So, Jesse, I want to very quickly here just talk about the blurbs on the back of this book that you did with John Thompson because it might be the most impressive collection of blurbs I've ever seen.

We have Michael Jordan, President Bill Clinton, Patrick Ewing, Phil Knight from Nike, Coach K,

Alan Iverson.

What does that list of people say about the life of John Thompson?

Man, it doesn't say enough because he's got more, like we only had so much real estate

on the back of the book.

Jesse Washington is a senior writer for The Undefeated and the co-author of the late

John Thompson's autobiography, I Came As a Shadow, which he wrote in tandem with the legendary

Georgetown coach.

What it says is that this is a man who grew up in segregation,

the son of a mother who was not able to use her college teaching degree and had to scrub

floors and clean toilets and white folks' homes. The son of a man who was not permitted to go to school as a child

and had to go work in the fields and as a result could not read or write.

And grew up to affect hundreds of lives directly through his coaching,

thousands of lives through his example, and met every president

after Gerald Ford and was so humble about it. I mean, we were working on the book one day,

and he was looking for some sort of, in a Providence Yearbook for some mention of something,

and a piece of paper flew out and fell on the

ground and I picked it up and it was a letter of appreciation from President George Bush.

Just as an afterthought.

And I was like, coach, he was like, oh yeah, put it over there.

And then he forgot about it.

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