"Big Man on Campus: John Thompson
and the Georgetown Hoyas"
January 5, 2022
Big Man on Campus: John Thompson and the Georgetown Hoyas
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
Date: January 1, 1991
Language: English
ISBN-10 : 0805011250
ISBN-13: 978-0805011258
Hardcover, 310 pages
The story of the early years of John Thompson in the book I Came As A Shadow was a revelation to many readers, but in reality it had been covered 30 years earlier in the well regarded Big Man on Campus, written by Leonard Shapiro, a former reporter and editor at the Washington Post.
Shapiro joined the Post in 1969, serving there for 41 years before retiring in 2010. At the start, one of his earliest assignments was the high school beat. "I covered St. Anthony's, and remembered [John] playing at PC," Shapiro said in a recent interview with this site. "We became good friends and occasionally he would tip me off on stories that I would not discover myself as a white reporter in DC." As coach, Thompson once took Shapiro along for a recruiting visit to meet Jeff Bullis (C'82), whose story was cited in this book as well as within the Jesse Washington book.
"Before the 1988 Olympics I told [John] he ought to write a book," Shapiro said. "My agent was looking for the next book. John wanted to do a book, just not with me." Shapiro's project coincided with a memoir Thompson was developing with Sports Illustrated writer Ralph Wiley, and while many contributors at Georgetown spoke to Shapiro for his book, Thompson repeatedly declined to do so. "Nothing against you," Thompson told Shapiro, "but Macy's doesn't cooperate with Gimbels."
While Shapiro did not get any support from Thompson, the coach did not shut down all contacts with the author. "I talked with [Bill] Shapland, Bill Stein, talked to lots of people. In total, over 150 interviews," he said. In the end, Shapiro's book was published and Wiley's was not. Thompson scuttled his book shortly after Big Man on Campus debuted in 1991. The idea of a memoir would not come to fruition until Thompson's 2020 autobiography.
Shapiro did his homework in Big Man on Campus and the depth of coverage is evident. He talked to a large number of individuals close to Thompson in the book, and their views of the man could be disparate. One former teammate at Providence called him "the finest gentleman I ever met." A childhood friend of Thompson called him "one of the most paranoid, duplicitous guys I've ever seen...He's more about the numbers, the stats, and the money, and that's it."
Thompson's early childhood is well chronicled, and Shapiro talks to many of his teammates at Archbishop Carroll and Providence College that set the stage for his career in teaching and coaching after his pro career concluded. The rise of the Hoyas in the 1970's is detailed as befits a newspaper reporter, but Shapiro juxtaposes the on-court success with first person comments from former players that were jarring to many at the time. One member of Thompson's first recruiting class, Merlin Wilson (C'76), spoke harshly of him, calling him "a very vindictive person", while Greg Brooks (C'76) said he hadn't talked to Thompson since the day he graduated. Shapiro admitted that the stories from the former players were surprising even to him.
One of the most disturbing stories was from former all-American Craig Shelton, who played at Georgetown from 1976 to 1980. Eight years removed from the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, Shelton was working as an hourly employee at a Giant Food warehouse in suburban Maryland when he spoke to Shapiro, noting that Thompson would not return his calls when Shelton tried to complete his undergraduate courses after his playing days had ended. "Thompson's main concern is to keep his job and win," Shelton commented for the book, noting he has never returned to campus as a result. "It's about money," Shelton said. "The bottom line is the dollars, keep their job, keep it going. How can you be a father figure when you have the pressure to win?"
One of the revelations in the book was not well received by Georgetown. Shapiro discovered that in the negotiations for the 1982 Georgetown-Virginia game, Thompson accepted $50,000 from a WTBS advertiser, Dr Pepper, to sway Georgetown to award the game to the cable superstation. Athletic director Frank Rienzo denied any knowledge of the offer, while Russ Potts, the promoter for the game, declined comment about Thompson or the deal "in the interest of our friendship".
Shapiro also provides first-hand comments about an issue prevalent in the Georgetown coverage of the 1980's: the lack of white players recruited by the coach. A half dozen former white players and recruits spoke on the record for the book, none citing any racial animus from Thompson, while a pair of Division I coaches claimed the opposite take: Thompson used an all-black team as a recruiting advantage. "He's a very powerful guy, and no one wants to take him on," said one coach. "What chance would I have recruiting if I went public on John Thompson? He's a hero in the black community. I'd never get another black kid."
There is a lot of praise about Thompson and the Hoyas in Big Man on Campus, including significant coverage of the championship seasons, but the totality was uncomfortable within the basketball office. When Shapiro's publisher, Henry Holt & Co., paid $2,900 to advertise the book in the 1990-91 game programs, Georgetown refused the ad after consulting with Thompson. For a university which carefully managed the perception of Georgetown Basketball in the high watermark of Hoya Paranoia, Big Man on Campus was a body blow of sorts. No one doubted Shapiro's attention to detail and fewer still questioned the content, but despite healthy book sales nationwide, Georgetown never publicized the book among its fan base, then or now.
Following Thompson's death in 2020, Shapiro wrote: "Long before anyone ever talked about John Thompson Jr. and Hoya Paranoia in the same breath, the late Georgetown basketball coach was about as open and cooperative of a resource as a young journalist could ever hope for." When the two saw each other in the intervening years following the book, Shapiro noted that it was merely "polite, but not a relationship" as it was in the past, and he was no longer getting those late night calls Thompson frequented among some members of the media.
"It was troubling, but that's what we [as reporters] do."
"I was proud of that book, told the story fairly," Shapiro said. "Every opportunity to comment, John chose not to. In the end, I basically concluded this is a guy is educating most of his athletes, a great percentage graduated, but he did right by them. I uncovered the story on the Sampson game, some things about his childhood. It was discovering things I didn't know. I had a great time doing it, quite an amazing story."
John Thompson never spoke publicly about why he abandoned his memoir with Ralph Wiley before publication--perhaps the comparisons with this book would have not held up by comparison. Three decades later, Big Man on Campus still packs a punch, an objective view of the first five decades of he life of John Thompson--some good, some bad, but never indifferent. It's required reading for any follower of Georgetown's golden era of men's basketball.