As the Georgetown University Hoyas prepare for Saturday's Final Four showdown with the Ohio St. Buckeyes, the media is focused on the matchup between Hibbert and Oden and on telling stories about the past. On the surface, the reason for this nostalgia is straightforward. The Hoyas have reached the Final Four for the first time in twenty years led by John Thompson III, the son of the iconic Hoyas coach, John Thompson Jr., who first put the school's name on the basketball map, and the team's emotional leader is Patrick Ewing Jr., the son of the Hoya and NBA great Patrick Ewing Sr., who's talent and spirit solidified the Hoyas early 80s dominance into three Final Four appearances in four years. But this Hoya team is as different from those Hoyas teams as that Washington D.C. was from today's.
How many of you remember the Sports Illustrated cover 23 years ago after the Hoyas completely dismantled a Guy Lewis coached Houston Cougars squad featuring Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler to win their first national title? Graham Slam was the headline and it depicted a bald-headed Michael Graham finishing a ferocious slam dunk. The Hoyas had thrown the title away two years before when Freddie Brown gave away a pass in the last seconds after Michael Jordan's game-winning baseline jumpshot. But in 1984 the Hoyas, still with Brown at point guard, rode Patrick Ewing and a savage frontline featuring a 26 year-old ex-soldier named Ronnie Highsmith and the out-of-nowhere transfer from UDC Michael Graham to an absolutely dominant victory over a great college team. I was nine years old at the time and I owned the Hoyas mini basketball, two t-shirts, and the sweet painter's cap. I was in heaven.
What's a Hoya? That question can be answered on many levels. The anecdotal explanation is that it is a Latin word for rock, thus the erudite Georgetown cheer Hoya Saxa! What Rocks? Hoya Saxa? What Rocks? I am not a Latin scholar, but I think the cheer is more accurately translated as What's a Rock? Or What's a Hoya? completing the ellipsis and indicating the deeper epistemological funny that the theologically minded student body was originally after when the cheer was created.
But whatever you think of the cheer, the question remains. What is a Hoya? It's not a bulldog clearly, which is the team's mascot. The Hoya itself is a symbol of contradiction. For example, why are the Georgetown Hoyas at one time the darlings of the DC Catholic elite and a national black power symbol? The answers to those questions lie in the strange relationship the university has with the city in which it is situated and in the strange relationship John Thompson Jr., former Boston Celtic, had with the university itself.
DC history lesson first. A predominantly black city, or Chocolate City if you prefer, that received a heavy migration of rural African Americans from North Carolina and Virginia in the 1960s. What the world knows of DC from the news and the movies is called NW Washington DC, an area which includes neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, Cleveland Park, the Gold Coast, and, of course, Georgetown. Georgetown is the city's colonial wharf district and generally speaking its most posh neighborhood. The place you will find the fanciest shops and the most expensive people. The greater bulk of the city is not wealthy and not white, and the part of DC that lies on the opposite side of the Anacostia River has historically been one of the most hopeless urban areas in America. It's not three miles from our country's most ostentatious symbols of wealth and power, the marbleized monumented lawn called the Mall. How can that be?
The Federal government has very little impact on DC outside of the Mall. Most of its employees live in the suburbs. DC loses out on tax dollars as a result of all the land the Feds occupy tax free and its citizens don't really have a vote because it's somehow not appropriate, but other than that Federal DC and real DC don't really interact. White DC and Black DC don't interact much either. That is not to say that all wealth in DC is white. It's not. There has always been a considerable black elite in DC, and like all elites, it has grown more powerful in the last ten years.
I cannot explain all of the historical, social, and racial forces that effect DC in this little blog, but I can tell you that Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, sits on the most expensive piece of real estate in a city of cities-within-cities that was run for over thirty years by Mayor Marion Barry, a hero of the Civil Rights movement, a felon, a coke-head, a leader. Georgetown's not even the only major Catholic University in DC. Its more papally-inclined crosstown rival, the Catholic University of America, has terrible sports though. Is there, was there, can there be anyway to bring sense to the tribal mess that is our nation's capital?
The answer is, or was, that in the mid-1980s John Thompson and his Hoyas were universally loved in a town where people share nothing. The 1980s were rough time in DC. White flight and city corruption had crippled the city, which was a burned out hulk of what it had once been. Meanwhile a place like Georgetown became the school for Latin America's most elite families, and white DC continued to prosper, as it always does.
Thompson built a basketball powerhouse from scratch on the principles that his city was black and his team would be too, that he would not give up on his players, and that they would work for him harder than they would work for themselves. At the same time he was able to recruit Patrick Ewing, a Jamerican seven-footer who revolutionized paint defense. Some will remember Ewing as a rickety, cranky fade-away jump shooter for the New York Knicks. That would be to forget the dominant athletic presence that made him the best college play of his moment. He sent opponent's shots into the stands. He rattled the stanchions of the basket with his dunks. His roars reached the rafters of the Cap Center. The wind from the punch he threw at Pearl Washington is still blowing in Indonesia.
Perhaps the most intriguing twist to the Hoya story is how the basketball team from an elite Jesuit institution became a national symbol of blackness? It happened in stages. At the same moment when political rap by Public Enemy and BDP was filling the streets of the country's major cities, John Thompson was an imposing black man coaching a hard-nosed discipline black basketball team to glory. One of the defining moments of Thompson's outspoken struggle with the white status quo of college basketball was when, having already won his first championship, the fight over Proposition 48 came to a boil. John Thompson and Nolan Richardson of Arkansas said publicly that the SAT scores were biased against African-Americans athletes, and that to bar athletes the chance to go to school on their basis was unfair. Thompson forgot to read the Reagan era memo about not mixing sports and politics, and his philosophically liberal Jesuit superiors pretty much backed him in the public fight. Meanwhile he was accused of using his players, of not caring if they could go to school.
John Thompson was the first black college coach to be a superstar, and the fact that he's 6'9" and has the voice of a sleepy Southern grizzly bear made him very difficult to avoid as a public presence. He used his stature to build a program. I mean no matter who you are you had to love the pictures of him towering over and yelling at Jim Boeheim, who like Ivan Lendl is one of those guys everyone hated but now loves because they got long in the tooth. If you were a black high school player choosing between them, who would you choose?
What Thompson really did was to instill pride in his guys, in his university and eventually in his city. So that when I was growing up, even the players on DC youth basketball powerhouse #10 Police Boys Club (or Kingman in AAU vernacular), when they sang out their fast-paced motto at half-court, patience, teamwork, discipline, defense, DC pride! they were thinking about becoming Georgetown Hoyas. White and Black, all of us were.
I attended on all boys religious prep school in DC, just like John Thomspon III and Roy Hibbert did, and I literally prayed that the Hoyas would win. The Big John era had many stages, most notable Reggie and the Miracles, Zo and Dikembe, and finally The Answer. What they all had in common was an unapologetic afro-centric pride backed by an elite white institution in one of the world's great media centers.
Towards the end of his career, and as a direct result of Iverson's short career, the Hoyas sort of got street-cred, and became a thug symbol. Gangs who wear blue all over the country sported the Hoyas gear and Outkast's Big Boi coined a rhyme that ended, "We bulldoggin ho's like them Georgetown Hoyas." The reputation was not entirely undeserved. Iverson was thrown in jail as a freshman for a high school brawl in a bowling alley. His backcourt mate Victor Page has been shot in the face on two separate occasions on the same block where he grew up. What kind of monster had the Jesuit fathers created? And where was Big John taking his ship?
John Thompson Jr. is a magnificent figure, and has more layers than an onion. His daughter, Tiffany, was my classmate and contemporary growing up and I liked her a lot for her courage, candor, and gracefulness. She cared very little about basketball, despite her awesome bearing, but she had the same way of dealing with race, that is proudly, unapologetically, but subtly. Brothers JT III and Ronnie attended Gonzaga College H.S., another DC Catholic institution that prides itself on racial contradiction and the alma mater of former Pepperdine tennis great Matt Tight. Ronnie played for his dad at G-Town and JT III went to Princeton. My alma mater. Bob Bradley's alma mater. Bill Bradley's alma mater. Coach Mitch's alma mater. Yeah you too Jesse... And then he eventually took over the reins as coach there and had a very successful run before coming to Georgetown.
The point being that John Thompson Jr., while a lion of Afro-centrism, also knew that to build permanent power in this land of ours, you must go to its halls, enter its inner sanctum. So now that his son, John Thompson III has negotiated his own hero's journey and inherited his father's mantle officially, a new order has been created. He has also inherited through succession, the mantle of one of America's most cantankerous symbols of white basketball, Pete Carrill. The new order being created at Georgetown is one in which the Georgetown Hoyas, while still black, are the sons of professional athletes (Ewing, Rivers), or are Georgetown Prep kids (Hibbert), or were the HS student body president bound for Princeton (Wallace). And now the city is bubbling with pride all over again.
The city has changed too. Like most of America's big coastal cities, it has enjoyed a massive re-investment and re-population over the last ten years, and areas that were depressed when I was growing up, are thriving now. The rich have gotten richer. The kids who grew up in the burbs have moved back to the city. The Whites have un-flighted. The Mayor is Adrian Fenty, of the Corey Booker mold, a well-schooled, well-trained capitalist, and the city is still black and more powerful than ever. But the tension is still there. The way it always is when there's coming up going on.
After the Hoyas defeated North Carolina, JT III looked humbled by the experience, calmly and graciously shaking Roy Williams hand. Afterwards though, the took the mike and led the crowd in a cheer. Call: We Are Response: Georgetown. He said it had been his favorite growing up. It was mine too. We Are Georgetown. All of us. Black and White. Thanks to Big John. I would rather have his giant congratulatory paw on the back of my neck than any piece of fancy hardware in the world.
This Saturday the Hoyas will play the Buckeyes. They will run the Princeton offense. Hibbert will battle Oden. Green will contend for quietest player of the year ever. The Hoyas will win. And the people will say, We Are Georgetown. And then they'll go back to living in their little pieces of DC. John Thompson III is a better basketball coach than his father was, and his players are better too. But he has big shoes to fill as a political figure. For now Big John is there behind him at the broadcast table.
What's a Hoya? That question can be answered on many levels. The anecdotal explanation is that it is a Latin word for rock, thus the erudite Georgetown cheer Hoya Saxa! What Rocks? Hoya Saxa? What Rocks? I am not a Latin scholar, but I think the cheer is more accurately translated as What's a Rock? Or What's a Hoya? completing the ellipsis and indicating the deeper epistemological funny that the theologically minded student body was originally after when the cheer was created.
But whatever you think of the cheer, the question remains. What is a Hoya? It's not a bulldog clearly, which is the team's mascot. The Hoya itself is a symbol of contradiction. For example, why are the Georgetown Hoyas at one time the darlings of the DC Catholic elite and a national black power symbol? The answers to those questions lie in the strange relationship the university has with the city in which it is situated and in the strange relationship John Thompson Jr., former Boston Celtic, had with the university itself.
DC history lesson first. A predominantly black city, or Chocolate City if you prefer, that received a heavy migration of rural African Americans from North Carolina and Virginia in the 1960s. What the world knows of DC from the news and the movies is called NW Washington DC, an area which includes neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, Cleveland Park, the Gold Coast, and, of course, Georgetown. Georgetown is the city's colonial wharf district and generally speaking its most posh neighborhood. The place you will find the fanciest shops and the most expensive people. The greater bulk of the city is not wealthy and not white, and the part of DC that lies on the opposite side of the Anacostia River has historically been one of the most hopeless urban areas in America. It's not three miles from our country's most ostentatious symbols of wealth and power, the marbleized monumented lawn called the Mall. How can that be?
The Federal government has very little impact on DC outside of the Mall. Most of its employees live in the suburbs. DC loses out on tax dollars as a result of all the land the Feds occupy tax free and its citizens don't really have a vote because it's somehow not appropriate, but other than that Federal DC and real DC don't really interact. White DC and Black DC don't interact much either. That is not to say that all wealth in DC is white. It's not. There has always been a considerable black elite in DC, and like all elites, it has grown more powerful in the last ten years.
I cannot explain all of the historical, social, and racial forces that effect DC in this little blog, but I can tell you that Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, sits on the most expensive piece of real estate in a city of cities-within-cities that was run for over thirty years by Mayor Marion Barry, a hero of the Civil Rights movement, a felon, a coke-head, a leader. Georgetown's not even the only major Catholic University in DC. Its more papally-inclined crosstown rival, the Catholic University of America, has terrible sports though. Is there, was there, can there be anyway to bring sense to the tribal mess that is our nation's capital?
The answer is, or was, that in the mid-1980s John Thompson and his Hoyas were universally loved in a town where people share nothing. The 1980s were rough time in DC. White flight and city corruption had crippled the city, which was a burned out hulk of what it had once been. Meanwhile a place like Georgetown became the school for Latin America's most elite families, and white DC continued to prosper, as it always does.
Thompson built a basketball powerhouse from scratch on the principles that his city was black and his team would be too, that he would not give up on his players, and that they would work for him harder than they would work for themselves. At the same time he was able to recruit Patrick Ewing, a Jamerican seven-footer who revolutionized paint defense. Some will remember Ewing as a rickety, cranky fade-away jump shooter for the New York Knicks. That would be to forget the dominant athletic presence that made him the best college play of his moment. He sent opponent's shots into the stands. He rattled the stanchions of the basket with his dunks. His roars reached the rafters of the Cap Center. The wind from the punch he threw at Pearl Washington is still blowing in Indonesia.
Perhaps the most intriguing twist to the Hoya story is how the basketball team from an elite Jesuit institution became a national symbol of blackness? It happened in stages. At the same moment when political rap by Public Enemy and BDP was filling the streets of the country's major cities, John Thompson was an imposing black man coaching a hard-nosed discipline black basketball team to glory. One of the defining moments of Thompson's outspoken struggle with the white status quo of college basketball was when, having already won his first championship, the fight over Proposition 48 came to a boil. John Thompson and Nolan Richardson of Arkansas said publicly that the SAT scores were biased against African-Americans athletes, and that to bar athletes the chance to go to school on their basis was unfair. Thompson forgot to read the Reagan era memo about not mixing sports and politics, and his philosophically liberal Jesuit superiors pretty much backed him in the public fight. Meanwhile he was accused of using his players, of not caring if they could go to school.
John Thompson was the first black college coach to be a superstar, and the fact that he's 6'9" and has the voice of a sleepy Southern grizzly bear made him very difficult to avoid as a public presence. He used his stature to build a program. I mean no matter who you are you had to love the pictures of him towering over and yelling at Jim Boeheim, who like Ivan Lendl is one of those guys everyone hated but now loves because they got long in the tooth. If you were a black high school player choosing between them, who would you choose?
What Thompson really did was to instill pride in his guys, in his university and eventually in his city. So that when I was growing up, even the players on DC youth basketball powerhouse #10 Police Boys Club (or Kingman in AAU vernacular), when they sang out their fast-paced motto at half-court, patience, teamwork, discipline, defense, DC pride! they were thinking about becoming Georgetown Hoyas. White and Black, all of us were.
I attended on all boys religious prep school in DC, just like John Thomspon III and Roy Hibbert did, and I literally prayed that the Hoyas would win. The Big John era had many stages, most notable Reggie and the Miracles, Zo and Dikembe, and finally The Answer. What they all had in common was an unapologetic afro-centric pride backed by an elite white institution in one of the world's great media centers.
Towards the end of his career, and as a direct result of Iverson's short career, the Hoyas sort of got street-cred, and became a thug symbol. Gangs who wear blue all over the country sported the Hoyas gear and Outkast's Big Boi coined a rhyme that ended, "We bulldoggin ho's like them Georgetown Hoyas." The reputation was not entirely undeserved. Iverson was thrown in jail as a freshman for a high school brawl in a bowling alley. His backcourt mate Victor Page has been shot in the face on two separate occasions on the same block where he grew up. What kind of monster had the Jesuit fathers created? And where was Big John taking his ship?
John Thompson Jr. is a magnificent figure, and has more layers than an onion. His daughter, Tiffany, was my classmate and contemporary growing up and I liked her a lot for her courage, candor, and gracefulness. She cared very little about basketball, despite her awesome bearing, but she had the same way of dealing with race, that is proudly, unapologetically, but subtly. Brothers JT III and Ronnie attended Gonzaga College H.S., another DC Catholic institution that prides itself on racial contradiction and the alma mater of former Pepperdine tennis great Matt Tight. Ronnie played for his dad at G-Town and JT III went to Princeton. My alma mater. Bob Bradley's alma mater. Bill Bradley's alma mater. Coach Mitch's alma mater. Yeah you too Jesse... And then he eventually took over the reins as coach there and had a very successful run before coming to Georgetown.
The point being that John Thompson Jr., while a lion of Afro-centrism, also knew that to build permanent power in this land of ours, you must go to its halls, enter its inner sanctum. So now that his son, John Thompson III has negotiated his own hero's journey and inherited his father's mantle officially, a new order has been created. He has also inherited through succession, the mantle of one of America's most cantankerous symbols of white basketball, Pete Carrill. The new order being created at Georgetown is one in which the Georgetown Hoyas, while still black, are the sons of professional athletes (Ewing, Rivers), or are Georgetown Prep kids (Hibbert), or were the HS student body president bound for Princeton (Wallace). And now the city is bubbling with pride all over again.
The city has changed too. Like most of America's big coastal cities, it has enjoyed a massive re-investment and re-population over the last ten years, and areas that were depressed when I was growing up, are thriving now. The rich have gotten richer. The kids who grew up in the burbs have moved back to the city. The Whites have un-flighted. The Mayor is Adrian Fenty, of the Corey Booker mold, a well-schooled, well-trained capitalist, and the city is still black and more powerful than ever. But the tension is still there. The way it always is when there's coming up going on.
After the Hoyas defeated North Carolina, JT III looked humbled by the experience, calmly and graciously shaking Roy Williams hand. Afterwards though, the took the mike and led the crowd in a cheer. Call: We Are Response: Georgetown. He said it had been his favorite growing up. It was mine too. We Are Georgetown. All of us. Black and White. Thanks to Big John. I would rather have his giant congratulatory paw on the back of my neck than any piece of fancy hardware in the world.
This Saturday the Hoyas will play the Buckeyes. They will run the Princeton offense. Hibbert will battle Oden. Green will contend for quietest player of the year ever. The Hoyas will win. And the people will say, We Are Georgetown. And then they'll go back to living in their little pieces of DC. John Thompson III is a better basketball coach than his father was, and his players are better too. But he has big shoes to fill as a political figure. For now Big John is there behind him at the broadcast table.
 | LIST OF COMMENTS |
| 1/3. well put Written by Guest - Friday, March 30 2007 | |
Some very salient points here. I am a Georgetown (the neighborhood, not the University) native who grew up hopelessly uncoordinated and in the bottom tenth percentile in height during the first Thompson/Ewing era. While I did my best to ignore the Hoyas (and pretty much all other sports), the Georgetown-mania was inescapable and it certainly galvanized a very divided city. Now that I'm a huge fan, I'd love to be back in DC to get a sense of how palpable the excitement is over the current team's great run. I live way too close to St. John's now, and I can assure you that there's not a lot of Hoya-mania up here. | |
| 2/3. Re: Hoyas Written by gileser - Friday, March 30 2007 | |
No Hoya mania Uptown? I saw the NY Times ran a front page article on Georgetown's dodgy recruitment of a guy with no GPA. I was wondering if they weren't just mad Red Storm fans. Hoya appeal does seem to go beyond sports appeal. I wanted to mention other contradiction. That while G-town U had El Salvador's elite children, the rest of that country's mother's were pouring into Mt. Pleasant about the same time. Such a crazy city to grow up in... | |
| 3/3. Re: Hoyas Written by gileser - Monday, April 02 2007 | |
Well damn them Hoyas. What a boring game. Like one of those grappling matches. The opposite of what I thought would happen in that Oden and Hibbert, saddled with fouls, were both really good. Conley and Wallace were good. Green and Summers just didn't show at all and Ohio St. controlled the game Big Ten style. Yeeeegh! Oh well. Get em next time. It's just basketball, right. I love that about sports. You project great drama onto it and if you lose you just let it go. Let it go Mitchy let it go. | |
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