By John Reagan
January 5, 2022


Georgetown: The Championships & Thompson
By: Roland Lazenby
Publisher : Full Court Press
Date: November 11, 1984
Language : English
ISBN-10 : 0913767085
ISBN-13 : 978-0913767085
Hardcover, 128 pages



Roland Lazenby is one of the preeminent sports biographers of this era, including books on the careers of players such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Jerry West, Phil Jackson, Tom Brady, Johnny Unitas, and many more. One of his earliest works was commissioned by Georgetown University following the 1983-84 NCAA championship basketball season.

A alumnus of Virginia Military Institute who was a police reporter at the Roanoke Times, Lazenby had been accepted into the writing program at Hollins University and wrote his first book on Ralph Sampson, an excerpt of which caught the interest of Georgetown coach John Thompson.

"Ralph Sampson was literally changing the culture of Virginia at that time," Lazenby said in an interview with this site. "I did that book and it was really about race in Virginia, his role in a changing culture. As the Georgetown people explained to me, John Thompson had read that book excerpted in the Sporting News. I had a book producer who had submitted [a proposal] when Georgetown won the national title to do the team championship book. They had a clear idea of what Georgetown was, the images it wanted to protect. It was protective of the basketball team but it was very protective of the entire university."

"I left my newspaper job immediately when I got the offer to do the book. I made more writing in 11 weeks than I did in a entire year at the newspaper. It launched in a bigger way my career writing lots of different books."

Lazenby's book, Georgetown: The Championships & Thompson is more than a season retrospective. It is a presentation in there parts: the first discussing Thompson's early years and his arrival at Georgetown; the second, the development of the team leading up to the 1983-84 season; and finally, the story of the season and its conclusion. Lazenby had first hand access to Thompson, something the coach did not provide to many journalists, much less someone outside the orbit of the program.

"In my experience interviewing John one-on-one for the book, I really came to understand in this country things are never what they seem to be racially--there are so many competing agendas, so much competing messaging, we have really had a running conflict over race in this country forever," Lazenby said. "I first saw him in the [1977] NIT in Blacksburg, I was a freshman wrestling coach at Blacksburg HS at the time and I just happened to go to that game. I had no background on Georgetown or John then. I was in that crowd, and there was John Thompson, and he was such an intriguing figure, and suddenly here I am seven years later sitting one on one with him and it occurred to me immediately I hadn't yet understood the connection between Red Auerbach and John Thompson," a relationship that he would later explore as the editor of the Boston Celtics annual, the Green Book, for five years from 1988-93.

The 1983-84 team was a touch point within many circles given the issue of race. Lazenby, who grew up in rural Wythe County, Virginia, grew to further understand this in his conversations with Thompson that provided an underpinning for the book.

"I realized that so much of John Thompson's image was threatening to white people: race, as a function of white fear," Lazenby noted. "Knowing's John's presence, his aptitude, everything he brought there, we all know that played into the narrative. This whole journey of race in America, there's so many things that have to come to pass to recognize all of these images and tropes and things about our past. Red [Auerbach] was that kind of figure who was unconcerned about the public. John Thompson was just a similar figure, unafraid about what he needed to be."

The coverage of the Final Four forms a coda to the story as told: Georgetown's epic defensive mastery versus Kentucky, its teamwork over Houston.

Quotes from the second half of the Kentucky game still resonate. "No one had ever seen anything like it," said Miami coach Bill Foster, one of 400 basketball coaches at the game while the National Association of Basketball Coaches helped their annual convention contemporaneous with the Final Four. "A [Kentucky] team with thee NBA first rounders, up by seven points at the half, goes 16 minutes into the second half and scores only two points. Incredible."

The book was conceived and completed in just 11 weeks in the summer of 1984, With his publisher at the wheel, "we literally drove 90 mph on a trip up I-95, laying out pages in the back seat to meet deadlines. We had to do the whole layout. It had to be done in a substantial hurry." Supplemented with what Lazenby called outstanding photography from the University during the season, Georgetown: The Championships & Thompson followed the team through the NCAA's and onto the national stage. But the relationship didn't end there. After the book was published, Lazenby was invited by Thompson to travel with the team to the 1985 Final Four in Lexington, KY. "I've always thought that game was haunted by Adolph Rupp," he added.

Georgetown: The Championships & Thompson was published by the University, not by a publishing house. "In a lot of ways it was a public relations brochure," Lazenby said, noting it was marketed primarily to members of the Hoya Hoop Club. It was so well received that Georgetown actually sent copies to the media.

"It was not a play-by-play book, it wasn't anything like that," Lazenby said. "In many ways it was a simple book. We had great photography, great support. Looking back was that Georgetown University had a very serious, very proscribed way it wanted to project, but it really went out of its way to embrace John Thompson and that basketball team and to incorporate that into all that Georgetown was. They were enlightened."

"The window [I got] into Georgetown was impressive. The more I understood about the Roman Catholic faith and the leadership role they played in race in America, my experience with Georgetown University was at the beginning of that understanding of the impact of faith and race. I was proud that I was at a point in life where my experiences prepared me to bring a book to broader context to that, John was willing to have a broader conversation with me. It was a moment in time where I was prepared to do that. We did a rush job, but the team was so great and was such an important moment, John Thompson allowed me in enough to put it into context."

"It was a formative moment in my life, that's for sure."