Remembering John Thompson, a college basketball giant who made his voice heard (2024)

On its own, it was nothing — a piece of white cotton spun together, meant to mop sweat. Slung across the shoulder of its owner, a basic towel became so much more, sometimes morphing into a flag of intimidation, or folding into the punchline of a joke, and for two nights, perching on a chair as a powerful symbol of protest.

This is what happened when John Thompson Jr. got hold of something. The basic became so much more — a towel a symbol, a team a cause, and a profession an instrument for social justice. Thompson was, by definition, a basketball coach, and an extraordinary one at that. He won a national title and 596 games, building a Hall of Fame career by turning Georgetown into a national power — and in the eyes of its rivals, a national menace. In and of itself that would have been enough. Except that didn’t suit Thompson. Not one to be content with staying between the lines, he strayed out of the coaching box and used his platform to rattle cages, refusing to stick to sports before sticking to sports was a thing. He fought passionately for what he believed in, and against anyone who stood in his way, quietly standing tall against racial strife and boldly confronting institutional racism to the benefit of thousands of college athletes. Thompson engendered, and almost required reaction. He found comfort in the uncomfortable, demanding conversation if not answers, and refusing to settle for good enough when something better was within reach. He made you laugh, he made you angry but above all else, he made you think.

A legendary coach and an equally legendary agitator, Thompson has died at age 78. A cause of death was not immediately known. “John Thompson did what he thought was right, and what was in the best interest of his players and his program,’’ former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese says. “And he didn’t give a darn what you or I thought about it.’’

At 6-10 and blessed with a rumbling baritone voice, Thompson cut an intimidating presence and knew how to use it. He stalked the sidelines, prodded his players and cussed at officials, putting that towel to good use. He sweated the small stuff, and sweated the big stuff, always seeking something better. If not perfection, at least improvement. He crafted a team in his own image. Georgetown teams did not back down, earning a reputation for their toughness as much as their talent. The Hoyas defended hard, elbows out and jaws jutted, a villain easily cast. That they frequently won only aided their image and made them easier to hate. From Thompson’s third season, in 1974-75, all the way through the end of his career in 1999, Georgetown never had a losing season, and in the ’80s the Hoyas dominated the sport, rolling to three Elite Eights, two national title game appearances and one title in nine years. He was the first Black head coach to win a national championship.

In the early days of the Big East Conference, Georgetown played a part in some of the league’s most memorable controversies. Thompson stoked the flames of a simmering rivalry with Syracuse by announcing that the Hoyas had closed Manley Field House in the Orange’s last season before moving to the Carrier Dome, and in 1984, Michael Graham punched Andre Hawkins in the Big East title game, earning only an intentional foul. Thompson and a young, spitfire version of Rick Pitino nearly came to blows during a game between the Hoyas and Providence, and Jim Calhoun remembers screaming about Thompson’s towel as an intimidator. “John has this great tactic, where he’d get pissed, stand up and flip that damned towel over his shoulder,’’ Calhoun says. “Every time he did that, I’d look at my assistants and say, ‘We’re f*cked now,’ and I’d ask the officials, ‘You want me to flip my towel too?’ But that was John. Only John could do that.’’

Hoya Paranoia, coined by a Washington Post reporter frustrated with Thompson’s strict access rules, morphed into a team persona, the Hoyas flipping the switch to inspire the madness as much as live in it. Postgame access lasted 15 minutes — sometimes to the countdown of a stopwatch — and rumors flew during the 1984 Final Four in Seattle that Thompson had sequestered his team in Canada to avoid the press. “It was a paramilitary operation at times,’’ former New York Daily News reporter Dick “Hoops” Weiss says. “Who knows where they stayed? It was an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the city. That was part of the mystique.’’

Thompson did nothing to dispel it. Years later he said the Hoyas did not, in fact, cross the border. His team got off the plane in Seattle and walked across the street to their hotel. He did, however, admit that during the 1982 NCAA Final Four in New Orleans, he drove his team to Biloxi, Miss. — a good 97 miles away — and enjoyed watching through the back window of the bus as reporters, hoping to follow the team, got tired of the drive. “I didn’t like being the evil empire,” Thompson said. “But I marketed it.’’

Some of the hostilities were real. The feud between Thompson and Jim Boeheim lasted for years, the two tolerating one another only in the best interest of the league. In 1988, Thompson, then the U.S. Olympic team head coach, extended an olive branch, inviting Boeheim onto his staff. “Then we had to get along,’’ Boeheim says with a chuckle. “In the beginning, we were young and competitive, and the games, the magnitude of the games, really built it. I mellowed in the end, and we became really good friends.’’

Much was at least easily diffused, if not entirely contrived. After the screaming match with Pitino, he praised the coach for the work he was doing at Providence. “So much sh*t happened,’’ Thompson said with a laugh. “But it was good theater.’’ In some ways, Thompson played the part, living up to the public persona of the gruff and aloof intimidator people thought him to be. In private he shared his caustic wit and belly laugh, happy to needle his fellow coaches. When Lou Carnesecca earned a little fame for wearing ugly sweaters on the sideline, Thompson stopped in the St. John’s bookstore before a game. Just before tipoff of the highly anticipated matchup, Thompson flashed open his suit jacket, revealing the ugly sweater T-shirt he had purchased to wear for the game. Not one to be outdone, Carnesecca retaliated the next time Georgetown and St. John’s met, asking his managers to tie a bunch of towels together. Carnesecca took the floor with the trail of towels over his shoulder, his managers following as if holding up a king’s train. “The funniest thing, when I got my radio show after I quit, people didn’t think I laughed,’’ Thompson said. “I would get on the air and start joking, and more people would call in and say, ‘We didn’t know you were like that.’ I told them, ‘You tried to define me by a soundbite in my life. I didn’t share things with you that I’m able to share now.’’

When Rick Barnes succeeded Pitino at Providence, he spent the entire warmup before his first game at Georgetown fretting about how to greet Thompson. He didn’t want to bother the important coach with a trivial handshake, and instead waited for a signal from Thompson as to whether he should come over and say hello. Thompson offered an almost imperceptible nod, and Barnes stayed away. After the game — Providence lost after missing a buzzer-beater — Barnes started to leave the court, figuring Thompson preferred it that way. Instead, Thompson grabbed Barnes in a bear hug, wrapping his left arm around the coach’s waist, and pulling the 6-foot-1 Barnes into his frame. “He said, ‘You’re a helluva coach,’ ’’ Barnes recalls. “He’s 6-10, so I’m looking up at him like a little kid. ‘Thank you.’ I mean, I really revered him, so that meant something.’’

In Thompson’s third season, Georgetown opened the year 7-2, inspiring a fevered fury among a fan base that didn’t know much about winning. The year before Thompson took over, the Hoyas finished 3-23, and were in the midst of a 30-year NCAA Tournament drought. But just as people started climbing aboard the bandwagon, Thompson benched his best player, Jonathan Smith, without explanation, and the Hoyas promptly lost six in a row. During a home game, fans unfurled a bedsheet. “Thompson the (racial epithet) flop must go.’’ The next day, Georgetown held a press conference and explained Smith’s suspension. Thompson had asked each of his players to sign a book, verifying they hadn’t cut any classes. Smith signed, but when Thompson later learned he had skipped, he sat him. At the press conference, his players — including Smith — echoed their support of Thompson, Felix Yeoman declaring, ‘If this is what it is to be a (racial epithet) flop, this is what we want to be.’’

“For those of us in White America, it’s hard to understand what it’s like to be raised a Black man,’’ Tranghese says. “Because of John, I like to think my views became more worldly, and more open-minded, and hopefully more understanding. People have no idea what he dealt with.’’

The only son and youngest of four children, Thompson grew up in the housing projects of Washington, D.C. His father worked in a tile factory and his mother, who had a teaching certificate, as a maid because she couldn’t find work in a school. Both parents believed fervently in education and when Archbishop Carroll offered a scholarship, Thompson enrolled in the newly desegregated school. He starred on the court, leading the team to 55 consecutive wins, earning high school All-America honors and the attention of plenty of college coaches, including St. John’s, which sent Carnesecca, then a young assistant, to lead the charge. Carnesecca knew Thompson’s games well. Before he joined the St. John’s staff, Carnesecca coached at St. Ann’s High, going head-to-head with Archbishop Carroll. He tried to sway Thompson and his family on the allure of New York, but Thompson’s mother was having none of it. “His mother says to me, ‘I’m afraid to send my boy up there to New York City,’’ Carnesecca says. “I said, ‘Ma’am. Look at the size of him.’’’ Thompson instead opted for Providence, though the adjustment wasn’t easy. He wanted to transfer after just one season, sticking it out only because of his trust in Dave Gavitt, his coach.

By the time he graduated from Providence, Thompson ranked as the Friars’ all-time leading scorer and was second in rebounding, and he led the team to an NIT championship and its first NCAA Tournament. Drafted by the Celtics in the third round, he served as a backup to Bill Russell, but quickly assessing the situation and his odds of playing, Thompson retired after two years. He returned to D.C., earning a master’s degree in guidance and counseling while coaching a St. Anthony’s High. The part-time coach built a hoops power, St. Anthony’s rolling to a 122-28 record in his six seasons.

After Georgetown fired Jack Magee, the school considered equally successful high school coach (and Thompson’s bitter rival), Morgan Wooten, from DeMatha, as well as Jack Ramsay, who had just been let go by the 76ers. University president Father Robert Henle instead went with Thompson, asking him merely to strive for a few NIT bids. This was 1972, only five years after John McLendon, hired by Cleveland State, became the first Black head coach at the Division I level. The decision to bring Thompson, a young untested Black coach, to a school with the academic pedigree of Georgetown when other candidates were available, raised more than a few eyebrows. Rather than heed his president’s charge and get along to get along, Thompson strove to build a team that could win and win big. He recruited in the city, ruffling the feathers of people who thought he fought a little too hard in the trenches, and when he lured top players to campus it only rankled the establishment more.

Some tried to paint Thompson as some sort of Peter Pan, a man championing the cause of the less fortunate, using his position to extend a Georgetown education to others who may otherwise not be able to achieve it. He pushed back on the trope. He didn’t want his players to be viewed as charity cases, as if their educations were an otherwise undeserved gift. Certainly, he knew the stereotypes that his team defied, but he refused to be part of a lazy narrative. He held the Hoyas to higher standards because his parents held him to higher standards, and because he believed they could meet the same thresholds as anyone else. He not only suspended Smith in his third season, he booted Graham from the team months after Georgetown’s 1984 title — a game in which Graham scored 14 points — after Graham stopped going to class. “It is not my intention to be a crusader for this cause or that cause,’’ he told The Washington Post in 1980. “I don’t want to be a social worker. Let’s take this education thing. They all say, ‘Thompson is wonderful because he stresses education, education, education.’ Well, they hired me to coach basketball. If I say I want my kids to get an education, it’s perceived as an extraordinary thing, that I’m a martyr or something. Why should that be?’’

Yet ever the contradiction, Thompson went to extraordinary efforts to protect his players. That, not some wish to aggravate the media, served as the real backbone to Hoya Paranoia. Thompson knew well what he had exposed the Hoyas to — an almost all-Black team playing for a top university — and would be damned if he’d heave more on the pile if he was in a position to prevent it. He cocooned them as much as he could from the noise and made sure they did nothing to bait the negativity. Freshmen were off-limits for media, including Patrick Ewing, the best high school player and a player Tranghese credits with single-handedly moving the Big East tournament to New York.

A Jamaican immigrant, Ewing carried the lilt of his native country in his speech and was a natural introvert. He struggled with the attention that came with his position. But those so inclined to search for such things decided the coach was hiding, not shielding, his star. At games, fans took the racist bait and pelted Ewing with bananas and labeled him illiterate. “What Patrick went through, no one knows,’’ Tranghese says. “It was horrible. Just horrible.’’ In 1985, Georgetown received a death threat against him, the school moving him from campus to a hotel for protection. At the NCAA Tournament that year in New Orleans, the university stationed several administrators by the locker room door, vigilantly checking reporters’ credentials. “He protected me,’’ Ewing says. “And he took the hits for it.’’

Four years later, Thompson took the hit for everyone. With a flip of his towel to assistant Mike Riley, Thompson walked across the (then) Capital Centre court, ducked through the tunnel and exited to a waiting sedan, leaving Georgetown’s game against Boston College before it tipped. Two nights later in Providence, the towel stood in for its owner, stretched across the head coach’s chair. A man often derided for saying too much spoke loudest when he said nothing at all. Thompson’s two-day protest of the NCAA’s proposed Prop 42 stopped the eligibility plan in its tracks, the NCAA abandoning would-be requirements that incoming freshmen have both a 2.0 GPA and a mandatory score on a standardized test to earn a scholarship.

Thompson criticized the proposal at its inception in 1989, arguing that standardized test scores skewed against minority students and the majority of athletes who would be denied eligibility would be Black. Others, including Temple’s John Chaney, expressed their anger and concerns but only Thompson walked off the court. Two days later, the NCAA agreed to delay implementation of the new rule and a year later passed an amended version.

The end came with an unexpected whimper, Thompson announcing his resignation midseason in 1999, citing an ongoing divorce and personal problems as the reason. By Thompson’s high standards, the program was on the decline, falling from an Elite Eight in 1996 to the NIT two seasons later and, in his last year, an 0-4 start in the Big East. He never really left, retaining an office inside McDonough Gym, and when his son, John Thompson III, took over the program, a seat in the back corner of the press conferences. Every once in a while “Pops” would pipe up with a comment.

Two years ago, Thompson walked the delicate balance of his son’s dismissal and his star player’s hiring, though plenty saw Ewing’s appointment as a sign that the patriarchal Thompson still controlled the program. Thompson admitted he reached out to Ewing, imploring him to throw his name in the hat for the job to “keep it in the family,’’ but he also insisted Ewing was “his own man.’’

Still, when Ewing showed up for his introductory press conference, he slung a towel across his shoulder.

(Top photo: Al Bello / Getty)