Don’t let the acoustics in McDonough Gymnasium fool you. The bouncing balls and squeaking sneakers are the sources of incessant echoing from Midnight Madness to March, but if you listen closely, there is a different sort of echo that is just as persistent in this bastion of ballers.
The source of these reverberations is senior point guard and captain, Jonathan Wallace. Sure, his Nikes do their share of wailing. He pounds the ball during his patented spin-dribble—the one that marks the initiation of his offense—so that the sound booms through the rafters. But even for the quiet kid from Harvest, Alabama, the most notable sounds are the ones coming from his mouth. Thank John Thompson III for that.
The two are inseparable—their humility, their Hoyacentric rhetoric, even their silence.
“Neither one of us likes to yap too much,” Thompson said at the team’s media day. “But Jon Wallace is someone that I trust. I trust him with the game. I trust him with doing things. I trust Jon Wallace as someone that gives you an honest day’s effort. I think we have had a pretty good relationship from the beginning.”
The beginning for these two seems unlikely now, seeing as the two men have nothing but praise for each other. Even as Thompson’s first real recruit (the rest of the class of 2008 was brought to Georgetown by former coach Craig Esherick), Wallace wasn’t immediately in line to become his coach’s right-hand man.
From an 80-acre farm in rural Alabama to the cobblestoned roads of Georgetown, Wallace followed Thompson on an uncertain ride. Wallace was promised plenty of playing time with Thompson at Princeton, but after Thompson took the Georgetown job in 2004, Wallace followed—and was designated a walk-on.
“In trying to get him to come here, I told him he’d never play,” Thompson said. “Now he hardly ever comes out.”
Wallace has been starting since his first year as a Hoya—despite his coach’s predictions—and hasn’t looked back since earning a scholarship. He has led his team to consecutive NCAA tournament births that landed them in the Sweet Sixteen and Final Four. Before last season, many perceived the young guard who was supposed to play Ivy-league ball as a skill-less brain on the floor, successful simply because he does not make mistakes. But his abilities are not to be discounted. He made half of the shots he took last year and led the talented Big East in three-point accuracy at 49 percent.
Shooting over a broom held high by his mother in gyms back in Alabama gave him his high-arching shot, but Thompson can take a little more of the credit for the rest of his game. Wallace is the coach on the floor. The players know it. And in arenas like the raucous Carrier Dome, Thompson knows it too. It’s all on Jon, and he’s fine with that.
“I trust his instincts,” Thompson said. “I trust the person that he is. He usually makes the right decisions, and very seldomly does he take a shot that I don’t think is going in.”
“Jon is a great coach on the floor,” backcourt-mate Jesse Sapp said. “I think Jon sees the floor better than a lot of people think. We call a timeout and Jon talks about what he sees. We go with that. Coach goes with that, and we score.”
When sophomore forward DaJuan Summers was pressed on the similarities between his coach on the sidelines and his general on the floor, he conceded their likenesses with a laugh. “He’s kind of like a baby Coach, I’ll say that.”
Like a mini-Thompson, Wallace has learned the coach’s craftiness, both on the court and with the media. It’s not that he’s got a pull-string on his back, it’s just that he’s eaten all the humble pie that comes with a career under Thompson.
“Forget everything that happened last year,” Wallace said, punctuating his statement with a quick chuckle like his coach tends to do.
It’s not an unconscious imitation either. Wallace understands that much of their success lies in relaying his coach’s basketball ideals.
“Coach and I talk all the time,” said Wallace. “Me being in the position I am, I try to grasp the mentality that he has and his structure of doing things and carry that over to the floor.”
If Thompson’s biased praise isn’t enough, just listen around the league.
“The X-factor for them is Jonathan Wallace,” Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin said. “The way he shoots the ball, the way he runs the team. He’s probably the best pure point-guard in our league as far as efficiency in doing his job.”
“The person that doesn’t get nearly enough credit, not only in our league, but in the entire country is Jonathan Wallace,” Marquette coach Tom Crean said. “Look at him last year, with what Jeff Green and Roy did, and what the freshman did. Jon Wallace is the one that makes everything go.”
