PROVIDENCE -- He was 6 years old when his father became the Georgetown coach in 1972. He was 16 when his father became a national figure, the most infuential black coach in the country.

"I've always been Big John's little boy," said John Thompson III. "I don't run from it. Not that I could if I wanted to. That's who I am."

He was at Brown Friday night to receive an award honoring him as the Black Coaches Association male coach of the year, an award named for Fritz Pollard, the Brown star of the 1916 Rose Bowl who went to become the first African-American quarterback and coach in the NFL; a man who spent his life fighting for social justice, a man decades ahead of his time.

And it was not without a certain sense of symmetry, given that it was here in Providence that Thompson's father came from Washington, D.C., in 1960 to go to Providence College, the first leg of a basketball journey that now has him in the Hall of Fame.

"He told me he was good," said Thompson with a smile. "He also told me he was a lot thinner."

He was thinner. And he was good, too.

But it was not his playing career that made John Thompson a national name. It was that he arguably was the first famous black coach, a presence in ways no one had ever been before. Proud. Iconoclastic. Controversial. Outspoken. An advocate for black athletes. And complicated, too. The child of racism who didn't have any white players.

That was the perception anyway, and back then, in those days of "Hoya Paranoia," Georgetown was black America's team, and John Thompson was more than just a basketball coach. Rollie Massimino once asked, "outside of Jesse Jackson, what black is any more visible than John?"

At the time, it was a legitimate question.

All this, and 6-foot-10, too.

But beneath the presence, there was a message, too, one symbolized by a deflated basketball Thompson always kept on his desk. The message? One day the ball isn't going to bounce any more, and then what? One day there's going to have to be a second act.

John Thompson III grew up with all of this.

How was it?

"That's a difficult question to answer," he said. "I never knew anything else."

In the mid-'80s, Georgetown as good a college basketball program in the country, his father a towering figure in the game, John Thompson III went to Princeton. Went to the Ivy League, an overwhelmingly white campus, and textbook basketball that looked as if it came out of some '50s movie.

"I went to Princeton because of Pete Carril," he said. "And I was lucky to go to Princeton. I had parents who were willing to pay for me to go. I was very lucky."

On the surface, it seems like a strange decision, John Thompson's son going to lily-white Princeton. But only on the surface. Carril was the kind of strong presence his father was. To this day, the younger Thompson says his coaching styles are a combination of his father's and Carril's, as disparate as that might seem.

John Thompson III went on to be a good player on excellent Ivy League teams. He also decided he wanted to be a coach, a decision that caused his father to call him a fool. John Thompson wasn't sending his kid to Princeton to be a basketball coach.

But a basketball coach John Thompson III became.

An excellent one.

He was an assistant at Princeton. He was the coach of Princeton for four years, winning three Ivy titles. Two and a half years ago he went back to Georgetown, to the program his father once built, to the one he had grown up around, to a program that was slipping into irrelevency, the glory days gone, just memories and rust.

Pressure?

The pressure of being another John Thompson at Georgetown?

He says he doesn't feel any, outside of the pressure all coaches feel to win games, do well.

Then again, there's never been a time in his life when he wasn't John Thompson's kid, so what's the big deal? He says how he'd be playing in high school and someone would be yelling at him about Georgetown. How he'd be playing in college and it was the same thing. Georgetown. His father. He learned early that trying to outrun either of them was like trying to outrun a shadow.

Consider his name.

When he first started coaching at Princeton he was John Thompson III. Then a couple of years into it he was called John Thompson, no III. So wouldn't you know it. Soon there were stories about how now he was finally comfortable enough to drop the III. The only problem was that it has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with a new sports information director.

Thompson laughs when he tells the story. John Thompson. John Thompson III. It's all the same to him.

That, too, is telling.

For he came across Friday night in his acceptance speech as nothing if not comfortable. Comfortable with who he is. Comfortable with where he is. Comfortable with the basketball legacy that's always been his life. Comfortable in his own skin.

When he first got to Georgetown he was asked how much his father was going to be around, the implication being was he going to be allowed to be his own person, or was his father's large shadow always going to be in the room, too?

Bottom line?

It doesn't matter.

Especially when last season he got Georgetown into the Sweet 16, and got the buzz back, too. One of the great coaching jobs in the country.

So call him John Thompson III. Call him John Thompson.

Call him anything you want.

He knows who he is.

breynold@projo.com / (401) 277-7340