Cut From The Same Cloth

Monica, whose mother died of lung cancer, says she's now "cancer-free." She consults for her alma mater and is the executive director of the John Thompson III Foundation, whose beneficiaries include the Capital Breast Care Center. "Looking back, I don't know how we got through it," she says. "Well, I do know—we were given a support system of family, friends and neighbors."

The run to the Final Four last spring served as a Thompson family catharsis. For John III and Monica, says Ronny, "it was really the first time there was nothing major they were dealing with." The emotions rattling inside Big John, whose own father had died before Georgetown reached its three NCAA title games in four years during the early 1980s, left him speechless during the overtime win against North Carolina, even though Westwood One was paying him to do the game as a radio analyst.

AS OFTEN as not, Big John, 66, may be found on winter afternoons in McDonough Arena. His son leaves a chair out for him. The father is usually in sweats, sometimes shrouded by a hoodie; and he's usually silent, a condition he so rarely submitted to during his coaching career. If he has any piece to say, he has unburdened himself of much of it earlier in the afternoon as cohost of his sports radio talk show.

"You notice," he says, in reference to his son, "he coaches without a whistle?" Big John had used three whistles—different tones to signal different messages.

Simply by hanging around he can do himself a great pleasure, which he calls "meddling." This does not entail pelting his boy with X's and O's. A few weeks ago John III told Pops that he was headed off to watch a recruit. "You need to get home and get some rest," came the reply. "And there's reports of black ice out there."

John III went to the game anyway. "He's wrapped up in basketball, and I enjoy fussing," Big John says. "That's why I meddle. Now, he just has to keep from seeing me as seeing him as my little boy."

From his seat in McDonough, the elder Thompson sometimes reaches for the clipboard and pen that John III has hung on the wall beside the chair, so he might make a note to share. Sometimes he nods off to sleep. If he were to look up to his right, he could see where, during a game in his third season, in 1975, someone unfurled a bedsheet emblazoned with THOMPSON, THE N----- FLOP, MUST GO.

Growing up, John III saw his father bring home from the office a bag of hate mail every few months. "Wackos," as John III calls them, phoned and sometimes showed up at the family home. A sportswriter in Utah called his father "the Idi Amin of college basketball," while opposing fans greeted one of his dad's players, Patrick Ewing, with banana peels and signs alleging that he couldn't read. "For every positive John Thompson story there was a negative one," his son recalls. Given all that, what son, if he were to hold the same position at the same school as his father did, wouldn't burrow himself into each moment?

John III is not apolitical—his senior thesis was on Black Separatists and Nationalists in the 1980s—and one day he may be ready to pick a battle or two, but where exactly is the advantage now? Especially when there's a pass out there, waiting to be properly thrown.

Of course, all the father's trailblazing made the son's blinkered focus possible. You can get lost if you wander—and Papa was a rolling stone, wading into issue after issue in a way his own father never could, for the first John Thompson had been yanked from school as a child to work the fields of southern Maryland. John Jr. pinned green ribbons on his players' uniforms in 1981 to raise awareness of the Atlanta child murders; he walked off the court in '89 to signal the injustice he saw in the NCAA's Proposition 42; and a year later he met with Rayful Edmonds III, the most notorious drug dealer in D.C., to tell him to stay away from his players. "I don't feel I was ever in a position where I could just be a basketball coach," he says. "If I were in a meeting or in public, I felt an obligation to speak up. People criticize Michael Jordan for not doing more in the public sphere. But Bill Russell and Jim Brown did what they did so Michael Jordan wouldn't have to."