“Thompson leads Hoyas to the Sweet Sixteen.”  Reading that headline from the paper two weeks ago, I couldn’t help but smile.  A quarter century ago, when life on Georgetown’s Hilltop campus revolved around the basketball team and its star, Patrick Ewing, the Hoyas were coached by Hall of Famer John Thompson II.   During Ewing’s four year career under JT II, Georgetown made the NCAA Championship Final three times. They won the championship title with a win over Hakeem Olajuwon and Houston in 1984.  From that point on, 20-win seasons, Big East titles, NCAA tournament bids, and blue-chip recruits became annual expectations for the Georgetown Basketball Team.  Under JT II, prized recruits Alonzo Mourning, Othella Harrington and Allen Iverson followed and Georgetown established itself as a premier basketball program.

    In 1998, Big John handed the reins over to his longtime assistant Craig Esherick.  Esherick never stood a chance of stepping out of the shadow cast by his 6-foot, 10-inch mentor.  After a six-year decline into mediocrity, the Georgetown faithful were screaming for a change and a return to the halcyon days of the 80’s.  So Georgetown turned once again to John Thompson, not Big John, but his son John Thompson III.   Expectations immediately soared for the Hoyas.  JT III was coming off a successful run as head coach at Princeton, his alma mater, where he mastered the school’s intricate offense originated by the legendary Pete Carrill.

    Surely, high school phenoms would now come to the Hilltop simply because of the Thompson name.  Certainly, JT III had inherited his father’s coaching genes.  The pressure on John Thompson III to produce quickly was enormous.  Not to mention the added factor of jumping from the genteel environment of the Ivy League to the rough and tumble world of the Big East.  The Georgetown faithful began to print up “Beast of the East” and “Hoya Paranoia” shirts and signs in anticipation of the return to the upper echelon of college hoops.  Throughout this pressure-filled atmosphere, John Thompson III, to his credit, maintained that he was his own man with a coaching style and philosophy different from his famous father.   This is not what the crowd wanted to hear, they wanted intimidation, shots being sent back in opponents’ faces, and full-court pressure like the old days. “I hope that when you look at our teams, you see some similarities between what we do and what they did, but at the same time I don’t get caught up in ’Let’s do this because Pops did it this way,”’ Thompson said.

    JT III stuck to his guns, coached his way, and led the Hoyas to a 19-13 record and the quarterfinals on the NIT in his debut season.  He followed this up with a trip to the round of sixteen in the NCAA’s, where they were the only team to give eventual-champion Florida a close battle.  With the team’s two big stars, Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert, returning for this season, pre-season hype for the Hoyas reached 1980’s proportions.  The Hoyas were on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s College Basketball Preview issue.

    This year, add to the mix, Patrick Ewing.  Not the Hoya Destroya of years past, but his son, Patrick Ewing Jr., a transfer from Indiana the previous year.  Never has a transferring player with two-year averages of 3.4 points and 3.7 rebounds faced this level of expectation at his new school.  Ewing and Thompson together again??!!!!  Just hand the Hoyas the trophy.

    The remarkable thing is that both John Thompson III and Patrick Ewing Jr. have emerged from the pressure to establish themselves in their own way.  Patrick Jr. had the sense to realize that his contribution would not come in the form of twenty point, ten rebound, five block performances, but in much subtler ways.  Down the stretch run of the season, during which the Hoyas have won 16 out of 17 games, Ewing has made himself into a valuable contributor through timely steals, lock-down defense and opportunistic rebounding.  Meanwhile, JT III has HIS Hoyas playing silky smooth offense and stick-to- your-man defense. 

While doing it their own way, this John Thompson and Patrick Ewing have the Hoyas on the verge of a National Championship for the first time since the days of their fathers.