'Big John Is Still Big John'

"He said, 'I'm sending you back to your father in Kinshasa, Zaire,' " Mutombo said, referring to the capital and the country's former name. "Big John said, 'Go back home so you can work in [former president] Mobutu's army.'

"I could not believe it. I said: 'I had a horrible toothache and got my tooth removed. That is why I missed school.' He told me I should have scheduled time around school to take care of my tooth. It was chaos in my life. I thought it was the end of my education. I told the advisers, 'Why is he doing this?' One day I miss. Can you imagine?"

Mutombo never missed another day of school in four years. He returned to the Congo many times during an NBA career that is now in the midst of a renaissance at age 40. Mutombo soon will open a hospital there.

"Big John's teaching was very powerful," Mutombo said. "He always emphasized education and life. Sometimes we would be at the gym for four or five hours. But three of those were him asking questions about life, questions about school, the direction he wanted us to go when we leave the university, how we should interact in business relationships."

Mutombo was one of 27 Thompson players chosen in the NBA draft and one of eight taken in the first round. More impressively, he is one of 76, out of 78, who stayed four years and received their degrees from Georgetown -- a 97 percent graduation rate.

Still, when Thompson twice walked off the Capital Centre court to protest the use of standardized test scores to determine freshman athletic eligibility, critics dismissed his position as an effort to ensure his ability to liberally recruit from the inner city.

"Everything I said or did, people interpreted it was for an athletic reason," Thompson said. "Sometimes they were right, but a hell of a lot of times they were not. Every breath I took -- as the song said, 'Every Move I Make' -- didn't relate to winning a basketball game. Or my life would have been very shallow."

In December, during a kickoff dinner for the 100th anniversary of Georgetown basketball at the Great Falls home of Georgetown alumnus and Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis, Thompson thanked the university for having his back when it was unpopular to have a socially conscious, loud and large black man as its coach.

"I was able to be who I was," Thompson said. "The fact that they didn't impose their will and desire on me to be homogenized or step in line with things that were not controversial, to be the black person they wanted me to be. . . . I couldn't have been what I was unless my university permitted me to be that."

'Big John Didn't Change'

Certainly no one is asking Thompson today to be anything other than what he is, though some speculate on how much, if at all, that person has changed. Ronny Thompson, for one, does not view his father as a suddenly mellowed man.

"I think we as a society have become more accepting of some things, where someone like my dad may be more tolerated than before," Ronny said.

Said Mutombo: "Maybe you think Big John has softened up. I don't know, Big John is still Big John. Generations changed; Big John didn't change."