An Open Letter to Hoya Faithful

Dear Georgetown Fans, 

I stand before you today with a plea: let’s help bring Georgetown back. As a die-hard, self-described “Lifer” fan of this basketball team, I am forced by blood to believe that brighter days are ahead. But my reasoning for writing this article focuses less on the simply fantastic recruiting class Coach Ewing and his staff have put together and more on the role that we as fans are going to play in bringing the old, gritty, tough, and genuinely exciting version of Georgetown back. As quoted in ESPN’s 30 for 30 Requiem for the Big East, “The Big East meant toughness.”

Let’s not sugarcoat it: this season has sucked. From a global pandemic forcing us to watch games from home, to watching Georgetown blow leads to both inferior and significantly superior teams (*coughs* Villanova and West Virginia), it stinks. Plain and simple. However, the 2020-2021 campaign has recently shown life since our Hoyas returned from their three-week COVID-19 hiatus, and the team has looked surprisingly rejuvenated. Chudier Bile’s emergence as a downhill and aggressive player has led to (slightly) more consistent play and two straight wins over Providence and #15 Creighton. 

But regardless of whether or not this team pulls off the unfathomable task of returning to the NCAA Tournament in more than half a decade, this article is about what we can do when we (hopefully) return to seeing games in person again. I look at it this way: Loyola-Chicago had Sister Jean. Whether we like it or not (we most certainly don’t), FGCU had Dunk City. These teams had a rallying cry, something everyone could so easily get behind that winning seemed all but guaranteed. While Georgetown obviously wouldn’t be in the same category as these Cinderella teams, you get my point. Georgetown basketball needs a rallying cry, a call to action, a genuinely exciting sentiment surrounding the program. Starting to build excitement and passion for these 5-8 Hoyas is critical in stabilizing the future of the program.  

Back at the undisputed peak of the Big East some four decades ago, we once saw three teams in the conference make the Final Four in the same year. Georgetown took down Kentucky’s Twin Towers and Houston’s Phi Slamma Jamma to win a national championship, and the Hoyas were among the kings of college basketball. My idiot father ran on the court like any other drunk college kid would do if his school made the Final Four three out of the four years he went there. But his seemingly idiotic idea created an unforgettable memory to go along with a great basketball program. 

My father’s go-to move was ripping his shirt off, running on the court, and joining the Georgetown band in their routine to the Hawaii Five-O theme song. It became a tradition that year, and the stories he’s told me about that season are absolutely insane. This picture shows all that, but my favorite story about it isn’t the content of the photo but rather how I got it. 

Fast forward to about five years ago when I went to John Thompson III basketball camp and was somehow convinced by my Mom to go up to the late John Thompson II and talk to him about my Dad during the Hoyas’ glory run. As soon as I started talking, I could tell Coach Thompson knew exactly who I was and told me he would have something for me at the end of camp. Sure enough, after JT3 did his final dismissal on the last day of camp, I got up, walked over to Coach Thompson in his massive chair, and he handed me an envelope with the photo and a message written on it: 

Now look, I’m not standing here as Georgetown sits at 5-8 saying we need a national championship run to bring the old Georgetown back. I’m actually saying the exact opposite. Sure, with winning comes nationwide attention and recognition, but if there’s no fun when we suck, where’s the glory when we win? Next year, with Aminu Mohammed & Co. coming to the Hilltop, we the fans have to create an atmosphere and culture of excitement and hype for the team. That means going to those shitty, early November non-conference games at Capital One, because why the hell not? It means having some faith in the program instead of turning into the dreaded “Fire Pat” Twitter reply guy after we go into halftime beating a community college by two points. It means being able to understand we’re not a blue blood and being okay with that. It means not taking the fact that we somehow landed a five-star recruit for granted and not laying all the success of the team on his back. At the end of the day, it just means to have fun and be proud to be a Hoya, whatever that may be. 

I know we’re all hoping Aminu becomes our next Otto Porter Jr. and carries us to the promised land. I know we want to see Georgetown SOMEWHERE in Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology sooner rather than later, and I damn well know we all want to see Georgetown get a Rothsteinism, but these things are possible not only through the team itself but also through the community that surrounds it. Whether it’s bringing the Hawaii Five-O theme song back or getting a new tradition going, Georgetown is primed for a return to relevance, and I stand here today (idiotically, some may say) saying let’s be part of the force that gets us there. Hey, they’ve already brought the kente jerseys back, right? After reading my columns in Bet the Blue and Gray, you probably think I’m the worst bettor this planet has ever seen, and you’d probably be right. But I’m willing to bet that with real excitement, energy, and passion, together, we can (maybe, hopefully?) get back to March Madness. Maybe even win a game or two. But for now, let’s not push it. 

Let’s just bring Georgetown back.