I Came As a Shadow by John Thompson

Author:John Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

* * *

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH Nike became important about this time. I had signed my first endorsement deal with the company in 1977, after having been told that they were paying college coaches to outfit their teams in Nike gear. I was an economics major, so you didn’t have to tell me twice. I went out to the company’s headquarters in Oregon and met with Nike founder Phil Knight and marketing chief Rob Strasser. To say they were small-time then would be generous. We met in a hotel room where they had clothing hanging up on racks, the kind with wheels that you can push down the street. I decided to work with them, mostly because I liked Phil. He had a lot of rebellious ideas, which appealed to that part of my nature. Plus, compared with companies like Adidas and Converse, who had all the big colleges, Nike was an underdog. That’s how I felt too.

In the 1983–84 season, we wore custom gray and navy blue Nikes with HOYAS printed around the heel. This was before Michael’s first Air Jordan. Black kids were starting to make sneakers popular for fashion at that time. They loved Georgetown, and when they wore our shoes, it helped Nike establish the rebellious image it wanted to project.

It also helped that we played in the Big East, which had become one of the best conferences in the country. Aside from talent, we had characters and story lines. We had a mystique. It was Big John vs. Little Louie. Syracuse vs. Georgetown. Tough, physical, gritty games, similar to the cities we came from. Star players like Chris Mullin, Pearl Washington, Mark Jackson, and Michael Adams. Syracuse’s Carrier Dome was the biggest college basketball arena in the country with more than thirty thousand seats. Television loved us. Dave Gavitt’s brilliance was now obvious to everyone.

I used various starting lineups that season, depending on who was playing well, the opponent, and other factors. Our players were extremely unselfish and sacrificed points or playing time for the sake of the team. Not everybody was happy about it, but they were mature enough to handle it. It helped that Patrick didn’t care about scoring all the points and always shared credit with his teammates.

I deliberately scheduled easy nonconference games at the start of the season. The Big East was tough enough, we didn’t need to beat ourselves up before those games. We won some early games by 40, 50, and 60 points before losing by two at DePaul. We won the next eight games before Rollie Massimino and Villanova used a sagging zone that clogged the middle to beat us at our place in double overtime. Then came another ten-game winning streak. Teams tried everything against us. Boston College tried to run with us; we beat them 92–83. Providence slowed it down; they lost 59–38. We won the rematch against Villanova at the Spectrum in Philly, but we lost to St. John’s, 75–71, when Chris Mullin had 33 points.

Mullin is the only player I ever told my guys to touch.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.