In 1972, he took over a Georgetown team that had gone 3-23 and had the Hoyas in the NCAA tournament in his third season. “ Iverson added a postscript on Twitter after news of Thompson’s death: “I will always see your face in my mind, hoping that I made you proud.”Thompson took those tributes in stride, rarely letting his gruff exterior slip. Mr. Thompson achieved much of his success by fighting against the grain. And they won’t say it’s Pepsi.”But there were almost as many Big Johns as there were days. It was the last time the United States would field an Olympic basketball team composed only of amateur players. He cited personal issues, which included a recent divorce from his wife of 32 years, the former Gwendolyn Twitty, his high school sweetheart. He pulled his players off the floor in protest during one game and walked off the floor in the middle of another, turning his duties over to an assistant.
You thought it might be a stairwell or a storage closet. Debate invigorated him. They retaliated with chimes of their own above the training room door, so Thompson couldn’t sneak up on them.Thompson understood that bookshelves explicate the man. But in March 2017, the university fired the younger Thompson following the program’s first back-to-back losing seasons in 44 years, and named Ewing head coach.
He never apologized for any of it. Which coach? His micromanagement of their lives was alternately criticized, praised and cited as cause for suspicion over the years. “Coach Thompson should get more credit than he gets for having created diversity at Georgetown, connecting Georgetown to this city and making it clear that Georgetown is not some elite institution sitting off there on the top of a hill,” former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, captain of Georgetown’s 1961-1962 basketball team, told The Washington Post. “Coach Thompson … thanks for saving my life. Thompson, John B.: Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1984). Mr. Thompson insisted as a term of his employment that he be given latitude to recruit high school students who wouldn’t otherwise meet Georgetown’s rigorous admission standards. Mr. Thompson found less success with his Georgetown teams of the 1990s. See our “He was ahead of his time by speaking truth to power when it was hard to do.”Thompson grew up tall and talented in Washington, D.C., wooed by the same basketball establishment he would later occasionally seek to turn inside-out.
John Thompson bent the world and made it a bit better.To understand Thompson, it helps to go back a long, long way with him. John Thompson, the Washington native who elevated Georgetown University basketball to national prominence, earned Hall of Fame honors and carved a place in history as the first African American coach to lead his team to the NCAA championship, has died at 78. Perhaps no man in his sport wanted victory more and trusted it less than Big John, who had seen how pressure to win warped good men. He left his phone number, told me his financial specialties and said if I ever changed my mind to call.When 7-foot-2 Dikembe Mutombo was recruited from Kinshasa, Congo, the usual skeptics wondered about his academic credentials. On a national level, Mr. Thompson was a key figure in launching the Big East Conference in 1979. Asked in a 2013 interview what he recalled about the sequence of events, which included a thunderous foot stomp, a foray onto the court and at least one expletive, Mr. Thompson, who had mellowed with age, said with a laugh: “I don’t remember why I was mad. Two-time NBA champion (Boston Celtics, 1965-66).
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“Manley Field House is officially closed,” Mr. Thompson famously intoned. “Quotations from Chairman Jesus.” “A Controversy of Poets.” “Ideas and Opinions of Albert Einstein.” And a book of Zen paradox: “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!”These days, as America debates serious issues, a serious man will be mourned, a wise man who also happened to be an excellent coach. He had averaged two points per game at Georgetown. He started at The Post in 1969 as a copy aide, and he spent 12 years as a general-assignment reporter, covering baseball, golf, college basketball, tennis, boxing and local high school sports.
The Hoyas’ graduation rate for four-year players was 97 percent, because they knew that, no matter what their academic challenges when they entered, they only had two years to prove they were serious about using school to prepare themselves for life — or give somebody else the chance they were wasting.Some rival coaches resented that Georgetown, a private school, seemed to design its own socially conscious (and opaque) rules and use them to win a lot of games. References. Once, my mom said she had enjoyed her late-night talks with that deep-voiced coach who had returned my calls. He reveled in standing up, speaking out and challenging the establishment when it came to causes he believed in. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. Built at a cost of $62 million, the five-level John R. Thompson Jr. Intercollegiate Athletics Center houses indoor practice courts, offices (including one for Mr. Thompson) and an academic center for the university’s roughly 700 student-athletes. In 1996, the talented but troubled Allen Iverson became the first Georgetown player under Mr. Thompson to leave school early, entering the NBA draft after his sophomore year. He required them to travel in coat and tie. Basketball-as-opportunity was a cause Mr. Thompson championed throughout his career. So was my mother,” Mr. Thompson told The Post in 1984.
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Even in church, Mr. Thompson had to wait for White parishioners to finish their prayers before he could approach the altar.