By John Reagan
January 5, 2022


I Came As a Shadow: An Autobiography
By: John Thompson with Jesse Washington
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
Date: December 15, 2020
Language: English
ISBN-10 : 1250619351
ISBN-13: 978-1250619358
Hardcover, 352 pages


John Thompson once described the three parts of his life as public, private, and secret. His posthumous autobiography, I Came As a Shadow, reinforced the public John Thompson, selectively discussed the private, and kept the secret where John always wanted it: with himself.

I Came As a Shadow is not a book specifically for Georgetown basketball fans, the ones who could debate the relative merits of a Bill Martin versus a Hollis Thompson, or those who would ask why Thompson milked the clock up 13 in the 1996 Big East final versus Connecticut. Instead, this is a book for those who had only fleeting glimpses of Thompson as a coach, or understood him from what others said about him. This was an opportunity for him to set the record straight; or, when John felt appropriate, the record he wanted it to be--and he succeeded in both.

I Came As a Shadow was literally 30 years in the making. At the peak of his coaching visibility in the late 1980's, Thompson signed a lucrative book deal for an autobiography with Sports Illustrated writer Ralph Wiley (1952-2004), a fiery and fascinating author whose works on the intersection of race and sport were as provocative then as today, and maybe moreso. Wiley, who once playfully referred to Thompson as "Dark Vader", seemed an inspired choice to craft a work on Thompson that would be the talk of the sports world. Just prior to its publication in 1991, following the release of Leonard Shapiro's Big Man On Campus, Thompson scuttled the book entirely. It's intriguing to imagine that Wiley's manuscript exists in some dusty archive of a publishing house, unrequited.

In the mid-2010's, Thompson reached out to Jesse Washington, a writer from ESPN who was also focused on the dichotomies of race and sport, to write a book on his life. Thompson had his choice of nearly any sports writer in America to pen what would become his final say on his life, so his selection of Washington in the crafting of this book was by design.

Upon its release, considerable attention was paid to Thompson's early childhood in segregated Washington. While much of this was covered in the Lazenby and Shapiro books, reading it from the source maintains its power. Thompson offers passing coverage to his formative years at Archbishop Carroll High School, from which he became a high school All-American but from which he stayed distant his entire adult life, no-showing team reunions and avoiding events in his honor. Thompson pays notice to the enmity he held for Carroll coach Bob Dwyer, and freely admitted he would never forgive him for a off-hand comment Dwyer once gave a white recruit in the 1970's that the kid would never get playing time at Georgetown.

Far less acrimonious but just as distant were his college and pro career, the only six years of his life Thompson did not live in the Washington area. There are some intriguing basketball nuggets here: his recruiting by Notre Dame and Syracuse, driving with Red Auerbach to Kutsher's resort in the Catskills for a summer job, or being selected to an all-star basketball team that traveled to the Soviet Union. Thompson's recollections of his days at Providence College are a mixed one, and he seemed unwilling to reconnect to that college as an alumnus, even going so far as to not attend the ceremony retiring his #50 jersey in 2015. One Dominican priest remarked to the Providence Journal, "One of the reasons you stay friendly with John is you don't talk about him."

Thompson's two years in the NBA also have their conflicts. Lifelong friendships with Red Auerbach and Bill Russell were tempered by a disappointing career as a reserve, with Thompson relating the humbling experience of him having to ask his Celtics teammates for a full share of the playoff money due the team because he needed it for his family. It was Auerbach who released Thompson to the 1966 NBA territorial draft that sent him to the expansion Chicago Bulls, a decision which led Thompson, then just 25, to walk away from the pros and return to Washington. It would prove a life-changing experience.

A significant though by no means predominate part of the book discusses his years as head coach at Georgetown from 1972 to 1999. It is impractical to cram 27 years of coaching into a requisite number of printed pages and Thompson had no intention to do so. Extended discussion on former players tends to focus on his four Hall of Famers (Patrick Ewing, Dikembe Mutombo, Alonzo Mourning, Allen Iverson), a trend that former players in the intervening years have noted as well, with some contending that Thompson gave them proportionately more attention off the court as well. Casual readers may not have cared as much about learning about who Tom Scates or Joey Brown was, and perhaps Thompson was comfortable focusing on those the reader may have known. In hindsight, it would have been interesting to learn which Georgetown stories didn't make the final cut and which were never proffered at all.

Jesse Washington declined an invitation to discuss the book for this article.

Proposition 42, and its predecessor, Proposition 48, were out of the national conversation until John Thompson's focus on educational opportunity over SAT scores elevated it and ultimately got it resolved by the NCAA. "I don't feel that anybody was doing anything maliciously, I feel even more certain about that now,", Thompson said in 1989. "I feel even better about the fact that no one had to be beaten over the head [to resolve it]. It was a sensible, intelligent discussion." Readers of I Came As a Shadow can get a second look at how Thompson viewed this era in first-person hindsight.

As the last chapter suggests, this book was at its core an opportunity for John Thompson to leave a memoir for his grandchildren and those in sports who would succeed him. As such, there is proportionately little about his wife Gwen and his three children within the book. His marriage and divorce was not a topic for extended discussion, nor family life in general. His declining health is kept out of bounds as well, though it is not known how much this affected the timeline of writing the book.

Rare is the autobiography where the last words from an author are without any follow-up, but perhaps that's the way John Thompson wanted it--he completed the definitive account of his life, in his words, on his terms. "Some will like John Thompson after reading this book; others may not," wrote Tom Goldman at NPR.org. "What's sad is that he won't be around for a book tour, to answer people's curiosities about why he did this, or said that. And to apologize for nothing."