“BIG JOHN… BIG BAD JOHN” – Song lyric from my adolescence (that has escaped Google’s dragnet).
Former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson’s autobiographical account of his life and times I Came As A Shadow, written along with Jesse Washington, and completed just before Thompson’s death in 2020 at the age of 78 (2020), is a passionate, but sober paean to his parents’ teachings and love.
Disclosure: Like Thompson, I graduated college in1964, and thrilled to the spirit and energy that his Providence College teams brought to the then still hallowed National Invitation Tournament. For those Knick fans who don’t know they are rooting for the “Knickerbockers,” we’ll just call it the NIT [1].
Though Thompson was happy at Providence College, he had hoped to attend Georgetown, but the school he later coached for 27 years remained segregated. The basketball team did not have a single Black player until 1967. Thompson became their coach just five years later, beginning his career the first year that freshmen were eligible for varsity sports. He compiled a 596-239 record over 27 years, with a .714 winning percentage from 1972 to 1999.
Thompson was a giant of a man, a massive, thick-bodied 6’10,” intimidating to many, easily misunderstood, but dedicated to following, to wherever it would lead him, the path shown to him by his uneducated father’s mantra-like dictum: study the white man; understand his ways.
Every bit of Thompson’s success- as he tells it- is traceable to following that advice, as built upon by legendary Boston Celtic Coach Red Auerbach’s admonition to watch what a player does when he’s “away from the ball.” As an attentive listener whose size made him an obvious future pro prospect, Thompson had a privileged place in the hometown choir of Washington, D.C. [2], to which Red preached.
I Came As A Shadow follows this controversial Black human rights leader down a path that winds inexorably through a career and life that cuts through a wide swath of American history, while remaining enough of a just plain basketball book to keep the reader’s interest, all the while educating him, willy-nilly. The reader would do well to study John Thompson. Understand his ways. Wisdom may soon follow. All things in time.
Auerbach steered young John toward Providence College, so that (under the old territorial draft choice rule) he could draft him out of college. That’s what indeed happened, although John “played” only two years with the Celtics. As Bill Russell’s back up, there simply was no playing time available, because “Bill Russell never came out the damn game.”
Thompson had success, at all levels: championships in high school, at Providence College, with the Auerbach/Russell Boston Celtics for two years, an NCAA crown in 1984, the first ever for a Black coach, with Patrick Ewing as his center.
But Thompson measured his own success by being true to the value system instilled in him by loving parents who struggled to make ends meet, while John was growing up, but were by no means impoverished human beings. When John went off to Providence College, it was in an old Ford Galaxie that his parents somehow provided for him, probably–he believed–at the cost of great personal sacrifices. “I think about my father not having the opportunity to learn how to read and write. And I wonder how many nights he had to eat my leftovers for me to drive up to college in that car (p.47).” This brought tears to my eyes.
Thompson’s relationship with Auerbach was one of a short list of formative ones for John, along with his parents, an uncle identified with the Harlem Renaissance for whom Thompson named his tragically short-lived (just ten days) second son, and a grade school teacher who steadfastly assured him that he was not stupid after Thompson was branded “retarded” on the basis of the paucity of information he gave to an interviewer/tester’s command to tell him everyone that went on in his head. Young John deemed this impossible, as his mind roamed so far and wide while walking in the woods near his house that he believed he could never recount all that transpired in his mind; so he volunteered almost nothing! Hence the label “retarded,” with the consequence that he was forced to repeat sixth grade.
From the beginning, though, Thompson attracted mentors and teachers, and stayed open to them, always believing in himself, as he believed his parents believed in him. That many of his mentors and trusted associates were white men and women may come as a surprise to some, because of Thompson’s challenging, sometimes militant stances and demeanor, echoed in the intimidating style of his 80’s Georgetown teams, whose pressuring all-court defense once moved me to quip that I prefer watching muggings in the subway [3].
As his full-court pressing Georgetown Hoyas terrorized their opposition, many traditional basketball fans came to hate Thompson and brand him a racist. To the charge that he was “intimidating,” he countercharges that his critics are being racist. “All that stuff people said later about me being hung up on race, where do they think I learned to be racially conscious (p. 19)?”
Deliberately intimidating or not, Thompson always trafficked in size: playing back-up center for Bill Russell during his two playing-time free years in the NBA, and later serving as the coach of such physical giants and future NBA Greats as Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, and Dikembe Mutombo, in addition to the diminutive, but remarkably courageous Allen Iverson, who Thompson recruited from prison, thereby quite likely saving his life!
He says that he can’t help it if he’s 6’10, thick bodied, and black; he merely asserted himself and would not back down. Did he know that his size made him intimidating? Of course, he did. Can he be justifiably criticized for throwing his weight around, or for capitalizing on the fear that his all-Black Georgetown teams’ pressing defenses engendered in opponents and the abuse rained down upon them by the mostly white press? He knew exactly what he was doing, but considered himself at all times morally correct.
Thompson always thought of himself as an educator, more than as a coach. He reflects “I didn’t truly value education at Providence. I just wanted to play pro ball. When I got to Georgetown, I advocated for education much more than I had practiced it myself. I demanded more from my players than was demanded of me (p. 52).”
And at p.107: “All the things I built the program on provided the type of informal education that can be just as useful as a history or economics class. The principles of our program were part of my nature, based on how my parents raised me and what I had absorbed from people like Sametta Wallace Jackson (his reading teacher), Dr. Anita Hughes (who told John he was not retarded and set him on a path toward education), and Red Auerbach.”
We are here, as so often in this book, in the realm of morality. Thompson is indeed a moralist, in the word’s best–but frequently overlooked–sense of someone who sees lessons in small events: naming an honorary award to commemorate an iconic campus character “The Raymond Medley Award,” instead of using the recipient’s nickname of “Pebbles”; carrying his mother’s towel on his left shoulder; keeping a deflated basketball in his office to signify that there’s more to life than the eight pounds of air needed to inflate a basketball. But he was also a realist: “Sure, I wanted to help kids, but only the ones who could help me win games.” (p. 101).
Reading Thompson’s thoughtful takes on so many politically and socially important humanitarian issues moved me to reflect on the amazing cadre of seminally important Black leaders in sports and politics who were around Thompson’s size: giants both literally and metaphorically. Herein I include not only Bill Russell (“the first person I knew who called himself Black. Not colored. Not negro. Black.” (p. 65)) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but Dr. Harry Edwards (who once held the NCAA record for the discus throw, and had his Ph.D. in Sociology at age 24), along with Bob Lanier and Nate Thurmond, both of whom were community builders. Though white, Bill Walton deserves inclusion here, perhaps as a replacement for Wilt Chamberlain, who–like Michael Jordan after him–had other priorities.
I imagine a phalanx of these seven men marching forward, perhaps joined by Lebron James. Now that’s insurrection!
In more peaceful ways, Thompson was transformational, having been the first Black major college coach, as well as the first to win an NCAA championship. He was hired in 1972, toward the end of the reign of UCLA’s John Wooden, who was revered by both black and white players.
Wooden is barely mentioned in this book, though there are plenty of references to Dean Smith, Bobby Knight, Lefty Driesell, and rival Washington, D.C. high school coach Morgan Wooten. Wooden (John Wooden, not Morgan Wooten) would have been shocked by Thompson’s unabashed and frequent use of “motherfucker,” as well as his less frequent but not isolated use of “nigger,” both as self-description and to denote a class of people, his people growing up in Washington, D.C [4].
While disavowing racism, Thompson is comfortable talking about race. Meeting Michelle Obama, he tells her she wears her blackness well. This pleases her to hear. How she might have reacted to Thompson’s busting into the refs’ dressing room after a Black referee made a bad call that cost him the game, and calling him a “handkerchief-head nigger” is open to conjecture. John grants that he shouldn’t have done that, while at the same time needing to emphasize that the ref had made a “terrible call.”
Thompson states that he “felt a deep responsibility to use the coaching occupation to open up broader opportunities for Black people (p. 229).” Regarding his successful 1989 protest against an NCAA rule that would have denied scholarships to “student-athletes” who did not enter college with either a 2.0 GPA or a combined score of 700 on the SAT, he frames his actions as part of his mission as an educator. “A lot of people judged my Proposition 42 boycott as coming from a basketball coach, which led to a perception that I acted out of self-interest. Nobody considered that I had earned two degrees in education (at p. 228).” He is referring to his master’s degree, in addition to his bachelor’s.
Thompson immediately follows this assertion with his book’s fourth (they just keep on coming, until they reach a climax the eighth time) mantra, which finally becomes an epiphany: “I’ve always been haunted by my past.” He invokes this shadow to explain that he always felt a “deep responsibility to use the coaching occupation to open up broader opportunities for Black people.” But only those who could help him win games!
That said, when, in the closing seconds of the 1982 NCAA Final, Georgetown’s Fred Brown had a mental lapse, leading him- down a single point- to throw a pass right to an opponent (North Carolina’s James Worthy), thereby foreclosing Georgetown’s chance to become national champions, Thompson’s post-game response was to hug Brown tightly.
His sense of the past unifies Thompson’s key themes: pride, dignity, and, that’s right, motherfucker: self-expression. Big John expresses a Big Self. Larger than life, the size he had to have to carry that much pride in a dignified manner, all the while genuflecting to the memory of his mother–a college educated woman who had to clean white people’s houses–by carrying her towel on his left shoulder.
He debunks the idea of equality as being for the timid. Having been told by a white Georgetown Philosophy professor, Father Heath, that people don’t willingly give up their privilege, he decided that he needed to be better, not just equal. This resolve, built upon the paradox that only in triumph can true equality be asserted and affirmed, goes to the root of Thompson’s essence: large, powerful, deeply passionate about his convictions; exquisitely sensitive, but militantly unsentimental.
When Thompson left Georgetown, after 27 seasons, his son John Thompson II succeeded him, and indeed succeeded too, though not quite as dramatically: after an early career Final Four appearance, John II never got back to that level, and was let go the year after Georgetown renamed their McDonough Gymnasium “The John Thompson Center.” His successor was Patrick Ewing! Who else?
This was near the end of Coach’s long marriage to Gwen Twitty, of whom he at all times speaks respectfully, acknowledging their relationship suffered from his intense preoccupation with his coaching mission. He is never contentious, and frequently appreciative.
About his post-coaching career as broadcaster [5] doing color commentary, Thompson states (p. 298) “They found out I didn’t hate white people. I enjoyed blowing up a lot of the assumptions people had about me.” Among his white friends and associates were Nike impresarios Phil Knight, Sonny Vaccaro, as well as North Carolina Coach Dean Smith, whom he considered a mentor.
I used to love listening to Big John do radio games for the NCAA Tournament. There was an accent he affected that made me think of Wilt Chamberlain explaining why Magic Johnson was the best point guard of all-time (Wilt’s way of dissing Oscar in the internecine GOAT wars of the 1960’s): “Magic was six nahn,” Wilt used to intone, as if to encapsulate all moves leading to checkmate in that lilting pronunciation of “nine.”
Amidst Thompson’s impressive litany of achievements and accomplishments, there were also setbacks, tragedies, misfortunes: his second son, named Lewis Grandison Alexander Thompson (after his uncle, his mother’s bohemian intellectual older brother, a poet who was part of the Harlem Renaissance, and thus offered young John a different kind of role model) died after just ten days, of a previously undetected heart problem. This is part of Thompson’s past that always haunted him.
The book’s title comes from a poem written by his uncle, his mother’s older brother.
I came as a shadow,
I stand now a light;
The depth of my darkness
Transfigures your night,
My soul is a nocturne
Each note is a star.
The light will not blind you
So look where you are.
The radiance is soothing
There’s warmth in the light.
I came as a shadow
To dazzle your night!
When he quotes the poem, early in the book, Thompson tells us that he always identified with that shadow. Only at the end of the book, though, do we grasp the full significance of the deep symbolism with which Thompson imbued his life. He WAS that shadow, deep and dark, transfiguring Georgetown’s night. He sees Georgetown’s hiring of him as part of its effort to heal itself.
This reader was stunned into appreciating the full significance of Thompson’s trip. He began his life as one of countless Blacks who were ipso facto unwelcome at Georgetown and ended up becoming the triumphant Coach whose classroom was a 94×52 foot space, plus outside surround that was theoretically “out of bounds.”
Thompson made plenty of enemies along the way. It cannot be gainsaid that he carried a chip around on his shoulder, the size of a boulder. But that’s only a metaphor: the more germane symbolic object on his (left) shoulder was his mother’s towel.
As for that boulder, like Sisyphus, Thompson had to keep on pushing it up there every damn time it rolled back down. Sisyphus, though, Camus assures us, died happy. We don’t know about Thompson’s last days. If they were spent pushing it up there again after it came back down, well, Thompson could rebound with Sisyphus as good as anybody. Insistence plus humility enables a man to keep climbing, carrying his burden with grace.
Thompson’s greatness lay somewhere in the Bermuda triangle formed by respect, dignity, and power. He was as deep as he was big and wide. Damned Intersectional, you could say.
Dignity is what he tried to impart to the memory of “Pebbles” with The Raymond Medley Award for Citizenship. This brought tears to my eyes. Yes, I’ve said that before: Thompson’s combination of depth, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity were that touching to me. The Game and its rich history inspires so many metaphors!
His book demonstrates that Thompson belongs in the vanguard of that phalanx of righteous giants, right next to that motherfucker who kept him on the bench in Boston. From above, Red Auerbach watches approvingly. John Thompson is away from the ball.
FOOTNOTES
1 With Thompson in a starring role, The Providence College Friars were 1963 NIT champions, which Thompson misleadingly states was the equivalent of winning a national championship. True enough that the NIT remained a viable choice for “independents,” the waste-basket category that included many of the schools who later became part of the Big East, when it was formed in 1979, and grew in tandem with ESPN.
The party was down-sized considerably, however, after Al McGuire turned down a 1967 NCAA bid in favor of gracing the NIT, but a little known guard who had great all-court presence, but was just beginning to perfect his jump shot spoiled McGuire’s party. What Al McGuire lost, Walt Frazier gained. (The Columbia band could have played “Who Owns New York?” for either of them; or both.) The NCAA countered with a rule that teams invited to The Big Dance had no choice but to accept. Al had good reason to prefer the NIT: he knew that UCLA (with Lew Alcindor) was too dominant, and he preferred twelve days in New York City to some meaningless odyssey which was bound to end unhappily.
McGuire never got his NIT title, but had the last laugh–as always he did–when he won the big one (the NCAA title in 1977, only the second year of John Wooden’s retirement, right after Bobby Knight’s 32-0 Indiana team) ten years after being required to leave home, and retired to the broadcast booth–where he was even better! His coaching career overlapped Thompson’s by just five years.
2 “What I mostly recall is Red explaining a world I could not yet see,” (p. 41). Later, Thompson quotes Red: “Some people say John is a hostile man. He’s a very caring man. He acts the way he does because he does not want people getting too close. He learned that from me and Russell. Be in control. Put other people on the defensive.” (p. 70).
3 Thompson’s only coaching failure was with the 1988 U.S. Olympic team, in the last Olympics before the U.S. began using professionals in the Olympics in Seoul, Korea. Thompson’s Georgetown style of ball did not work with international rules. He failed to choose a diverse team, and wound up only one white player, and, coincidentally or not, only one shooter. He had cut Steve Kerr, among other outside threats, in favor of speed, leading me (in a 1988 piece published in WELCOMAT, to dub his team “Dan Majerle and the Seoul Brothers,” and to quip that “Thompson seemed to think he could win with twelve players named Charles Smith.”
4 Thompson devotes considerable time to his friendship with Smith, who taught John that 70% of basketball is what happens off the court; that is, 70% of basketball is not really about basketball. It was Smith that he faced in his first NCAA Finals game in 1982. Smith is one of many white colleagues that Thompson talks about with fondness and respect, even admiration. He admired and respected Bobby Knight, despite Knight’s tantrums and rages. Whereas John Wooden is only mentioned in passing, and neutrally at best. Great coach? Maybe, but not every motherfucker spoke John’s language.
5 Thompson’s life had almost ended shortly after he retired, as he had originally been booked on the September 11, 2000 flight that was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon. He learned this from a phone call from long-time assistant Mary Fenlon, who called to tell him that was the flight he had originally been scheduled to take from Washington to Los Angeles for a speaking engagement. Reluctantly, he had agreed to change the reservation.
It is Ms. Fenlon to whom Thompson dedicates his book. He states: “To whatever extent I helped women get ahead, I’m as proud of that as I am of what I may have done for Black people.”