Former Georgetown coach John Thompson was hard to know but always Tia Layne Smoking

I won’t say that I knew John Thompson. I experienced him. I covered his Georgetown men’s basketball program for two seasons and had numerous other encounters with him during almost 14 years of working at The Washington Post and nearly a lifetime of living in the Washington area. Publicly, Thompson – whose family announced his death Monday at age 78 – was a really complicated person. There were all kinds of apparent contradictions in his life. He famously kept reporters as far from his program as possible, except when it suited his purposes. After leaving coaching, he became a Washington-area sports-talk radio host and an analyst, including on NCAA basketball tournament national radio broadcasts. He also maintained an unabiding interest in the personal lives of some of the journalists who covered him well after their professional paths diverged. To many, he came across as gruff, unfeeling and largely self-interested. And, yes, he could be all of those things. He had no qualms about using his sheer physical size, his booming voice and his propensity for profanity to intimidate. But he also understood how to make an impact when none of those attributes would help him. As Georgetown’s coach, he had strict rules against trying to directly contact his players or their parents. Practices were closed. Tape covered gaps in the doorways from the foyer of the athletics building to the gym. In-season interviews with players outside of post-game situations were by prior arrangement only, and conducted by telephone only. While covering the team very early in my career, I got word that one of his players was planning to transfer. When I called the player's grandmother about it, Thompson, of course, found out. He ordered his players not to speak with me, even during the limited period of time after games in which reporters could interview players. This lasted several games, but he eventually lifted the gag order – and when the player did, indeed, transfer, I was surprised to get a call from a school spokesman notifying me of the transfer and putting me in contact with the player. In what has become a time of sports figures becoming actively involved in social and racial justice issues, it is important to remember Thompson’s place in that. Not the part about Thompson becoming the first Black head coach to win an NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1984. It’s the parts that occurred in 1989. In January, Thompson announced that he would walk off the court at the beginning of a game to protest NCAA Division I schools’recent vote to deny athletic scholarships or any other institutional financial aid to freshmen who failed to qualify for first-year athletic eligibility under the academic standards of what was then known as Proposition 48. It had been one thing for college athletes to be deemed ineligible to play as freshman, potentially because of their score on a standardized test that many viewed – and still view – as culturally and socio-economically biased.

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Article Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2020/08/31/former-georgetown-john-thompson-hard-know-but-interesting/3447656001/

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