When sons also rise, comparisons follow

During his first year as basketball coach at DePaul, Joey Meyer and his players were standing around the airport waiting for their plane when a fan approached. “Hi, Coach, how ya doin’?” said the fan. Meyer stuck out his hand. The fan ignored it. Instead, he greeted Meyer’s father, Ray, who was now an ex-coach traveling with the team as a broadcaster.

“He walked right by me,” Joey Meyer said. “The whole team was laughing at me. It was a perfect example of what I had gotten myself into.”

What Meyer got into is what Murry Bartow got into at Alabama-Birmingham — that is, learning what it’s like to follow a successful, even beloved father as coach in the same program.

Now John Thompson III, the new coach at Georgetown, gets to find out.

Even though he was head coach at Princeton (the others were assistants) and five years have passed since his father retired, the comparisons will be inevitable. John Thompson III said he has spent his entire life being John Thompson’s son — but not in this job. How much pressure that adds to an already pressure-filled environment remains to be seen.

“It was real hard for me,” said Meyer, now coach of the Asheville Altitude of the National Basketball Development League. “I think my situation was different from the Thompson situation because there was a body of work in between, and that makes it a lot easier. But he will still be in [his father’s] shadow.”

Few shadows loom as large, in every sense. John Thompson’s legacy as an empire-builder only grew as the program struggled under Craig Esherick. Moreover, Thompson remains a vocal, highly visible presence on the local sporting scene. At 6-foot-10 and well over 300 pounds, he is among the world’s biggest talk show hosts. He hasn’t exactly left the room.

Like John Thompson, Gene Bartow created something out of nothing, except there really was nothing. UAB never had a basketball program until Bartow got there in 1977. He coached for 23 years and won 366 games before retiring in 1996 and turning things over to his son, who had played and coached for him.

“It’s an unusual situation, I would tell you that,” Murry Bartow said. “At UAB, Gene Bartow was it. He came from UCLA and started the program. He was the athletic director. We played in a building named after him. People always wanted to compare me to my dad.”

Bartow coached the Blazers for six seasons. He had a good record (103-83), but nothing like Gene’s and he was fired in 2002. After taking a year off, he was hired at East Tennessee State and last season led the Buccaneers to a 27-6 record and an NCAA tournament berth.

“I kind of knew what I was getting into at UAB,” he said. “We went to three postseason tournaments, but even in my fifth and sixth year, when I’d be introduced to somebody at a restaurant or something, it was still as Gene Bartow’s son.”

Bartow said he and Meyer established a bond “from going through what we’ve done.”

Said Meyer: “We’re kind of similar people, very close to our families, and we’re kind of sensitive to the father-son relationship. It was a hard situation. Hard for him and hard for me. It’s just part of it.”

It is a rather small club (one that also includes Scott Drew, who followed Homer Drew at Valparaiso before going to Baylor). Now it has a brand new member.

“It’s difficult,” Murry Bartow said. “Obviously at Georgetown, Coach Thompson is such a legend and even though [his son] is not directly following him, he will be compared to his dad. In a lot of ways, it’s not fair. But it is reality.”

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