When John Thompson called Dean Smith at 1 a.m., he answered with delight, not dread
John Thompson, the former Georgetown basketball coach who has died at age 78, was a night owl who liked to talk hoops, civil rights and politics when most of America was asleep.
In all of those ways, Thompson was identical to his close friend Dean Smith, the former North Carolina basketball coach. In 2006, I was interviewing Smith in his Chapel Hill office when he began to speak about his deep friendship with Thompson.
“When the phone rang at 1 a.m.,” Smith said of Thompson, “both of our wives knew who was on the other end of the line.”
I thought of that quote Monday when Thompson’s death was announced. Personally, I’m terrified of 1 a.m. phone calls, which in my experience rarely bring the sort of news that you want to hear.
But it was different for Thompson and Smith — colleagues, friends, Olympic coaching teammates in 1976 and rivals in 1982 during one of the best NCAA championship games ever played.
For the two coaches, a late-night phone call was often a blessing. A time to let their respective guards down. The two men loved each other. You can see that love in a famous Hugh Morton photo following that ‘82 national title game, which UNC won, 63-62, on freshman Mike Jordan’s jumper.
Thompson had just suffered a devastating defeat, one in which his guard Fred Brown threw the ball directly to UNC’s James Worthy in the final seconds to ruin the Hoyas’ chance of winning. And yet he is giving Smith (who, as always, looks tiny next to him) a huge hug and smiling broadly.
In 1984, two years later, Thompson became the first Black coach to lead a team to the NCAA championship. But he was far more than a championship coach. Of the 77 players he coached at Georgetown who stayed for four years, 75 graduated, according to The Washington Post.
Thompson kept a deflated basketball on his desk to remind his players not to let a basketball define their existence. He once walked off a court, publicly boycotting a game he was supposed to coach, when he thought an NCAA rule was unfair to minority athletes. He summoned a notorious drug dealer to his office and told the man he had to stop trying to associate with Hoya players.
At Georgetown, Thompson coached future hall of farmers like Patrick Ewing, Dikembe Mutombo, Alonzo Mourning and Allen Iverson. He was a larger-than-life presence on the court, a 6-foot-10 man with a white towel slung over his shoulder and a voice that reverberated in gyms around the country.
Thompson’s friendship with Smith — who died in 2015 — was only one glimmer in Thompson’s multi-faceted life. But it always intrigued me. Current UNC coach Roy Williams remembered in a statement Monday how important it was for an ailing Thompson to be at Smith’s funeral.
Said Williams: “Without a doubt, he was one of Dean Smith’s closest friends.... I’ll never forget at Coach Smith’s funeral, Coach Thompson arrived two hours early and sat quietly by himself in a pew. Even though he wasn’t in great health at the time, it was important for him to be here for the service, just as it was when Coach Smith retired (in 1997) and Coach Thompson came to Chapel Hill for the press conference. He would check in on Coach Smith, which meant so much to Coach Smith’s family and all of us who knew and loved him.”
The two men sometimes recruited the same player — Ewing, who led Georgetown to three Final Fours in four years in the 1980s, was the most prominent. Ewing visited both campuses, and Smith wanted him badly.
“UNC was one of the six schools that I considered,” Ewing told me in a 2016 interview. “But when I was there (in Chapel Hill), I remember Dean Smith telling me: ‘If you don’t come here, I think you should go to Georgetown.’”
Smith was such an admirer of Thompson’s progressive views on basketball, race and society that he once said publicly he wished that Thompson would one day become U.S. president. It’s also notable that Smith said several times after the 1982 title game that Thompson had out-coached him, despite the Tar Heels’ victory.
The two men had originally gotten to know each other under unusual circumstances. In 1970, as Smith wrote in his 1999 autobiography “A Coach’s Life,” he was recruiting a player named Donald Washington. Thompson was at the time a high school coach in Washington, D.C.
Washington played for Thompson at St. Anthony High and, when Washington’s mother died, Thompson and his wife Gwen had become Washington’s legal guardians.
So Smith took a recruiting visit to the Thompsons’ house, answering questions about UNC from John Thompson.
“I was extremely impressed that most of the questions he asked me were about academics,” Smith wrote. Thompson asked for the exact course schedule of a current Black UNC player named Bill Chamberlain, and Smith knew them all. It was apparently a version of a question Thompson had asked every college coach who walked through his door.
“John told me later I was the only coach to pass the test,” Smith wrote.
Washington would eventually sign with UNC, although he broke his foot early in his career and ultimately didn’t make much of an impact in Chapel Hill.
Still, the bond was sealed. Smith recommended Thompson when the Georgetown job came open and he asked Thompson to be one of his assistant coaches on the 1976 U.S. Olympic team. That team won a gold medal.
It should also be noted that Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski was friends with Thompson. Coach K said Monday in a statement about Thompson: “He was an incredibly strong person who always put his players first and fought for them at every turn. Repeatedly, I was amazed at his passion for doing what is right, even when unpopular and no one was looking. “
In 2015, the U.S. Basketball Writers established the Dean Smith Award not long after Smith had died, one designed to emphasize the qualities Smith had on and off the court. Thompson was selected as the first winner.
Smith would have liked that.
Like many people, he thought so much of Thompson — enough so that when the phone rang at 1 a.m., he picked up the receiver not with dread, but with delight. And there aren’t many better testaments to a friendship than that.
This story was originally published August 31, 2020 at 1:31 PM with the headline "When John Thompson called Dean Smith at 1 a.m., he answered with delight, not dread."
