Georgetown’s John Thompson, the first Black coach to win an NCAA title: He paved it so we had a better chance

John Thompson III had lived with his father for 14 years by 1980, which gave him plenty of time to see most sides of the man many came to know through the course of his life as “Big John”. What happened on the night of March 16, though, was something altogether new.

The Georgetown Hoyas, coached by John Thompson Jr., were unable to stop Iowa’s rally from 14 points down and lost when they surrendered a three-point play to Hawkeyes center Steve Waite with five seconds remaining in the game. The venue for this game had been the NCAA Tournament East Region final, which meant Georgetown had fallen a few seconds and a single point short of the program’s first-ever Final Four.

“That was the first time I saw my father cry,” John Thompson III told The Sporting News. “After the game, there was like a big postgame pep rally he showed up to and spoke and thanked everyone for their support. And then we go back to our room – it’s just the family, and he started crying. And he just said: ‘I don’t know if we will ever have a chance to get back this far.’

“He understood and acknowledged how much luck goes into making a Final Four in a single-elimination tournament.”

Many people underestimated Big John, but on this occasion, he was the guilty one. Because two years later, Georgetown had signed the No. 1 prospect in high school basketball and arrived in their first Final Four with Patrick Ewing at center, and two years after that, in 1984, the Hoyas faced Houston and Hakeem Olajuwon at Seattle’s Kingdome with the national title at stake.

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On that night, now 40 years ago, Thompson became the first Black coach to win the NCAA Championship. It was an occasion that changed college basketball for the better, in the way that Cincinnati and Loyola had advanced the sport by winning the tournament with majority Black lineups in the early 1960s, and UTEP did in 1966 by claiming the title with an all-Black starting five.

Since Thompson broke through with that championship, three more Black coaches won titles: Nolan Richardson with Arkansas in 1994, Tubby Smith with Kentucky in 1998 and Kevin Ollie with UConn in 2014. Men of color have made 16 more Final Four appearances, including Thompson’s in 1985, his son John III’s with Georgetown in 2007 and Kevin Keatts of NC State this season following the Wolfpack’s amazing rampage through nine consecutive single-elimination games.

Where once Big John could look around from his prominent vantage point and see few Black coaches at major programs, this season saw minority coaches at more than 25 percent of major programs, in every league but the Pac-12.

“In Seattle, being in the same situation, after everything’s over in the room, he looked up and said, ‘Well I guess we made it back’ ” Thompson III told TSN. “People talk about him being the first Black coach to win the national championship, but you heard him say over and over: He was just the first to be given the opportunity to, not necessarily the first to have the ability, the knowledge, the talent.”

Thompson, who died in 2020 at age 78, was well more than a coach during his years in charge of the Hoyas. He was a leading voice in the game during a period of substantial change for college athletics. His memorable public protest against the NCAA rule that was known as “Proposition 42” – which forbade member schools from granting athletic scholarships for athletes that failed to meet initial eligibility standards that included a minimum standardized test score – eventually led to its abandonment.

“A week probably doesn’t go by that someone in this industry will come up to me and express how Pops influenced them, whether it be coaching or playing, people that aren’t even in basketball at this point, just how he inspired them,” Thompson III said. “He always said if he had the luxury of just being a coach and not taking on other responsibilities, and not standing up for what he thought was right, he might have won a couple more championships.”

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When Patrick Ewing was being recruited to play major-college basketball out of Cambridge Rindge & Latin School in Massachusetts, there was little doubt about his ability to impact whatever program he chose. Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post wrote that “some say he is the next Bill Russell” and that Ewing “could help transform the Hoyas from their current mediocre status to NCAA Final Four material almost immediately.”

For all Thompson’s gifts as a coach and leader, there can be no doubt landing Ewing was the primary ingredient in the program’s staggering success over the next four seasons: one Big East regular season title, three Big East Tournament championships, three Final Fours, three NCAA championship game appearances, the 1984 national title. A winning college coach must be a leader and tactician but also must be a terrific “general manager”. It is impossible to win big without an exceptionally talented roster. A 7-foot center who excelled as a defender and shot-blocker, Ewing became a three-time consensus first-team All-America selection and the Player of the Year in 1985.

“Playing for Coach Thompson was great. He always talked to me about people of my caliber, very few wanted to come and play for Black coaches,” Ewing told The Sporting News. “I didn’t even look at it that way. I just looked at that he was a person that looked like me, carried himself with dignity and class, spoke eloquently and he was a person I could emulate and be like as I continued to grow.”

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Ewing became part of not just a team as Georgetown basketball escalated toward national contention, but a cultural phenomenon. Thompson’s approach to running the program was uncommon: practices were closed to reporters, interviews tightly controlled and monitored, postgame locker room access limited to 15 minutes (that often passed far more quickly than prescribed). When Georgetown was involved in the NCAA Tournament, the chosen team headquarters hotel most often was ignored in favor of a location many miles from the central excitement.

The largely white media called all this “Hoya Paranoia”. The term was pervasive enough that university president Father Timothy S. Healy wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post criticizing its use. “A totally successful black man who succeeds in his own way and on his own terms in this competitive world is hard for many white Americans to swallow,” he wrote.

Many in Black America loved it. Georgetown gear – hats, jerseys and especially jackets – became common apparel in cities around the nation, not just in D.C. The appeal went beyond even basketball, but the in-your-face style of the Hoyas on the floor was an essential element.

The Hoyas of 1984 were built around Ewing, but the recruitment of two wing players from Baltimore’s Dunbar High – sophomore David Wingate and freshman Reggie Williams – made the Hoyas a more versatile offensive team. The addition of freshman power forward Michael Graham added even more toughness to a team that had plenty.

They won the Big East with 14 wins in 16 games, then claimed the Big East Tournament in overtime against Syracuse. They were sent to the NCAA West Region and played SMU and big man Jon Koncak in their first game. It almost ended there, the Hoyas winning just 37-36, but there never was another close finish. Kentucky put up a fight in the national semis but went ice cold in the second half against the Hoyas’ oppressive D. The final, even against Houston and Hakeem Olajuwon, was lopsided from the jump. The Cougars couldn’t get the ball inside to their big guy, who took just nine shots.

“He pushed us to be the best, on and off the floor. I enjoyed playing for Coach Thompson,” Ewing told TSN. “We were ‘Hoya Paranoia’ because we didn’t open our practices, because he didn’t give (the media) all access to me, we got labeled all these different things. And because we didn’t take any s— from anybody when we played, we got labeled ‘dirty’ and all these other different names they called us back then.

“But I think all those things helped strengthen our bond and our belief in him, and that helped us to be the team that we were.”

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John Thompson understood he was presented opportunities that were not as available when John McClendon, credited as the inventor of the fast break and the winner of three consecutive NAIA titles, or Clarence “Big House” Gaines, who won an NCAA small college title at Winston-Salem State, were working as coaches. When Thompson became head coach at Georgetown in 1972 – George Raveling got the Washington State job in that same year — it had only been two years since Will Robinson became the first Black coach at an NCAA Division I program, at Illinois State. Robinson had spent nearly 30 years as an inner-city high school coach because those were the only opportunities available to him after he graduated from West Virginia State and completed work on a Master’s at Michigan.

The history of the Georgetown program stretches back to the beginning of the sport itself, thanks to Thompson’s connection to Gaines, and thus to McClendon.

“Coach Mac’s adviser was the inventor of basketball, Dr. James Naismith. And John McClendon mentored my father, and my dad – in his own way – mentored coach Thompson,” Clarence Gaines Jr. told TSN. “As a matter of fact, the year Coach Thompson won the tournament, he spoke at a banquet at Winston-Salem State. I remember picking him up at the airport. That just tells you a little about the relationship they had.”

It was Big House Gaines who first tipped off Thompson to the talent of Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, who was the star of the 1980 Elite Eight team and the squad two years later, in Ewing’s freshman season, that came within a single possession of winning the 1982 title against North Carolina and Michael Jordan.

“These men of color just needed the opportunity to compete on the same level, at the same stage,” Gaines Jr. said. “And if they’re given that opportunity, they’re able to show what their value is, that they can compete at the highest level.”

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Nolan Richardson had just completed his ascent to coaching major-college basketball and become the first Black coach to win the NIT when he met Big John at the 1981 Final Four. It had been a challenging climb for Richardson.

He lost his mother at a young age and was raised by a grandmother who insisted he was capable of excellence. After playing two years in junior college and then two for Don Haskins, including on a 25-3 Texas Western (now UTEP) two years before the program made its historic breakthrough in the NCAA Championship game against Kentucky that inspired the movie ‘Glory Road’, Richardson coached high school for a decade, then three absurdly successful seasons in junior college. In 1980, he was hired at Tulsa.

“Texas had never had an African-American coach in 49 junior colleges,” Richardson told TSN. “I was there three years, and all three years there we won the conference, all three years we won the regionals, and all three years we went to the NJCAA and then went undefeated to win the whole thing my third year.

“When I got to Tulsa, John was there at the Final Four, and he wanted to meet me, who had won the NIT … I was so pumped about his teams and how hard they played, how rugged they were. I kind of adopted some of the things he preached. He was a particular stickler, like I am, about conditioning. He was a stickler about playing as hard as you can play. I think those are the kinds of characteristics that I wanted to emulate.”

By The Numbers
Years
27
Wins
596
National titles
1
Final Fours
3
Big East titles
13
After getting Tulsa to the NCAA Tournament in three of his next four seasons, Richardson was hired at Arkansas as the first Black coach at a major program in the South. He had enough individual challenges building up the Razorbacks in that environment that he paid limited attention to the burgeoning controversy surrounding the new NCAA rule termed “Proposition 48” in 1986, which mandated a minimum standardized test score for freshman-year athletic eligibility. Many researchers have asserted there is economic and racial bias to such tests. When schools comprising the NCAA determined Prop 48 had not gone far enough, and they passed the Proposition 42 rule three years later that forbade granting athletic scholarships to athletes who failed to meet the minimum score, Thompson made his protests against these standards as public as possible.

On Jan. 14, 1989, Thompson walked off the court at the Capital Center just prior to the start of the Hoyas’ Big East game against Boston College.

“I’ve done this because, out of frustration, you’re limited in your options of what you can do in response to something I felt was very wrong,” Thompson said that night. “This is my way of bringing attention to a rule a lot of people were not aware of – one which will affect a great many individuals. I did it to bring attention to the issue in hopes of getting them to take another look at what they’ve done, and if they feel it unjust, change the rule.”

They did. Prop 42 ultimately was abandoned. The NCAA eligibility center document to help prospective athletes plan for college now focuses on core-requirement courses – English, Math, Social Sciences – that must be completed during high school years. More than 80 percent of U.S. colleges no longer require the completion of standardized tests for admission, whether or not the student is an athlete.

“I’ll tell you a funny story about leading up to that. The BCA – the Black Coaches Association – they were on a conference call and talking through what he planned on doing, what his thoughts were,” Thompson III said. “A young coach got caught up in the moment and said, ‘Coach Thompson, I’m going to walk out, too. I’m going to do the same thing.’ And in very different words than what I’m going to say right now, Pops was like, ‘Fool, if you walk out, you’ll be fired. I can stand up – and I may be fired, too, but you definitely will be fired. So sit down and shut up.’”

Observing all of this led Richardson to become more involved with the BCA. He attended a meeting in Dallas and saw Thompson speak about these injustices and immediately pledged to do what he could to try to make things right.

And when the Razorbacks started getting good – a Final Four in 1990, Elite Eight in 1991 and then the run to the title in 1994 – Thompson talked to Richardson about how that success could help create opportunities for other coaches to come.

“I was one of the only Blacks in the South that had an opportunity to do something, so every game meant a lot more than just a win for me or the university – it meant opening doors,” Richardson said. “John, to me, opened those doors. He was the one who had the roads – we didn’t have to walk on gravel. He paved it a little bit so we had a better chance.”

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Ed Cooley agreed last spring to leave his home in Providence and become the fourth coach to succeed John Thompson as Georgetown head coach. He remembers wanting to play for the Hoyas as a teen, wearing the Georgetown “Starter” jacket and looking up to Ralph Dalton, who averaged 9 minutes and 2.8 points for that championship team.

Years later, he remembers listening to Big John, Nolan Richardson, Bob Knight, John Chaney and George Raveling holding court in the lobby at the Final Four coaches hotel at New York City in 1996.

“I remember that like it was yesterday, kind of being in awe: One day, I hope I can do that,” Cooley told TSN. “I didn’t envision becoming a head coach until I got to Boston College with Al Skinner, Coach Skinner being another Black head coach that had success. That’s when I started to realize opportunities could come.

“We played Georgetown, and Coach Thompson was on the bench. He would come put his arm around me – we just had a strange relationship, and he always remembered me from when I was in high school, for some reason.”

Cooley has risen through the business from his days on Skinner’s terrific BC staff to success at Fairfield, Providence – where he was The Sporting News Coach of the Year in 2022 – and took over Georgetown this season hoping to build the Hoyas back toward the championship contention that once had been the norm.

He sees Thompson’s legacy everywhere he looks – at the number of minorities in his business, on what is now his campus.

“I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t progress. We’ve made way more progress than football. Football, they’re full of it,” Cooley told TSN. “When you look at the ACC, I think they have the most minority coaches. I think the Big East is half, maybe. It can always be better, but it’s way better than when you could name five coaches in the country, at the Division I level. It’s way better than that.

“Everywhere I walk on this campus, I’m reminded of Coach Thompson. His aura, I don’t know will ever leave. Every morning, I walk in, there’s a 7-3 statue of somebody who transformed the school. I don’t know that I can walk around Georgetown and not feel the presence. Will I always be under that umbrella? Sure. But I’m not going to be intimidated by that. It’s an opportunity.”