, determination, resilience, tenacity, you could throw all of that in there,” he said.

“Every Georgetown player who has played in this league has portrayed that.”

And the show is still onstage.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.