'Pops Don't Run No Democracy'

9/1/2020

In a rare light moment, John Thompson displays an extra-large version of Looie Carnesecca's gamer sweater. Their teams battled, but Looie and Big John seemed to like each other.

The above quotation came from Ronny Thompson, a Georgetown basketball player back in the day, describing the leadership style of his coach, that is to say, his father.

John Thompson, Jr., the long-time basketball coach at Georgetown University, died Sunday night at 78.

He did things his way, defying any definition imposed by others. If you praised some aspect of his leadership or coaching, he bristled, blustered, maybe even dropped an epithet.

I got a first-hand view of his bombast in 1984, days before Georgetown won the national Division I basketball championship.

I had called the president of Georgetown, Father Tim Healy, to assess the impact of Thompson on his players, almost all of whom were Black.

''This is a man from the Washington area who is taking kids who don't have two coins to rub together and is literally teaching some of them how to use a knife and fork,” Father Healy said in my column before the Final Four.
“He knows just what he's doing, “ Father Healy continued. “And we at Georgetown support him in what he's doing.''

At the press conference before the Final Four in Seattle, Big John went off, loud and clear.

I distinctly remember him denying that he ever taught anybody to eat properly and I distinctly remember him saying: “I ain’t no Jesus Christ.”
He did not mention Fr. Healy or The New York Times (or me) but it was clear he had read the column and was not amused.

John Thompson surely had a powerful role in the lives of many of his players. Of the players who stayed with the program, the graduation rate was said to be 97 percent.
Some left early, to be sure, but while they were there, they all had to play relentlessly, without any frills to their game. Thompson once said a certain player would be all right as soon as he dropped “the old Boogaloo” from his game – meaning, fancy moves, fancy passes. He expected people to know what he meant by “the old Boogaloo.” No definitions.

In Thompson’s time, Georgetown had an academic advisor, Mary Fenlon, a former nun, on the bench. Fenlon, who passed in late 2019, was said to be witty and sociable, but in public she was as inscrutable as Thompson.

His model player was Ronnie Highsmith, an Army vet who was four years older than the stars and would lend physicality on the court and discipline off the court.

The players succeeded, under Thompson's model of discipline and education.

As it happens, I am currently catching up with the biography, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” by David W. Blight, published in 2018. (I believe that I went through grade school through college without ever hearing a mention of Douglass.)

The book tells how Douglass, the escaped slave, educated himself to become a writer and speechmaker and caustic critic of Abraham Lincoln when he saw fit. His larger-than-life persona pushed America toward the Emancipation Proclamation.

America has gained from black critics and activists. Early in my career, I ran into powerful figures like Harry Edwards, the academic, and Jim Brown, the football player, and Bill Russell, the basketball winner (for whom Thompson was an understudy for two years.)

Nowadays, athletes like LeBron James and Maya Moore and Renee Montgomery are setting a tone, just as John Thompson did once as a protest. My friend and colleague, Harvey Araton, AKA The Rebbe of Roundball, has a knowing column on Thompson, the activist, in the Tuesday NY Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/sports/ncaabasketball/john-thompson-georgetown-ewing.html?searchResultPosition=2

Like Frederick Douglass, John Thompson did not talk about his feelings, his inner reactions. He had a posture and he stuck to it.
Ronny Thompson’s evaluation of his father was perfect.
* * *
My column quoting Father Healy:
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/26/sports/john-thompson-s-wall.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/19/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-coaches-get-some-sympathy.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/11/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-rookie-has-earned-his-minutes.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/sports/ncaabasketball/john-thompson-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

Gene Palumbo

9/1/2020 02:05:15 pm

George,
Thanks for the links. Read, and liked, all three columns. Favorite line: "One assist was an alley-oop to Jerome Williams, decidedly straight from Boogaloo."

George

9/1/2020 02:23:27 pm

Gene: as the saying goes, don’t they know, you can’t kill rock n roll? GV

ED MARTIN

9/2/2020 11:14:11 am

In the 80s and 90s I followed St. John’s with a Dodger-like passion and admired Louie. With no publicity he made sure his players had post graduation jobs, sometimes in the lesser European leagues if they were not NBA caliber, mostly from friends around NYC who had hiring potential.

I saw that sweater and thought John Thompson was a comic genius for wearing that replica. Like you, I never felt any hostility for JT, just rivalry, and I never had negative feelings for him. That began when we were in DC before NY, and Maryland was the basketball superteam, with a seeming redneck as coach. John and Georgetown moved him over and became a hero to me.

The most amazing sports moment was when three Big East teams went to the NCAA Final Four. St. John’s, Georgetown and Villanove. You know Big John’s team won.

PS, hi to Alan, poetry, today. Who thought a Lehigh grad, could write?

Alan Rubin link

9/3/2020 10:16:21 am

Ed-

Your return would not be complete without a knock on Lehigh, a rare sign of normalcy during the pandemic.

I use a ghost writer since I worked with numbers and a slide rule at Lehigh.

Actually, I've just begun outlining a book on soccer goalkeeping. It is about lessons learned and not how to play the position. My daughter Jen, who wrote a book "We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood" and I will draw upon her support.

Dean Koski, Lehigh's men’s soccer coach, had put me in touch with past Lehigh goalkeepers. Their input has been very insightful and will be incorporated into my book. Title and publisher to be determined.

Until the betting scandal of 1950's, the NYC metropolitan area was the national mecca for basketball. Madison Garden games, including double headers, included locals- CCNY, St. Johns, LIU, Fordham, Columbia, Manhattan and more. Upstate was Syracuse, Siena, St. Bonaventure, etc.

CCNY won both the 1950 NIT and NCAA tournaments beating Bradley both times 71-68.

CCNY had an undefeated freshman team in 1950 and would have been even stronger in 1951. Their coach Nate Holman was very innovative and recruited from the NYC area.

Frank McGuire left St. Johns in 1952 to coach at North Carolina. That began a drain of NY area talent south and local basketball has not been the same since.

John Thompson came after this golden era of East Coast basketball, but he would have fit right in. Looie Conasecca and John Thompson were friendly enemies.

They never would have tolerated Terri Coal3's behavior at Oklahoma.

Great coaches come with different styles, but they all insisted that their players always gave an effort of 100% and strived to do their best. Winning was important, but the personal development of individual was paramount.

Today, there are not enough coaches like John.

ED MARTIN

9/3/2020 01:51:36 pm

Alan, the truth is we Muhlenber guys were jealous, because the Cedar Crest girls always seemed to feel Lehigh and Lafayette parties were better. One of our “fight songs,” was “Oh Muhlenberg (1848) was Muhlenbergwhen Lehigh was a pup, And Muhlenberg will be Muhlenberg when Lehigh’s all grown up!” Or was it “washed up?
You get the idea,

Although Berg played Lehigh in football and other sports, the big sport was Basketball in the 40’s with Berg in the NIT one year, and in the Garden in those years, versus St. Johns, CCNY, Seton Hall, and equally big games in Philly with Villanova, St.Joe’s, Temple and Penn.

I saw the CCNY NCAA/NIT Champions CCNY team beat Berg , something like 102-82, twenty points and given the history they mave have been point shaving. Names from that era, Dambrot, Dukes, Seton Hall; Harry Boycoff and Dick Maguire, St J; Mylkvy, Temple; Arizon, Villanova; Jerry West, LaSalle., etc.

Its great you daughter has written the family memoir/history—take after her mother?

Our goalie, the year we saved soccer from being dropped at Berg when the GI Bill ended and enrollment dropped one third, was Bill Hitchcock, lost a kidney when kicked in save, recovered and graduated.! Most guys who joined me, to save the sport had never played, but were high school athletes, or good intramural ones. We lost all games, except one, a tie with Ursinus. I was out with a sprained ankle so that may be why. Later Berg was Centennial Conf champ and in NCAA III, several times.

George

9/2/2020 02:55:26 pm

Ed: i was there, covering. Hiked the Red River Gorge mid-day. Knew a Long Island family with ties to all 3 semi finalists and a car license that said “Bigeast3”
And Villanova confused Hoyas with
deliberate pace. Great game.
GV

Ed Martin

9/2/2020 05:04:44 pm

My bad GV. I meant the Hoya’s (what’s a Hoya?) defeating St. Johns, not the final. Rollie who?

ED MARTIN

9/3/2020 02:02:01 pm

Note to Alan, I meant Tom Gola at LaSalle, not Jerry West, W.VA, I think.

Alan Rubin link

9/4/2020 09:19:38 am

Ed-

I never cared for the girls from Ceder Crest. Many of us thought that they were too snobby. One blind date asked me what kind of car I had. I told her that it was a convertible, but she was not too pleased when I showed up on my Italian motor scooter.

I loved Tom Gola. He moved so effortlessly.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

'Pops Don't Run No Democracy'

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