STILL GIVING AT SOUTH MOUNTAIN
Thompson, 80, a coaching icon in community
On most mornings, Richard Thompson rises before 6 and heads to the golf course not far from his Laveen home for nine holes. He is usually the only one on the course.
It’s been a ritual during this pandemic, something he looks forward to each day, a way to clear his head and evaluate life.
When he’s home, he will sometimes look into the past and see how far the world has come now.
Not very far, it seems.
Thompson was part of the first four years of Phoenix South Mountain High School’s history, from 1954 to ’58. Back then, he noticed how the white players would be on offense and the Black players on defense in football, how there would be no more than two Black players on the basketball court during games at a time.
The school’s nickname was once the Rebels with the Confederate flag sometimes used as a symbol and illustrations of a soldier dressed in Rebel garb as well. South Mountain changed its nickname to Jaguars in the mid-1980s, despite student protests.
Now, when Thompson turns on the news, there is a protest going on somewhere, whether it be over Confederate monuments or police brutality. He recognizes such issues aren’t new, but they are being seen in a new way.
“It didn’t go backwards,” Thompson says. “It just got exposed. It’s been going on. The thing that changed are the videos. If they didn’t have the videos, they’d still be jacking people up.”
Thompson’s perspective on the challenges facing Black youths in south Phoenix, where South Mountain is located, helped guide the way he worked with student athletes at the school.
Thompson never held the official title of head
track and field coach at his alma mater. He was an off-campus assistant coach. But his impact has resonated for decades.
He was mainly responsible for helping the school’s greatest all-time track athlete, Dwayne Evans, make it to the 1976 Olympics at the age of 17, just out high school. He also helped with the Olympic track careers of sprinters Harvey Glance (1976) and Calvin Smith (1988), and mentored Olympian Pam Green (1980).
Thompson was looked up to at South Mountain, and still is, maybe more than any coach in the school’s history.
“Coach Thompson is a staple in the history of South Mountain High School, as well as in the community in which he lived in all of his life,” said Brian Fair, one of the school’s greatest all-time athletes, who is now the athletic director. “When wanting to know about the South Mountain athletics, he is the guy to go to.
“His contribution to our community cannot be undermined. He has coached some of the best athletes the state of Arizona has ever seen, as well as he coached on the global level,” Fair added. “Track and field is his expertise but his coaching efforts go beyond track and into the other sports with his mentorship of the student-athletes that have walked the campus of South Mountain since the 1950s. I’m blessed to have him still here at South as a resource and mentor for me.”
A decades-long impact
Thompson has always stood up for what he thought was right, and, according to those impacted by him, has always lifted the spirits of young Black track and field athletes from lower-income families.
In 1956, when he was sophomore in high school, he knew he wanted to be a coach after seeing his track teammate, Clem Watson, the state champion in the 100 yards as a sophomore, serve a fiveday suspension for an absence during his junior year. He was forced to miss a track meet.
“That is when I knew I wanted to be a coach so that wouldn’t happen again,” Thompson said.
At 80, he still gives back to South Mountain, working on campus with special needs students and still spotting a track phenom that he won’t hesitate to help promote.
Currently, he sees some of the same qualities he saw in Dwayne Evans in rising junior Brian Fair Jr., son of the school’s athletic director. Brian Fair was one of the greatest all-around athletes ever to go through South Mountain, leading the Jaguars to an undefeated season and state championship basketball season his senior year in 1991.
“I told Brian (Sr.), I said, ‘He’s next to Dwayne,’ “Thompson says. “We’ve had kids coming in, in terms of being phenoms. He’s the next one. I think he should run 20.5 (in the 200 meters) as a senior.”
Thompson first discovered Evans in 1968, perhaps the most socially volatile year in recent American history before 2020.
“When I first met him in the field behind I.G. Homes Boys Club, I was a skinny little boy just doing what boys did in those days,” said Evans, a retired probation officer who now is the track and field coach at South Mountain. “Unbeknownst to me, Thompson gave me my life purpose and direction.”
Evans was a basketball player when he took him under his wing at the I.G. Homes, Thompson recalled.
“We practiced in the back,” Thompson said. “One day, Dwayne walked up and said, ‘Can I run?’ I said, ‘You come back tomorrow. I’m going to have you race against two other kids.’ I though the two others kids were fast. We had a run off and Dwayne beat them.”
Thompson would go around town and seek donations to get Evans to national age group meets as a youth all over the country. He got $500 from Jesse Owens and Kemper Marley, a prominent Valley businessman in the 1970s, would lead him to high powered executives for donations
Thompson’s mentoring helped lead Evans to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, where, as a 17-year-old who had just graduated from South Mountain High School, won the bronze medal in the 200 meters.
“On the flight back from the 1975 Junior Nationals Track and Field championships, Thompson told me I could and would make the ‘76 Olympic team,” Evans said.
“No one would have told me at 16 that it was possible to accomplish something of that magnitude so early in my track career. But Thompson did and believed I would. As they say, the rest is history.”
When Evans stops by Thompson’s home these days, the two reminisce about those days, how Evans shocked the world when he ran the 200 in 20.22 seconds at the U.S. Olympic Trials out of lane one, while breaking a spike on a rain-soaked Eugene, Oregon track. How, Thompson felt, Evans had the perfect setup in the Olympics finals to win.
“He was here the other day,” Thompson says. “I said, ‘What happened in the semifinals (of the Olympics 200 meters)? (Don) Quarrie (the gold medalist in the 200) and everyone was looking at him. I said, ‘Dwayne, I want you to win the semifinals.’ He came off the turn and, with five meters left, eased up. He said, ‘I was trying to reserve my energy.’
“The day they ran the 200 (final), it rained. They put Dwayne in lane seven. They put him in the lane to win it.”
Overcoming setbacks, but always a teacher
There are no regrets. Just great memories. A connection that runs through so many other athletes who were brought up like Evans, in the inner city, looking for hope, for a role model who would guide them to life victories.
“What makes him truly special and unparalleled is his belief in his people, which he calls family,” Evans said. “He believed in us so much that our confidence was sky high and we trusted him. He provided inner-city youth the opportunity to dream big dreams.”
That belief always came from within, growing up in south Phoenix, where he played basketball and ran track. He played basketball at Phoenix College, worked as a janitor, built an Olympics youth program from scratch, and even took the state of Arizona to court, after he felt he was wrongly passed over for a promotion in the state Office of Equal Opportunity.
Thompson said he eventually reached a settlement with the state, after the case worked its way through federal courts for about five years.
But that was far from his toughest battle.
In 2013, his son Tyrice Thompson, a former football player at Arizona State, was stabbed to death while working as a bouncer at a Scottsdale nightclub. Ian MacDonald, an ex-Marine, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, after being found guilty of manslaughter in 2014.
Thompson keeps his son’s ASU No. 81 football jersey in a frame in his home.
“You don’t cope with it,” Thompson said. “As long as you live, it stays with you.”
That experience also has helped Thompson as he has continued working with students.
Recently retired educator Anne Montgomery, a former TV news sports anchor in the Valley, who has worked as an Arizona Interscholastic Association football official, quickly bonded with Thompson early in her journalism/communications teaching role at South Mountain.
“When I was a new teacher at South Mountain High School, I struggled with some of my students,” she said. “I mentioned this to Coach Thompson and he asked if he could come into my classroom. I barely knew the man at the time, but I was so frustrated with my students that I said he was welcome.
“He spoke to them about the future and how their behavior might affect their hopes and dreams,” she said.
“He never raised his voice. He didn’t know any of these children, yet he treated them as a loving grandfather might. I will always be grateful that he took the time to meet with those kids. He showed me how to be a better teacher.”
‘How many more can you do?’
Thompson had an unconventional way of coaching. He would stand in the middle of the field surrounded by the track and observe. He would talk to each athlete differently, design workouts based on their strengths.
“The majority of the kids I was coaching came from single-parent families,” Thompson said. “I treated them like I wanted to treated. I’d say, ‘I’m an athlete. I’m just too old so I coach.’ I’m not like, ‘You’ve got 10 things to do, and, if you don’t do them, you suck.’ I ask how many more can you do? If they say, ‘One,’ then I end it there.
“I can test you and determine if you have the speed. That’s the whole ballgame. Speed is the greatest gift you can have. Not everybody is fast. You can’t teach him to be fast. He is either fast or not fast.”
He helped out Harvey Glance, who was part of the 1976 Olympic gold-medal 4x100-meter relay and was the top 100 sprinter from the United States, before the USA boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games.
In 2016, Thompson was inducted into the Phoenix Union High School District Sports Hall of Fame. Three years ago, with Evans’ help, the annual Richard Thompson Track and Field Invitational was started at South Mountain.
“As a South Mountain alumnus graduating with the first class in 1958, Coach Thompson has been an icon in track and field at South Mountain High for more than 40 years,” said Zack Munoz, athletic director of the Phoenix Union High School District.
“He has been a tremendous inspiration to youth and adults throughout the Phoenix Union High School District.”
All children need mentors, Montgomery said, but in south Phoenix, where many the students live in poverty, people like Richard Thompson are even more important.
“While his heart is with his track athletes, I’ve never seen Coach Thompson shy away from helping any student,” Montgomery said. “His calm demeanor and caring attitude are always on display. I wish we could clone him, or even better I wish more people took an interest, following his lead, in helping children become their best selves. Imagine what our students could accomplish then.”