A mind-boggling story just out about one of Washington, D.C.’s most notorious drug kingpins brings to mind one of the finest hours of former Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson, Jr.
It also shows how, in the right hands, athletic leaders can be powerful forces for good.
Here’s how this afternoon’s new story begins:
Well, Edmond may have been a violent crack kingpin, but one man didn’t fear him. Thompson, the legendary, national-championship-winning coach noted for a rough style and an insistence that his players actually study and graduate, was surely the most respected man on the streets of the nation’s capital throughout the 1980s. Some of us were sure that if he ran for mayor, he could win without even campaigning.
Edmond, himself a good basketball player, grew up as friends with John Turner, a Hoya role player. Thompson heard Edmond had been seen hanging around with Turner and Hoya superstar Alonzo Mourning. There was and is no evidence either player was involved with drugs; indeed, Mourning remains to this day a man almost universally admired for both grit and character. But Thompson wanted to take no chances.
Thompson sent word to the streets: I want Rayful Edmond in my office. Rayful Edmond complied. Think of what would have happened if, say, Knute Rockne had summoned Al Capone to a meeting. Capone would have sent word back: “You want me to come to you? No, you come to me. Capisce?”
But Edmond dutifully showed up at Thompson’s office — and Thompson told him, in no uncertain terms, to leave his kids alone.
And Edmond did. He was never seen in the company of a Hoya player ever again. As Andrew Sharp wrote for SB Nation, Thompson “single-handedly scared the shit out of one of the most infamous drug dealers in U.S. history.”
Lord knows, John Thompson has flaws. He can be one of the most ornery people you’ll ever meet, and for no particular reason. He inculcated a sort of paranoia in his players that was neither necessary nor constructive.
But Thompson’s principles were right. There was the time he was at a conference and people were spouting some sort of economically liberal, anti-competitive claptrap — and Thompson interrupted to say, “What the hell, am I the only capitalist in this room?” Most famously, there was his well-known pride in making sure his players actually received an education while at Georgetown. If they were not on the road for a game, they attended class. Every time. If they didn’t transfer away, they graduated, at an astonishing rate of 97 percent.
Thompson was famous for keeping on his desk a deflated basketball. The point: to remind his players that most of them would never make a living from the game, so if they didn’t get an education, they would end up flat and useless as that ball. This was a man who taught good life lessons.
Maybe even Rayful Edmond learned something from Thompson. Maybe that’s why he became such a model prisoner. Who knows? What is known is that the big coach stared him down, with the sheer weight of moral authority. It’s a great story that never should be forgotten.
