From the front row of the Seattle Kingdome on April 2, 1984, Georgetown students felt like we too were being hugged by John Thompson Jr.
First, the huge coach hugged Fred Brown, the hug that brought a great story full circle. Then he hugged star center Patrick Ewing, a hug of unmitigated joy between two people who will be legends as long as basketball is played. The Georgetown Hoyas were national champions at the apex of college basketball’s mid-1980s popularity, and they did it as one of the most controversial teams in history.
Thompson, who died overnight at age 78, was one of the most admirable but most divisive figures in the sport. He was the first black man ever to coach the NCAA champions, but he hated that distinction because he said it implied no other black men before him had been good enough. Every player on his team at the time was black, but that was by happenstance (transfers due to family tragedy), not design. His team played with sharp elbows and chips on their shoulders, along with an attitude Sports Illustrated dubbed “Hoya Paranoia,” but as individuals they were trained to be some of the most gracious of men.
Thompson was known for taking risks on kids who had academic or at times behavioral problems, but nobody in basketball stressed academics more intensely than Thompson did. If his players were not on the road for a game, they attended every single class, without fail. If they didn’t, they were punished. If they repeatedly failed to, they were off the team. But if they stayed four years, then (with only two early exceptions), they graduated. Every single one.
And, as recounted in these pages before, Thompson had the courage and stature to stand up to one of the most dangerous drug lords in Washington, D.C., with one writer saying Thompson “single-handedly scared the s— out of one of the most infamous drug dealers in U.S. history.” The drug lord, Rayful Edmond, never bothered Thompson’s players again, and he turned his life around in prison, becoming a model prisoner who provided great help for years to federal prosecutors.
The internet and news pages will be full of all of these stories and more. Thompson deservedly was treated as not just a great basketball coach, but a cultural icon.
Still, it’s hard for those obituaries to capture what it was like to be a Hoya in the Thompson-Ewing era. The racist sentiments directed at the team were palpable and horrific. The ignorant assumptions of too many outsiders — those not in the classroom with these players, seeing them attend, participate, and study, much less interviewing them for news articles during which some of them casually dropped Shakespeare references — were that Thompson’s program was a basketball mill rather than an educational enterprise.
And although Thompson was gruff to outsiders and the media, definitely including student reporters, and reportedly super-hard on his players, every single person on campus knew how much Thompson loved his players with a deep devotion. As Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick and CBS’s Brent Musberger railed against Hoya Paranoia, we fellow student Hoyas embraced the team with the intensity, even if only of empathetic extension, of fellows in a foxhole.
That’s why, even more than for the outside world in which Thompson’s hugs became famous images, those full-player embraces were deep-heart massages for us.
The first iconic hug had come in 1982, when then-sophomore star Fred Brown threw a pass not to a Hoya teammate but to a North Carolina Tar Heel at the key moment in one of the best-played title games in history, costing Georgetown a chance for the championship. Rather than berate Brown, Thompson famously hugged him.
Brown then tore up his knee, came back severely diminished in speed and with a knee brace, and played a key if limited role in the 1984 championship redemption. So, when Thompson called time out with the game in hand so he could remove Brown and give him a triumphal hug instead of one of condolence, we fellow students who had lived vicariously through the rehabilitation process could imagine we felt it, too. And as Thompson then hugged his star Ewing, whose smile at the time could light a city, what we knew was evident was the truth that Thompson’s program was built on tough love, not on some sort of racial anger.
Thompson was a complicated man, but one of deep principle. I loved the time he berated NCAA functionaries by proudly asking if he was the “only capitalist in the room.” I loved the way he remained a mentor to some of his players, even bench-riders, for years after they left his program. I loved the way he stayed loyal to Georgetown University for more than two decades after he retired from coaching, and the way he set an example for all of us, players and students alike, of how to live with fiercely independent integrity.
Thanks for everything, Coach. We loved you, too.
Quin Hillyer shared sports editor duties for the Georgetown Hoya student newspaper the year Georgetown won the national championship.
