RIP John Thompson (Big John)

Pearl Washington was a turnover machine.

My favorite Syracuse team ever was the Erich Santifer-Leo Rautins-Tony Bruin-Gene Waldron group. Followed close by the Roosevelt Bouie-Louis Orr era.

 

Don't be talkin' shit about Pearl.

 

I was kind of uncomfortable with the basketball team being virtually the only black students on campus. I'm from suburban D.C., and Thompson is said to have uttered some pretty amazing things about white players during his coaching days, on the rubber chicken circuit. I wasn't there, so I won't repeat them. It's amazing how Patrick Ewing has come out of his shell as the Hoyas' coach, of course lending to his NBA playing and coaching career.

 

Which emphasizes again what Joe Paterno could and should have done as soon as he found out somebody was implicating his program in sexual abuse.

If Joe Paterno had given the word, Jerry Sandusky would have been dropped feet first into Lake Erie.

 

And don’t kid yourself, Rayful Edmonds, murderer and drug king pin, got as much great press and street cred Out of the encounter as Thompson did. It was a win-win situation for both of them

 

Very cool stories on this thread.

I've always thought basketball was the one major sport where small private schools have equal footing with large state universities, mainly because you really only need a coach with a successful system, a couple of stars and a decent supporting cast (thinking Loyola Marymount, for example) to take a program to the next level.

There was Ray Meyer at DePaul. USF with Bill Cartwright. UNC Charlotte. Marquette. Jacksonville with Artis Gilmore. LSU with Maravich. But for the most part, every conference had that one basketball school that was perpetually excellent: UCLA, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina and Kansas, just off the top of my head.

But as California kids, we all watched David Thompson, Len Elmore and Phil Ford, and rooted for our favorite ACC teams in the 1970s, even though we had no idea where Chapel Hill or Raleigh were. None of us liked Bobby Knight and his undefeated Hoosiers, but we loved Magic vs. Bird. Same with the Big East in the 1980s.

It takes a unique individual to get the absolute best out of his team as a coach. He has to be a combination of teacher, guardian and security guard. He has to instill a sense of confidence without complacency, while manufacturing an "us vs. them" mentality, whether real or imagined. You don't have to be a jerk but it seems to be part and parcel of the job in most cases.

I think of the way Herb Brooks prepared the 1980 US hockey team as a parallel to how John Thompson ran his teams at Georgetown. They both kept their players out of the media spotlight and focused on the process. But Brooks only had to beat the Soviets once.

RIP, Coach.

 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, i have Georgetown people in my family: my mother went to Visitation for three years (HS and junior college), my uncle and cousin both got BAs and grad degrees there, my mom went to Vizzy reunions her whole life. The whitest of all white bread Catholic schools in one of America's blackest cities.
Before Thompson, GT hoops was based mostly on products of Catholic high schools and prep schools in the DelMarVa region, mostly white "suburban style" jump shooters. (They usually sucked, to the point that GU was teetering on the edge of just bailing on D-1 competition.)
John Thompson wasn't going to roll like that. He was going to recruit the roughest and toughest of inner city players from the east coast. He wasn't interested in suburban jump shooters.
Needless to say this didn't always sit well with the old guard alumni who were the parents of those kids -- until he started to win big.
Thompson may have overdone that whole concept; he pretty much refused to even try to recruit any of those guys as role players, or even to allow any of those white-boy Catholic prep schoolers even to walk on, when having three or four white guys on the end of the bench might have helped his popularity with the old alums.
But JT was a product of the years when there were rigid quotas for Black players on college and NBA rosters. In Thompson's playing days Black players pretty much had to be stars or starters-- the Celtics were one of the first to keep Black players (like JT) as backups.
So Thompson probably figured, he wasn't going to keep players who didn't fit into his overall plan as "white tokens" on the end of his roster. He was going to sink or swim doing it his way.
He won big, so it worked. If he hadn't won, it could have all fallen apart in a big way.

 

I never subscribed to a coach accounting for race as determining who starters were. If you can ball, it doesn't matter. Duke had at least one honky baller during most of Coach K's good years. Nolan Richardson started five white players a few times at Arkansas in his early years before they won a natty. And John Thompson, to his credit, had a few pasty fellas on his roster, including Brendan (Long) Gaughan.

 

Man, that guy has gotten more mileage (literally) out of his "Georgetown experience" than anyone with his piddling NASCAR talent deserves. Nice kid. But please.

 

I don't think JT explicitly made roster or playing time decisions strictly based on race, but he wanted specific types of players in his program, and most of them happened to be Black.

 

It helps when your dad runs a casino and can fund your hobby.

 

Or co-owns a chain of chicken fast food restaurants, like John Wrecks Weekly. I know IndyCar's Howdy Holmes was heir to the Jiffy Mix baking company in Michigan.