Sad news… Georgetown men basketball head coach has been suspended from all sports activities for placing a bet against…..
there were so often spent without heat, eating mayonnaise sandwiches because
there was no meat and cornflakes with water because there was no milk. Ed
Cooley put aside those circumstances to become Rhode Island’s high school
basketball player of the year and later the state’s most recognizable face.
Eventually, he was presented the key to the city of Providence. All he had to do
was stay at Providence College, where his home arena was a mile from his
childhood stomping grounds, and his statue would have joined those of Friars
legends Joe Mullaney and Dave Gavitt outside the school’s $30 million practice facility.
The place can seem perfect, inseparable from who the person is. It can also be suffocating.
“I was raised by a community,” Cooley said, sitting in the John R. Thompson Jr.
Intercollegiate Athletic Center, where he walks past the statue not of Mullaney or
Gavitt but of Thompson — because he is the men’s basketball coach not at Providence but at Georgetown.
on Saturday — is that he walks past Thompson’s statue and works in a
building named for Thompson but isn’t beholden to the Thompson legacy. Think
about what a break that is for that school. Big John took over his hometown
program in 1972. In the years since, the Hoyas employed his top assistant (Craig
Esherick), his son (John Thompson III) and arguably his most iconic player (
Patrick Ewing). That’s a half century of a single man’s influence, which means
Cooley takes this job on a tightrope — which he’s only too glad to walk.