I Came As a Shadow: An Autobiography

By John Thompson and Jesse Washington

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

The long-awaited autobiography from Georgetown University’s legendary coach, whose life on and off the basketball court throws America’s unresolved struggle with racial justice into sharp relief

John Thompson was never just a basketball coach and I Came As a Shadow is categorically not just a basketball autobiography.

After three decades at the center of race and sports in America, the first Black head coach to win an NCAA championship is ready to make the private public. Chockful of stories and moving beyond mere stats (and what stats! three Final Fours, four times national coach of the year, seven Big East championships, 97 percent graduation rate), Thompson’s book drives us through his childhood under Jim Crow segregation to our current moment of racial reckoning. We experience riding shotgun with Celtics icon Red Auerbach, and coaching NBA Hall of Famers like Patrick Ewing and Allen Iverson. How did he inspire the phrase “Hoya Paranoia”? You’ll see. And thawing his historically glacial stare, Thompson brings us into his negotiation with a DC drug kingpin in his players’ orbit in the 1980s, as well as behind the scenes on the Nike board today.

Thompson’s mother was a teacher who couldn’t teach because she was Black. His father could not read or write, so the only way he could identify different cements at the factory where he worked was to taste them. Their son grew up to be a man with his own life-sized statue in a building that bears his family’s name on a campus once kept afloat by the selling of 272 enslaved people. This is a great American story, and John Thompson’s experience sheds light on many of the issues roiling our nation. In these pages, he proves himself to be the elder statesman college basketball and the country need to hear from now.

I Came As A Shadow is not a swan song, but a bullhorn blast from one of America’s most prominent sons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250619341

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I always planned to be a teacher, not a basketball coach. I used basketball as an instrument to teach.

My classroom was the court.

When I say teach, I’m not talking about how to run 2-2-1 zone press or the fast break, although we did those things quite well. I felt a responsibility to broaden my players’ perspectives, of the world and of themselves. I had to expose my kids to their own intellects and give them a sense of self-worth beyond their physical attributes. I tried to praise them for their minds as much as for making the quick trap off the inbounds pass. But I always knew the reason I had their attention was basketball. Basketball was my instrument to make them listen to everything else.

Basketball also became a vehicle for me to challenge injustices. I didn’t think about it that way when I started coaching Georgetown’s team in 1972. I just did what came naturally based on how I was raised by my mother and father, the environments that I lived in, and the amount of time I was exposed to certain things. I reacted based on heredity, environment, and time. It wasn’t like I strategized or planned to be an outspoken person. If I thought my team, myself, or people in general were being treated unfairly, I tried to say something about it. Sometimes I did not speak up when I should have. Other times, I should have kept my mouth shut. But as I got further in my career, basketball became a way of kicking down a door that had been closed to Black people. It was a way for me to express that we don’t have to act apologetic for obtaining what God intended us to have, and that we should be recognized more for our minds than our bodies. All this came out of the strong responsibility I felt to teach kids more than how to throw a ball through a hoop.

Too many Black kids are conditioned to seek recognition based on physical instead of intellectual attributes. We have to stop thinking about power as being able to dunk on somebody or lay somebody out on the football field. Real power is defined by the capacity to think and excel in various situations. Compared with physical abilities, intelligence places you in a better position for a longer period of time. Far more money is made sitting down than standing up.

These are some of the things I felt it was important to teach. But I have to be honest about my motivations. I also wanted to win basketball games. I wanted to win an awful lot. Let’s not act like I was Saint John out there, only concerned with education and uplifting the race. Winning was incredibly important to me, and you best believe I was good at it.

People only listen to you if you win. I intended to be heard.

I knew that my success or failure would influence opportunities not only for other Black coaches, but for Black people in general. I couldn’t be just a coach because my cause was not the same as most other coaches. My cause was more serious. I had to win because Black people didn’t have the right not to be successful.

Years ago, I read a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that affected me deeply: Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. In other words, to be truly free, we must have the freedom not to be successful, too. When I arrived at Georgetown, I knew of only four other Black head basketball coaches at white colleges. If I didn’t win, and win fast, I would have been run out of there and you never would have heard from me again. The next Black coach in line probably wouldn’t have gotten hired, either. Most Black people, myself included, did not have the freedom not to be successful.

America is finally realizing that even today, after all that Black people have fought for and achieved, far too many of us are still not free.

As I finish this book, the nation is being torn apart by protests and riots over the death of George Floyd. This man did not have the freedom to make a tiny mistake—allegedly passing a fake twenty-dollar bill. I empathized with Floyd when I heard him cry out Mama! as he died beneath that policeman’s knee. I was a mama’s boy growing up. The safest place I ever felt was in my mother’s arms. The protests have forced everyone to confront a lot of deeper injustices, which is something I have always tried to get people to consider. Yes, Black people are being needlessly killed by police, but there are many ways of killing a person. You can kill people by depriving them of opportunity and hope. You can kill people by saying that society is equal, then starting a hundred-yard race with most white people at the fifty-yard line. Discrimination is a lot more complicated today than when I was growing up and they made Black people sit in the back. Trying to fight discrimination today can feel like shooting at ghosts.

But I am proud of the way today’s generation is protesting and refusing to be apologetic for insisting on their God-given rights. We have entered a new era of vocalizing our humanity. To reach this point is one reason I did the things I did, to help demonstrate that we should not accept the unacceptable. I never would have imagined years ago that a Black female mayor of D.C. would paint BLACK LIVES MATTER on the street leading to the White House. I respect that young man Colin Kaepernick because he sacrificed his career to protest police brutality. He was a hell of a quarterback who could have played many more years and made a lot more money, but after he kneeled during the national anthem, football was taken away from him. Let’s not forget that he was protesting exactly what happened to Floyd.

That said, I disagree with the method Kaepernick chose to protest. I love America. We as Black people are not guests here. We paid a heavy price for our citizenship, which makes me cherish it. I know people who have fought in wars, and I would never personally kneel during the anthem because it would hurt some of them. But I will defend what Kaepernick did with all my heart. I think he showed the utmost love and respect for what the flag represents, which is the right to demonstrate against injustice. I think Kaepernick was honoring every American who died in uniform.

I don’t agree with people who riot, either. The looting and burning over Floyd’s killing made me disappointed, sad, and angry. But I always said that fear of the riot is more powerful than the riot itself. Now, the fear of the riot has returned.

Some people try to translate Kaepernick’s protest as hating America, or they tell LeBron James to shut up and dribble. Tell me, when do these people think it is appropriate to speak up? When have certain white people ever said it was the right time to protest injustice? Never, that’s when. There goes John again, is what I always heard. I refused to be quiet, but a good deal of the time, I felt like I was by myself. Now, I’d like to see them try to shut up the millions of people who marched in the streets for George Floyd.

Reflecting back on my life, I said and did things that I regret. I hope God forgives me for all the mistakes I made. I do not intend to cast the first stone in this book. But I hope that some of the things I said and did helped us get closer to obtaining real freedom. Ralph Waldo Emerson said we should call our employment by its lowest name, and so take from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. People tried to define me as many things during my career, both good and bad. In my own mind, I just considered myself a secondhand teacher. But this book is not about teaching Allen Iverson to handle the basketball, or Patrick Ewing to control the paint, or Dikembe Mutombo and Alonzo Mourning to block shots. I always told my players not to define themselves by the eight to nine pounds of air inside a round piece of leather, and I apply that same principle to myself. I’m extremely proud of the fact that Patrick, Dikembe, Alonzo, and Allen are in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. I’m in there, too, although it took them three tries to vote me in because of the stances I took and the statements I made. But when people ask what I’d like to be remembered for, I say, "All the things that kept me out of the Hall of Fame."

Here’s what happened with all those things. I might be wrong sometimes. But this is how I feel.

1

ANNA AND ROB

My mother always told me to speak my mind.

My father always said, Son, study the white man.

Growing up, I didn’t fully understand what they meant. Now I know my father was teaching me to figure out how things operated beyond our segregated corner of Washington, D.C. And my mother was saying I should not let myself be interpreted or defined as something I was not. They were preparing me for what I would deal with in the future.

The two people who had the greatest influence on my life are my mother and father, Anna Alexander Thompson and John Robert Thompson Senior. I know what they had to go through for me to accomplish anything.

My mother was born and raised in Washington and graduated from Dunbar High School, where a lot of legendary Black people were educated, like Carter G. Woodson, General Benjamin Davis, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Dr. Charles Drew. After high school, my mother earned a degree from Miner Teachers College in Washington. Then she went to teach in a one-room schoolhouse in the tiny town of Compton, in rural St. Mary’s County, Maryland. That’s where she met my father. They got married and moved back to Washington, but my mother couldn’t get work as a teacher. I’m not exactly sure why, but I do know that in the 1930s and ’40s, the District of Columbia didn’t properly fund the segregated Black schools. Despite the fact that my mother was a trained educator, she took what we called day’s work to make ends meet.

Day’s work sounds better than cleaning white folks’ houses, doesn’t it?

My mother did day’s work mostly on the west side of Rock Creek Park, which was the dividing line for Black people in the city. We called everything over there Across the Park. Most everything Across the Park was white. Georgetown University was Across the Park, too. Georgetown might as well have been the moon, as far as we were concerned. The moon felt more familiar to us than a place like Georgetown.

My father woke up at five every morning, without an alarm clock, to go to work at the Standard Art, Marble and Tile Company at 117 D Street Northwest. My father could not read or write. He was born and raised down in St. Mary’s County, working the fields and farms, oystering on the water, and doing other types of manual labor. Some of the children in his family had to work, and some of them went to school. He got the bad roll of the dice. His lack of education feels tragic now, but back then it didn’t make much of an impression on us, because we were conditioned to think that a man never being taught to read or write was normal.

I was born in 1941, in my parents’ house at 523 2nd Street Southwest. I was the youngest of four children, behind my sisters, Inez, Barbara, and Roberta. When I was maybe a year old, we moved to the Frederick Douglass housing projects in Southeast Washington, also known as Anacostia. Until I was ten, these projects were the center of my world. They consisted of several dozen two-story wooden buildings, not crammed together but spread out with some grass and packed dirt in between. Our apartment had five rooms, maybe six. Behind our apartment was a tiny plot of land, just a few steps wide, where my father grew some vegetables. Everybody in the projects kept their yards clean and looked out for one another. And everybody in the projects was Black, I mean that literally. I never saw a white person there, ever. I had no idea we were living under segregation and poverty, because my parents kept food on the table and clothes on our backs. Everything seemed good to me.

We didn’t have any playgrounds in the projects, but we found amusement all over the place. Kids today buy their fun; we learned how to make our fun. We nailed two pieces of wood together in the shape of a cross, attached some wheels from a broken-down bicycle to the short piece, then put some old roller skates on the long piece. We called that a skatemobile. You’d lie on the long piece of wood and race down the hill. We played stickball in the street. I fell in love with baseball on a field that had more bumps than smooth parts. When a ground ball came your way, you’d better watch out that it didn’t hit a rock and fly up in your face.

Across the street from the projects the woods began. People in Washington used to call Anacostia the country because you had to cross a bridge to get there, and we had grass and some trees. My friends and I had a great time in those woods. You could go in there, get a limb from a tree, put it between your legs, and that was your horse. Go get your cap guns and run around playing cowboy. We picked flowers, apples, and pears. We caught rabbits in shoeboxes: set the box up on a stick, put some food behind the stick, the rabbit hits the stick, and the box comes down over the rabbit. We gazed at horses in a nearby field, collected tadpoles and frogs. I learned that blackberries grow on a vine and mulberries grow on a tree.

There was a popular song when I was growing up that said even though folks might be uneducated or underprivileged, still they get from A to Z, doin’ what comes naturally. That’s how we lived, just doing what came naturally.

I always had some sort of little hustle job. Money has never been something I was reluctant to get. I took my Radio Flyer wagon up to the Safeway grocery store and asked people if I could carry their bags home. I sold crepe flowers door to door for Mother’s Day. All the houses in the projects were heated with stoves that burned wood or coal, so my friends and I collected scrap wood in bushel baskets and sold it for people to burn in their stoves. Or when coal got dropped off in the street, I could shovel it into an old lady’s house and get a few coins.

My sisters liked taking me to the movies at the Carver Theater on Nichols Street, which is now Martin Luther King Avenue. They showed these pictures where the white hero with big guns ran all through the jungle. He always had a bunch of Black natives with him, and the natives went up ahead carrying sticks and spears. If anything went wrong, if they got attacked by a tiger or some enemy, the natives always got killed first.

I used to think, Why is the Black guy with the stick in the front, and the white guy with all the heavy artillery in the back?

My father liked to come home from work, sit on the porch, light his pipe or a cigar, and listen to baseball games on the radio with me. I was crazy about baseball as a kid. The Cleveland Indians were our favorite team, because they signed Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League. Doby went through everything Jackie Robinson did, but without the same recognition. The Indians also had the Black players Luke Easter and Harry Suitcase Simpson. Some of the biggest inspirations of my earliest years were Larry Doby and the boxer Joe Louis, because those were the only successful Blacks that society permitted to be visible to us. All we saw were athletes, which had a powerful effect on us.

Boxing was the most popular sport in the projects, by far. When a Joe Louis fight was on the radio, everything stopped, I mean the babies wouldn’t even cry. We all gathered to watch the radio. Not listen to the radio—we watched it like it was a television. If Joe knocked one of them suckers out, so many people would come outside yelling and hollering, you thought it was a parade. That’s how much respect Black people had for Joe Louis. Educated Black people and Black thinkers were not visible to us.

I may have lived in the Frederick Douglass projects, but I never knew who Frederick Douglass was when I grew up. He wasn’t someone we talked about. Black people were too busy surviving.

Money was a constant problem in our household, although my parents kept that hidden from us. The government limited the amount you could earn and remain in public housing, and they sent people to the projects to snoop around. My mother worried that we would lose our home if they found out she made extra money doing day’s work. My father took me to the Christmas party at the tile factory every year, and there was a lot of extra food left over. We gathered it up and took it home. I don’t know exactly what my father’s job was at the factory, but when he came home from work his hands never got clean. He washed them in the kitchen sink, even rubbed lard from a can on his hands, but the dirt was ground in so deep his hands stayed dirty all the time. Despite all this, I never once heard my father complain about having to wake up so early every morning. My mother never complained about scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets, or having to bring home secondhand clothing from houses she cleaned. They kept us fed and clothed and did not raise us to feel we were deprived of anything. Most important, they showed us a tremendous amount of love. As a result, I had an extremely happy childhood.

Let me say right now, this is no sob story about Oh, look at us poor Blacks suffering in the projects. I never felt oppressed or inferior. I felt very secure. I actually thought we were middle class, because my parents provided for us. We had very little exposure to the outside world. I was a mama’s boy, and my sisters called me little Jesus baby because they said I could do no wrong in our mother’s eyes. I never felt safer than in my mother’s arms.

Some of my earliest memories are of my father hugging me and smiling at me. Here’s something I think about a lot in my later years: my father always stood behind us and ate what we left behind. At the time, I just thought, He doesn’t want us to waste food. Now I realize the man must have been hungry but sacrificed so we could have more than him. Was I so selfish that I didn’t realize the reason he chewed on that pork chop bone I left behind, why he sopped up the gravy on my plate? My father was providing. He didn’t eat so we could eat.

A common stereotype about low-income Black people is they’re not loved, the fathers are missing, they’re always fighting with each other. My childhood was the opposite of that. My parents made sure I had everything I wanted.

But I also knew what not to want. My parents made sure of that, too.

I knew not to want a new pair of tennis shoes until you could see my sock through the hole. I knew not to want two pairs of dungarees. I knew not to want more than one slice of baloney on a sandwich. When I lived in public housing, I didn’t have my own bedroom to sleep in, I had a spot. Bedrooms were for the wealthy. I had a place to sleep, and I was happy.

My mother and father always stressed that education is the most important thing a person can have. My mother is the one who took me to school and dealt with all my teachers, since she was a trained teacher herself. My father spent more time teaching me about life. It started with telling me to study the white man, which did not mean to ingratiate myself, but to learn how his world functioned. He also taught me about things to be ready for at school, how to deal with kids in the neighborhood and people in the wider world. He instructed me to watch and listen to my surroundings, especially when I was someplace new. He always told me, Watch the person who doesn’t say anything, because they’re the one who’s really listening.

Once he took me to the tile factory, and I saw the way his bosses trusted him for guidance and information. He knew far more than they did about what kind of tile or cement to use in certain situations. I once saw him rip open a bag of mortar, put a little in his mouth, spit it out, and say exactly what kind it was. He did that because he couldn’t read the bag. My father told me he trained every new boss they gave him. That taught me how to value people who worked for me, because they might know more than me about certain things.

Forget that line about people without formal education being dumb. My father taught me more about life than someone with a doctorate. Our family didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that he was illiterate, and when I got older I realized that people covered it up for him. We avoided situations where he had to read or write anything. If someone brought a newspaper over to our house with something they wanted him to know, we read the article out loud. If we ate at a restaurant, my mother made a meal suggestion instead of him reading the menu. Think about that for a second. My father grew up only fifty-six miles from the nation’s capital, and he could not obtain a basic education. He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever been around, and he couldn’t spell John Thompson.

We all acted like it was no big deal. Being conditioned to think it was normal—that almost feels worse than the fact that it happened.

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THE FIRST SCHOOL I went to was Turner Elementary, right on the edge of the projects. I didn’t want to go. Forget about kindergarten, I wanted to stay home with my mother. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted. Our family was Catholic, like many other Black families in Washington, and after the second or third grade I left Turner and went to the local Catholic school, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The school was about a mile from the projects. We walked down a hill through some woods along Stanton Road, which was dirt at the time. When we got to the Suitland Parkway, we’d peek up and down to make sure it was safe, cross the parkway, and walk up another hill to get to school. Our Lady of Perpetual Help sat up high on a plateau, you could see the whole city laid out beneath you. People still go up there to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July.

All the students at Our Lady of Perpetual Help were Black, but the nuns and priests were white. This was my first direct, daily exposure to white people.

This was also when I experienced my first problem in life. I couldn’t read.

To this day, I don’t know why. My mother read to me and tried to help me. My sisters could read, but not me. The nuns thought I was retarded, that’s the word they used at the time. The classrooms had a gold star row, a blue star row, and a baby row. Literally a baby row: the nuns put a picture of a baby at the end of that row. The gold star row was the smartest. The blue was average. They stuck me in the baby row.

Did I know they thought I was stupid? You bet I knew. I never thought of myself as stupid. I was more embarrassed by the fact they put me in the baby row. But that wasn’t the only thing. The nun teaching the class had candy, and she’d give you some as a reward if you did the best on the test or you answered a question right.

I always wanted that candy. I never got it.

It didn’t take long for my friends and me to give Our Lady of Perpetual Help a different name. We called it Our Little Prison Home. We were too young to say that for any specific reason other than making a joke, but we must have sensed it was not a loving or welcoming place.

My temper started to bubble up then. Once, a classmate started a conflict with me. He was very light-skinned, to the point of looking almost white, and he sat in the gold star row. He did something to me and I plucked him or retaliated in some way. He ran and told the nun. She assumed I was the instigator and grabbed me. I reacted very strongly, told her to take her hands off me, and called her a white witch.

For me to explode like that was not typical. I wasn’t a troublemaker or knocking people down or robbing them. But I was beginning to sense that the light-skinned kids were treated better than those of us with dark skin. They were more pampered and got more praise. I had some vague idea that this was not right, so I resisted strongly. That may have been the birth of me resisting, because that was not in my personality up to that time.

The nun sent me home, and my mother brought me back to school to find out what happened. The nun told my mother I called her a white bitch.

In those days, I didn’t curse at all. My mother would have killed me for that. Fortunately there was a girl in my class, Patsy Stewart, who had been sitting beside me and heard what happened. Patsy said, Mrs. Thompson, he didn’t say a bad word, he said ‘witch.’

My behavior was probably a way for me to camouflage what I didn’t know. I think I was insecure about not being able to read, or about being dark-skinned. At that age, all the abusive things that were said to me about color came not from whites, but from Black people. We were never around any white people except the nuns and priests. For another Black person to call you dark or black was one of the worst insults you could get. That was to be expected, because Black people wanted acceptance. We transferred what the oppressor was doing to us and inflicted it on someone else. Before I ever encountered white society, I was taught that it was a disadvantage in life to be a darker Black person.

After the situation with the nun, the pastor at the school made a big deal out of taking me for a drive down Suitland Parkway to talk to me about controlling my temper. He said, You have to be careful, you might grow up and kill somebody and go to jail. In those days, if you were a Black boy and didn’t end up in jail, or if you were a Black girl and didn’t end up pregnant before you got married, that was considered a successful life. Black folks thought that way, too. Think about how low those expectations were: don’t go to jail, and don’t get pregnant. The pastor thought he was doing his job.

But I remember one white nun at the school, Sister Eunice, whispering to me later, A man without any temper is not much of a man at all.

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WE DIDN’T HAVE a car, and neither of my parents knew how to drive, so we took the Greyhound bus once or twice a year to visit my father’s family down in St. Mary’s County. Sometimes all six of us would go together. Other times, my father rode down with me and one of my sisters and dropped us off to stay with our aunts, uncles, and cousins. The only time I saw my father wear a suit was when he visited his hometown. He wanted to show his family he was doing well up in the big city.

We called the Greyhound bus the Hound. It made a rest stop in Waldorf, Maryland, not far outside Washington. Maryland used to be a slave state, and then it had Jim Crow. When we stopped at the little Waldorf rest area, which had snacks and restrooms, Black people had to enter through the back of the building. We couldn’t go in the front. When we returned to the bus, we always sat in the back. None of this made an impression on me at the time.

One trip I was sitting next to my father in the back of the Hound when we pulled into the rest stop. My father needed to use the bathroom and walked around to the back entrance. I waited on the bus by myself, looking out the window toward the front of the rest stop, where the white people entered.

All the white folks came back out and got back on the bus. We waited another minute or two. The bus driver closed the door and started rolling.

I sat there by myself, silent and terrified, looking out the window. The bus kept rolling.

My father ran around the corner of the building. The bus stopped. He got on, came to the back, and sat down beside me.

Why didn’t you say something? my father asked. I couldn’t articulate an answer. I was scared to death, a little Black boy on a strange bus full of white people.

My father’s hometown of Compton was this tiny place surrounded by farmland as far as you could see. All my relatives lived in little houses on long country lanes, with no electricity or running water. I was fascinated by their way of life, which exposed me to things I had never seen in the projects. To get water, we had to walk down the lane to the pump. To bathe, they heated water on a woodstove, then filled up a metal washtub. You stood up in the middle of the tub and washed yourself. Light came from kerosene lamps. There was no toilet; you went out back to the outhouse. We never thought about it as being a disadvantage. I loved going down there.

I admired how my cousins could walk a mile barefoot on the side of the hot asphalt road to get groceries. They had some tough feet. We walked to a white man’s farm and got fresh milk from his cows. I didn’t like the taste, but my cousins drank it like water. I thought it was really funny when a fly or a bug flew around the house and my cousins gave it the name of somebody they didn’t like. They’d swat the bug and say Get outta here, Sam! or Betty, you better keep away from my porch!

My cousins taught me to walk along the left side of the road, where the cars came toward you, not from behind you. They showed me to always mount a horse from the left side. I respected my cousins for how hard they worked on the farms. When they took me through the tobacco fields, I saw huge green worms on the tobacco leaves that scared me to death, but my cousins flicked them out of the way like they were nothing. Sometimes I went out to work with them just for fun and didn’t last more than fifteen minutes. They stayed out there all day, making money.

When I coached, we called sprinting back on defense or hustling on the fast break working hard. I wonder if I would feel differently about that phrase if I’d grown up like some of my cousins, working in those fields cutting down tobacco and corn in the