Cut From The Same Cloth

Seven years out of school, John III no longer had to fend off his father, beyond a barb that a Politics degree from Princeton seemed like an awfully pricey thing to be wasted on a profession like coaching. For that first season he kept his day job, driving from his office in Cherry Hill, N.J., to practices during a season capped by the Tigers' upset of UCLA in Carril's final NCAA tournament. Two years later, with Thompson a full assistant under Carril's successor, Bill Carmody, the Tigers went 27--2, finishing the regular season ranked No. 8.

But in 2000 things came a cropper. In short order Chris Young, the team's 6'10" All-Ivy center but also a dominating righthanded pitcher, signed a $1.5 million contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates, which in the Ivies made him ineligible to play any sport. A few weeks before fall practice, Carmody lit out to become the coach at Northwestern. Spooked, Spencer Gloger, who had been recruited by UCLA before signing with the Tigers, suddenly decided to transfer and play for the Bruins. Princeton athletic director Gary Walters named Thompson to replace Carmody—but three more would-be regulars wound up unavailable, one because of injury, another for academic reasons and a third after he quit the team.

Thompson gathered the survivors in a conference room and insisted that all the pieces to win an Ivy title sat around the table. "He never let on for a minute that playing for anything less was acceptable," remembers Nate Walton, the 6'7" senior who would be pressed into playing center. In their opener at Duke the Tigers suffered a 37-point, nationally televised humiliation, the school's worst loss in more than 90 years. In practice the team ran numbing hours of drills on offense, and another player ended up quitting. "Success has a price, and that year we all paid it," recalls Ed Persia, a freshman on that team.

Yet along the way Princeton stole a December tournament at Ball State, beat Xavier and its star forward David West, and won six of its first seven league games. Later in the season, on the bus home after back-to-back 17-point losses at Columbia and Cornell, Thompson let a silent hour pass, then got up in the aisle to address his men. Recalls Walton, "Instead of beating us into the ground, it was, 'O.K., how do we get better?' And, 'We're still in first place in the league.'"

The Tigers stayed there, thanks to an alchemy of freshman energy and senior urgency. Of their 16 wins, seven came by single-digit margins. "A lot of it was just getting us to believe that we had a chance," says Kyle Wente, whose off-balance 25-footer won a game at Harvard. "When you went over to the bench, whether you were up a point or down a point, he was such a calming presence. Just, 'Guys, we've been here before. This is what we do.' You see that throughout his career, and it goes back to his demeanor and how it instills confidence."

After beating Penn to clinch the Ivy title, Thompson met the press alongside Walton, who had just put into the books a stat line that is emblematic of the Thompson approach—a quadruple single of nine points, eight rebounds, seven assists and six steals. "Guess the cupboard wasn't as bare as people thought," said the coach.

His first team had won a berth in the NCAAs by launching more three-pointers than twos, by attempting the fewest free throws of any Division I team and by failing to throw down a single dunk—offense played defensively, indeed. "He's the best game coach I've ever seen," says Walters, a former coach himself and past chair of the NCAA basketball committee. "He's passionate about his players but completely objective in how he manages the game. He's a great example of emotional intelligence."

By the end of his four-season run at Princeton, Thompson's teams would win with better rebounding, quicker shots and more isolation plays than the program's hidebound devotees were used to. Some fans weren't quite sure what to make of these stylistic apostasies, grumbling that Princeton no longer delivered as many of the signature backdoor baskets that they could frame and hang in the great rooms of their orange-and-black minds. But John III had begun to recruit athletes he believed would flourish with more autonomy and at a stepped-up pace, foreshadowing what he would create at Georgetown. A mind is a fine thing to deploy, but athletic ability is a terrible thing to waste.

Meanwhile, Thompson had his eye on something loftier. "One day I said to him, 'You're too competitive to want to stay at this level, aren't you?'" recalls Sonny Vaccaro, the shoe-company impresario and longtime Thompson family friend. "He said, 'Yes, Mr. Vaccaro. I want to go for the brass ring.' Obviously he couldn't do it at an Ivy League school. Once he got into coaching, the competitive Thompson blood took over."

In 2004 an opportunity arose at Georgetown, from which his father had abruptly retired in midseason five years earlier. The Hoyas had just lost their final nine games to finish 13--15, their worst record in more than three decades, and Pops' successor, Craig Esherick, was on his way out.