Crusading coach a successful and influential figure in the sport he loved
Basketball coach
JOHN THOMPSON was a crusading AfricanAmerican college basketball coach who inspired counterparts from all races while making Georgetown a famous brand.
Asked upon his hiring at Georgetown to occasionally take the pitiful Hoyas to the National Invitation Tournament, a consolation prize for middling teams, Thompson instead built his team into a national power. The Hoyas went to three Final Fours and won the 1984 national title, making Thompson the first black coach to win a major NCAA Division I basketball championship.
His teams also won seven Big East Conference regularseason titles and he directed the 1988 Olympic team to a bronze medal in the final Olympics before the United States began using NBA players and dominating the competition.
Thompson finished his 27 college seasons — all at Georgetown — with a 596239 record before being inducted into the Naismith Memorial and
National College Basketball halls of fame.
“He was a true builder of young boys to men,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers wrote on Instagram.
“Set the tone for us all. We will remember him as a coach. But anyone who came in contact realised, he was much more . . . a mountain of a man.”
A hulking presence at 2.08m and roughly 136kg who walked unhurriedly, often with a folded white towel draped over the shoulder of his suit jacket, Thompson commanded attention with his stature and baritone voice. Some found it ironic that he was so successful at a largely white college with mostly black players.
“What I think happened is that an intelligent black man, with a clear idea of what he wanted, has weaved in and out between a lot of confused honkies and has accomplished things that have benefited both parties,” the Rev Timothy Healy, Georgetown’s president, told Sports Illustrated in 1980.
Thompson was a relentless advocate for disadvantaged players, particularly from minority backgrounds. In what might have been his most powerful statement, he walked off the court before a game against Boston College in 1989 as part of a boycott to protest Proposition 48, an NCAA regulation that denied scholarships to players who failed to achieve minimum grades and standardised text scores.
‘‘I’ve done this because, out of frustration, you’re limited in your options of what you can do in response to something I felt was very wrong,” Thompson said. “This is my way of bringing attention to a rule a lot of people were not aware of — one which will affect a great many individuals. I did it to bring attention to the issue in hopes of getting [the NCAA] to take another look at what they’ve done, and if they feel it unjust, change the rule.”
When Thompson became the first black coach to reach a Final Four in 1982, he said it meant that others before him were not given the same opportunity, college basketball author John Feinstein recalled in a 1999 interview on CNN.
‘‘That was, clearly, an important point to make at a moment when he could have given an easy, cliche answer,” Feinstein said. “John Thompson never went for easy answers.”
Thompson was fiercely loyal to a legion of players that included eventual NBA stars Patrick Ewing, Allen Iverson, Dikembe Mutombo and Alonzo Mourning. Thompson continued to recruit Iverson after the prep prospect had spent four months in jail for allegedly participating in a brawl at a bowling alley before his senior year of high school. Iverson’s conviction eventually was overturned because of insufficient evidence.
Born on September 2, 1941, in a racially segregated nook of southeast Washington, DC, Thompson developed an early aptitude for basketball that led to an AllAmerican career as a centre at Archbishop Carroll High. Later, at Providence College, he was captain of the first team in school history to reach the NCAA tournament, in 1964.
The Boston Celtics selected Thompson in the third round of that year’s NBA draft and he was a backup to Bill Russell on championship teams in each of his first two seasons. But he would not play another minute, surrendering to a more powerful lure: teaching kids to play the game he loved.
He died on August 30, aged 78, and is survived by children John, Ronny and Tiffany and his five grandchildren. —