There’s a direct through line from the life and legacy of John Thompson and the legacy the NBA players are trying to create in the NBA bubble with their words and actions.
This week has been an unrelenting assault on living Black superheroes. Chadwick Boseman passed after using films like Black Panther and 42 to help reimagine the strength and ingenuity of Black people. Terri Embry, the wife of Wayne Embry and a civil rights activist in her own right also passed on.
And now, Coach Thompson, who died at the age of 78 Sunday.
He left Georgetown as the program leader in wins (596), NCAA tournament appearances (20), Final Fours, (3) and won the only NCAA National Championship in program history in 1984, becoming the first African-American head coach to do so at the same time.
Additionally, he also won two NBA titles as a player with the Boston Celtics.
But though he was the first Black head coach to win an NCAA championship he didn’t like the distinction and would push back at the assertion he was the first to be qualified to do so, instead underscoring the point he was just the first to be given the opportunity.
Not only an influential coach, it’s important to note he was a great coach. His winning percentage at Georgetown was .714 and during the 1980s nobody won more NCAA tournament games than the 25 victories he racked up.
His most impressive stat, however, is that 97 per cent of his four-year players graduated with degrees.
He coached for 27 years at Georgetown but the lessons he imparted are eternal.
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Thompson deeply valued education. Because of an undiagnosed vision problem, he was considered an academic risk as a child but thanks to basketball he gained a scholarship and went to Providence and then eventually got his master’s from Columbia.
He had a deflated basketball in his office to underscore the point to his players that you need to have a plan for your life when the air goes out of the basketball and you can’t play anymore.
Thompson coached Hall-of-Famers Alonzo Mourning, Patrick Ewing, Dikembe Mutombo and Allen Iverson during their time at Georgetown but he didn’t just shepherd their careers he guided their lives.
When a few Georgetown players, including Mourning, befriended dangerous drug lord Rayful Edmond in the 1980s, Thompson brought Edmond into his office and excoriated him, warning him to stay away from his players. Edmond listened and obliged.
In Iverson’s Hall-of-Fame speech he credited Thompson for saving his life.
“I want to thank Coach Thompson for saving my life” said Iverson. “I was recruited by every school in the country for football and basketball and the incident happened in high school and all that was taken away. No other teams, no other schools were recruiting me anymore. My mom went to Georgetown and begged him to give me a chance and he did.”
What Thompson stood for was important. He was the first Black coach I remember witnessing.
He was such a legendary figure in the Black community that people looked at Georgetown as if it was a Historically Black College.
But Georgetown, in actuality, was far from it. He had his players wearing Kente cloth and reading Black literature on land that enslaved and sold Black slaves in order to cancel school debt.
Because of it a Black status symbol was a Hoya Starter jacket and hat. Before the UNLV Runin’ Rebels or the Michigan Fab 5, Hoya Paranoia was the NCAA program of choice to represent Black culture.
What was best for Black people stayed on the forefront of his mind.
In 1989, Thompson protested a new academic eligibility rule, denying them of scholarships. Many at the time felt it was something that would disproportionally affect African-American athletes and was a racist policy, but few had the power to try and change it like Thompson.
He famously protested Propositions 48 and 42 standing up for systemic injustice and inequality.
Proposition 48 stated that athletes with less than a 2.0 grade-point average and 700 SAT score would be ineligible for a year. Three years after, a more strict rule was passed based on Proposition 42, which said athletes falling short of those standards could not be admitted at all on athletic grants-in-aid.
It wasn’t lost on Thompson that these rules came in to play only when the sport started to become widely desegregated in power conferences.
Thompson entered the court for Georgetown’s Jan. 14, 1989 game against Boston College and left before tip-off.
He refused to return until he was “satisfied that something [had] been done to provide these student-athletes with appropriate opportunity and hope for access to a college,” Thompson said.
He missed one more game after that. The rule was rescinded at the next NCAA convention.
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In the 1980s he threatened to take his team off the floor many times when there were racists chants and signs about his players.
So when thinking of the the NBA players that took a stand last week it’s important to remember that they weren’t just following in the footsteps of individuals like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Craig Hodges and Bill Russell.
The wild-card strike by the NBA, WNBA, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the professional tennis circuit, had its roots in Thompson’s fingerprints all over it.
He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama and was the Chuck D of the hardwood. Wise enough to lead with diplomacy but brave enough to fight the power when necessary.
Thompson was one of the giants of collegiate sports, basketball and the Black-empowerment movement. Although he has now been laid to rest, so many modern-day influencers stand on the shoulders of a giant whose reach and impact was far greater than his time on earth.
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