Remembering John Thompson Jr., 1941–2020: The longtime

entered a long discussion with players on the Dream. Not all of the players felt comfortable sitting out. Some wondered if that meant the end of the season. WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert was also there, and Atkins says she told the players that she didn’t want them to be silenced by not playing and encouraged the team not to give up airtime by striking. In the end, the Mystics collectively made the decision to postpone the game, and no WNBA games were played that night or the following day. Engelbert would later express pride for her players and tell ESPN that the league “absolutely” supported the players’ decision. Both the NBA and WNBA have since resumed play.

“It was a demonstration of our ability to choose what we get to do,” Atkins says, when asked if she considers what the team did a boycott or strike. “If we feel the need to make a statement and that statement is not playing, then we have the choice to do that … This wasn’t a self-care day. This wasn’t a reflection day. It was a day to show people that not only do we stand in solidarity with our NBA brothers, but we understand that when you get down to the gist of things … it becomes a game of life, as crazy and drastic as that sounds. That’s what it feels like you’re telling us, to choose our community or to choose to play a game, a game that we all love, and yes, we get paid to do it. But we do have to understand that sometimes things are just bigger than the game.”

In an image that quickly went viral, every player set to play that night is seen kneeling and linking arms. Staff members also have arms linked, and in the front row is a 5-year-old named Emanuel. The young child is wearing a red shirt. Next to him is his mother, Mystics forward Tianna Hawkins. Recently, she’s had to explain to him why he can’t play with a Nerf gun outside, like they’ve seen White kids do.

“We’re tired. We’re frustrated. We’re pissed off,” Hawkins says. “Me personally, I was emotional. Just because putting on that T-shirt with seven bullet holes in my back, raising a young man, a soon to be young man, just knowing that that could be him in the next 12 to 13 years. We’re tired.”

Many of the Mystics players also personally know someone who has been directly affected by police brutality. Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, a former Mystics player now with the Los Angeles Sparks, lost her cousin, who was shot and killed by an off-duty Arlington deputy sheriff in 2013.

This is why, for Atkins, speaking up for Black lives is not a political statement. It’s her reality.

In every graphic, gruesome, heart-wrenching video of Black men being shot, she sees her brother, her dad, her cousins, and her uncles. She sees herself in Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed while she was sleeping at home in Louisville, Kentucky.

“I sleep at night; every night, I’m doing nothing, no different than what she was doing when I’m sleeping at my home,” Atkins says. “There’s things that people say that we can do to avoid these situations, and it’s hard to avoid a situation where your skin is seen as a weapon, your skin is seen as something that works against you ... We wake up Black.”

Remembering John Thompson Jr., 1941–2020 The Basketball Hall of Fame member and first Black coach to win the men’s NCAA basketball championship made Georgetown’s program his own.

Courtesy of Georgetown University

By Leonard Shapiro

Contributing Writer The news that legendary Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson Jr. had died Sunday, Aug. 30, at 78 released a rush of memories dating back 50 years.

I first met and interviewed “Big John” in his tiny office at St. Anthony’s High School in Northeast Washington. The small Catholic school no longer exists, but that’s where Thompson’s storied coaching career began in 1966, a year after he retired as a reserve center for the Boston Celtics. Thompson was the back-up for the great Bill Russell, a perennial All-Star and first ballot Hall of Famer, and most of his playing action occurred either in practice or during “garbage time” at the end of games, when the dominant Celtics were far ahead on the scoreboard.

Tired of the travel and disappointed about being chosen by Chicago in an expansion draft, he decided to retire and return to his native D.C., where he had played on arguably the greatest team in local high school basketball history at Archbishop Carroll High School.

The Lions won three straight city titles and John Thompson Jr.

Thompson and teammates Tom Hoover, Edward “Monk” Malloy, and George Leftwich all earned Division I scholarships. Thompson, 6-foot-10 and close to 300 pounds, started at Providence College for three straight years. Malloy played at Notre Dame, joined the priesthood, and later served as the university’s president. Leftwich and Hoover starred at Villanova University. A knee injury ended Leftwich’s pro chances, and he later came back to coach the Carroll team himself. Hoover, a rugged 6-foot-9 forward, had a long pro career in the NBA and now defunct American Basketball Association.

The coverage of Thompson’s career in the coming days surely will focus on his 27 seasons at Georgetown University, where his teams won seven Big East championships, played in three Final Fours, and earned the school’s only national championship in 1984. In doing so, Thompson became the first Black head coach to win an NCAA men’s basketball title.

I have other memories, one of them triggered not long ago when I opened up a rarely used desk drawer looking for who knows what and instead found a yellowed, 48-year-old copy of the Washington Post Magazine, once known as Potomac, dated Aug. 27, 1972.

“Heroes of the City Game” was the cover headline, and inside was a story about playground basketball I had written, mostly at Thompson’s suggestion. He had only recently been named the Georgetown coach, and still occasionally played pickup basketball around the city and offered to give me a guided tour one weekend earlier that summer.

He took me to Watkins Playground in Southeast D.C. Those courts were known back then as the “House of Champions” because so many legendary local players had made it their home concrete on the way to the NBA. Among them were Hall of Famers like Elgin Baylor, Dave Bing, and Austin Carr.

That day, he introduced me to 25-yearold Ronald Cunningham, best known as “Biggie,” an apt description for a chiseled 6-foot-5 behemoth who weighed 240 pounds and scattered other big bodies any time he headed to the hoop. He had played for three years at the University of Utah before dropping out and returning home to drive a truck and raise his family.

Biggie in turn introduced me to the term “boguarding.” As I wrote back then, “when Biggie takes his man to the basket and bulls his way in for a lay-up on sheer brute strength, he has boguarded his opponent. When Biggie tells a smaller dude he has next [game] when he really doesn’t, and the little fellow agrees, Biggie is the boguarder; the shrimp, in effect, the boguardee … ‘If you can’t take it,’ says Biggie, ‘You get off the court.’”

I also quoted Thompson in that story.

“It’s always important to get a boguarder on your team,” he said. “There’s no referee on the playground, and there’s always some kind of dispute about the score, about who’s got the down. The boguarder is generally the guy who wins the argument. If you don’t have a big guy with a reputation, you’ll lose.”

In many respects, Thompson was the ultimate boguarder as Georgetown’s basketball coach. He did it his way, and if you don’t like it, take a hike.

If you wanted to make fun of his early-season schedule against puff-ball opposition, go right ahead.

If he closed his locker room to the media after games, too bad.

If he wanted his team to stay in a hotel and hold a closed practice 60 miles from a Final Four site, that’s your problem, not his.

If you want to call that “Hoya Paranoia,” feel free. It wasn’t going to change.

And if he decided to walk off the court at the start of a game to stage his own personal protest of a new NCAA rule he felt racially discriminated against minority athletes, just deal with it.

It was his way or the highway, and who could argue with the results—a 596-239 record, a 98 percent graduation rate for players who stayed in the program for four years, and the development of Hall of Fame players like Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, and Allen Iverson.

Thompson was always a big guy with a welldeserved reputation. A boguarder through and through, to the very end.