THOMPSON, John Robert, Jr.

(b. 2 September 1941 in Washington, D.C.), college basketball coach noted for being the first African-American coach whose team won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men's basketball championship.

Thompson is the youngest of four children of John Robert Thompson, Sr., a tile-factory worker, and Anna L. Thompson, a teacher, domestic worker, and practical nurse. After struggling scholastically in elementary school because of poor eyesight, he did better in junior high, where he was also exposed to organized basketball. Growing quickly toward his eventual height of six feet, ten inches, he was recruited by Archbishop John Carroll High School to play basketball with several other fine players. In their three varsity years, the Lions won 103 games and lost only eight. They won their last fifty-five games and captured three league titles and two city championships. Scholastic magazine named Thompson a high school All-American in his senior year, and he graduated in 1960, forty-eighth in a class of nearly three hundred.

During his junior season, Thompson met Father Thomas Aquinas Collins, a Dominican priest, basketball fan, and graduate of Providence College in Rhode Island. Collins arranged a campus visit, and Thompson decided to attend Providence. His freshman team had a record of 30–2, and he averaged 32 points a game. In his three varsity seasons, Providence went to the National Invitation Tournament twice and the NCAA tournament once. He graduated with a degree in economics and was picked by the Boston Celtics in the third round of the 1964 National Basketball Association (NBA) draft.

Thompson's professional career lasted only two seasons. Between them, in June 1965, he married his high school sweetheart, Gwendolyn Twitty. They had four children together, including John III, who became the head basketball coach at Princeton University, but divorced in 1999. For the Celtics, Thompson played center behind Bill Russell, saw limited playing time, and was bothered by injuries. Still, he became close friends with Russell and Arnold "Red" Auerbach, his coach and general manager. They showed him basketball at its highest level, taught him the importance of defense and a strong bench, and cautioned him to develop mental toughness and be wary of the media. Despite his selection by the Chicago Bulls in the NBA's 1966 expansion draft, he decided to retire as a player.

Instead, Thompson started working for an antipoverty program in Washington and taking graduate courses in guidance and counseling at Federal City College, later the University of the District of Columbia, earning an M.A. in 1971. He also began coaching at Saint Anthony's, a small high school with a mediocre basketball program. Over six seasons, he compiled a record of 128–22 while developing a style that stressed recruiting fast, rugged players, passing the ball to the big men on offense, and playing relentless defense. Moreover, he monitored his players' academic progress closely and insisted that they strive to get good grades.

In 1972 Georgetown University hired Thompson to reverse the fortunes of its basketball team, the Hoyas, that had finished 3–23 the previous season, and also to help the Jesuit school come to terms with the social changes of the 1960s. His first move was to hire Mary Fenlon, a Saint Anthony's teacher, to fill a new position, academic coordinator and administrative assistant. He also secured a promise from the admissions office to evaluate his intended recruits based not just on their test scores and grades but also on whether they possessed a reasonable chance to graduate.

Thompson's first team improved to 12–14, and his second bettered that by one game. In the 1974–1975 and 1975–1976 seasons, the Hoyas won the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference championship and earned berths in the NCAA tournament. He served as assistant coach to his friend, Dean Smith, for the 1976 U.S. Olympic team that won a gold medal in Montreal. In 1980 Georgetown, representing the new Big East Conference, nearly made the Final Four, losing the Eastern Regional final to Iowa 81–80.

The following season marked the start of the Ewing era, named for center Patrick Ewing, Thompson's best recruit. In Ewing's freshman year, 1981–1982, the Hoyas advanced to the NCAA's final game, only to be defeated by Smith's North Carolina team, led by another outstanding freshman, Michael Jordan. After a disappointing season, the Hoyas rebounded in the 1983–1984 season to win their school's first national championship, beating the University of Houston 84–75 in the title game. In Ewing's senior year, Georgetown came close to repeating, losing to underdog Villanova by two points.

As his teams got better, Thompson became a national celebrity, and Georgetown was transformed from a nearly all-white bastion of Jesuit intellectualism to a multicultural university well known for its basketball team, composed mostly of African Americans. With his trademark, a folded, white towel draped over the shoulder of his suit, he evinced a distinctive coaching style that served as grist for many a journalist's mill. Thompson's teams played aggressive basketball that several times led to confrontations with the opposition. Moreover, he shielded his players from the press, staying at out-of-the-way hotels and refusing to let his freshmen submit to interviews. Openly slow to trust others, he nevertheless resented the phrase attached to his manner, "Hoya Paranoia." In 1988 he was sharply criticized when the Olympic team he coached won only a bronze medal.

A physically imposing man quite willing to offer his opinions, Thompson battled racism forthrightly, particularly when it was directed at Ewing and other prominent players, and he fought against charges that he was a racist himself. In 1989 he objected to Proposition 42, an NCAA regulation that denied financial aid to athletes whose high school grades and scores on standardized college entrance exams were below certain thresholds. Thompson called the regulation racially biased, and he boycotted two games to make his protest visible. Despite an intimidating manner that drove some players away from Georgetown and led to several difficult personal relationships, both with players who left and some who stayed, he maintained the primacy of education, keeping a deflated basketball in his office as a symbol of what his players would possess after their careers if they did not graduate.

On 8 January 1999 Thompson resigned as coach for personal reasons associated with his impending divorce. Subsequently, he hosted a radio talk show and did television analysis for professional basketball. His record at Georgetown, 596–239, included several coach-of-the-year awards, induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and a 97-percent graduation rate for those players who remained in school for four years.

The only biography of Thompson is Leonard Shapiro, Big Man on Campus: John Thompson and the Georgetown Hoyas (1991). Among the many newspaper and magazine stories on Thompson during his career, notable is William Gildea, "Georgetown's Thompson Resigns," Washington Post (9 Jan. 1999).

Steven P. Gietschierm