The phone rang on Monday morning, followed by an awkward silence. No, bye. Without words. Only moments of silence turn into a stifled gasp and, finally, into a heartbroken sob.
“You had to come from Maryland, DC and Prince George County to know what Coach Thompson meant to us,” Phoenix Suns manager Monty Williams finally said over the phone. “I played in his gym one summer and he insulted me because I wasn’t doing something right, and man, it was an honor. Patrick [Ewing] and Alonzo [Mourning] they were there playing the pickup, and for a moment I felt like a part of their family, because the coach didn’t talk to everyone that way.
“… He looked like my grandfather, and every time I saw him …”
The words melted into tears. Eventually, Williams found five that explained why Thompson meant so much to him – he meant so much to so many – and always will.
“He defended us.”
John Thompson, a Hall of Fame coach, a cultural icon, an unstoppable force, died on Sunday at 78. He made Georgetown basketball a phenomenon, and it remained until his retirement in 1996. Although Thompson had several opportunities, he never became an NBA manager, but influenced the league far beyond Ewing and Mourning and Allen Iverson. Its impact has resonated over the past few days, weeks and months, as the NBA has raised its voice to protest the inequality. The players came out in 2020, like Thompson came out one night in 1989.
There are dozens of basketball’s ancestors in this movement, but none greater than John Thompson. Few had been exposed to black coaches like Thompson, not because they didn’t exist, but because they didn’t have the opportunity to coach at the top of the sport.
Thompson was a former DC high school coach at a small Catholic college with regional aspirations – and he made Georgetown a national champion and cultural touchstone.
For a moment today, everyone should also reflect on the role Ewing has played in Thompson’s life and legacy. Her decision to attend Georgetown in 1981 changed everything. Ewing provided Thompson with the platform to reach the masses in a way that inspired, challenged, and forced all kinds of people to consider – and reconsider – how inequality was rooted in the fabric of the American experiment.
Now, Ewing is the coach of Georgetown, one of the most worthy heirs to a place that Thompson has made one of the most influential in the sport.
“I wouldn’t be here without John Thompson,” said Williams, a graduate of Notre Dame, on Monday morning. “He was a hero to us. We had our parents, Len Bias, and Len died. And then we had John Thompson.
“It was the first, along with Coach [John] Chaney, who got up and said, “This is wrong.” They felt offended when people tried to put them in a different class and gave me confidence in not putting up with things I knew were wrong.
“He taught the black kids to believe they were valuable, and the athletes among us knew he was talking about us too.”
Williams watched Georgetown games on black and white television in his childhood home, not far from the Capital Center in PG County, where the Hoyas trampled the Big East. Williams would have picked Georgetown, if only Thompson hadn’t picked one of his high school rivals over him.
“I wanted to go there so badly,” Williams said. “And that started a fire in me.”
Several years ago, Williams had completed a nine-year NBA playing career, handed over New Orleans to the playoffs as head coach, and found himself in Georgetown for a scouting assignment for the San Antonio Spurs. The old coach had been retired for some time, but he still sat on the pitch in a chair and watched his son, John Thompson III, lead Hoyas’ training.
“He hugged me, and he knew how I grew up, that I was a kid from his area, I had walked into the coach, and he told me things I knew he wasn’t telling everyone,” Williams said.
“It was like talking to a character from the Bible that I wanted to meet. In those parts, a lot of people called him Big John, but I never got around to doing that. I always called him Coach Thompson.
“I just knew I didn’t have his backbone, and I wish I had. He was like Moses to me.”
And now Monty Williams was crying again. Maybe John Thompson was never his coach, but that’s not exactly how he sees it. Monty Williams was another guy who came out of subway DC in the 1980s, another guy outside of America, whom Big John’s strength, will and genius changed forever. Looking back, Thompson should have offered that scholarship to Monty Williams for a guy who eventually moved on to James Madison, but maybe that rejection pushed Williams in a way that acceptance never could.
Whatever the reason, Monty Williams, who grew up with Hoya Paranoia in the shadow of the Cap Center, runs an NBA team just like Thompson did a college program: hard love, higher standards. And on Monday morning Williams cried until he repeated again: “I’ll only ever call him Coach Thompson.”
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