Originally published on i95Ballerz.com, this article has been re-titled and utilized by HoyaReport.com, with permission.
September 5, 2020 - As sophomores at Archbishop John Carroll High School in Washington, D.C. during the 1957-58 season, George Leftwich and the late John Thompson Jr. lost the city championship to Cardozo.
Leftwich, a six-foot guard, and Thompson, a post-player 10 inches taller, did not stop after the loss to the Clerks their 10th grade year. They evolved and became undefeated. Six decades after their unbeaten senior season, the two men were inducted in the 2020 Class of the D.C. State Athletic Association (DCSAA) High School Hall of Fame last month.
“It means the world,” said Leftwich, when asked about the August 26 induction during a phone interview. “You spend your whole life involved in athletics and then for somebody to remember you, that’s very big.”
For Leftwich, who spent his 50-plus year career as a coach and administrator, working at D.C.’s Sidwell Friends School and his high school alma mater Archbishop Carroll in addition to time at the University of the District of Columbia and Gwynn Park High in Maryland, the delayed recognition did not matter.
“It doesn’t matter, as long as I get there,” Leftwich said. “Good to be thought about and inducted.” For Thompson, a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, this induction announcement came just days before his passing.
The lesser-known point guard told the story of their development after the championship loss, the victories on the court, and gave his thoughts on what really matters.
“We Were Legit”
George Leftwich did not start out as a point guard or even at Archbishop Carroll for that matter. After being declared ineligible as a freshman at D.C.’s Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, he spent a semester at McKinley Tech before his junior high teammate Tom Hoover convinced him to come to Carroll, at the time an all-boys school, which opened just a few years earlier in 1951.
Not knowing anyone at the school besides Hoover, Leftwich plotted his way onto the basketball team.
“When I was a 10th grader, I figured the only way to get on that team was to out shoot everybody,” Leftwich recalled. “Well, I did that and we lost the city championship.”
With other shooters on the team like Edward “Monk” Malloy, Leftwich sought to help the team the next year in a way no one else could---as a point guard.
“I was the only one that could handle the ball,” he said, “so I thought that was my calling.”
“If George was a selfish individual, his statistics would have been off the chart,” recalled high school teammate Jim “Kenny” Price, in a phone interview, “but he wasn’t that way.”
“George always wanted to make everybody better,” Price said.
Leftwich was not the only one who changed his game after the loss in the championship. Another 10th grader named John Thompson Jr. transformed his game too.
“As a sophomore, he didn’t have any idea what kind of competition it was going to be,” said Leftwich, of Thompson, “but after he saw what the competition was, he spent the whole summer between sophomore year and junior year improving.”
“When he walked on that floor as a junior, he was legit,” Leftwich said. “That’s how much that man had improved.”
Speaking of his late teammate’s knack for improvement, Leftwich said, “As it played out, life was the same way, [he] did the same thing, the same way, all the way through life.”
The transformed tandem of Leftwich and Thompson would win championships in their junior and senior seasons defeating even colleges freshman teams and playing a national schedule.
“We were legit,” said Leftwich, of the time after the summer of improvement. “That’s why I always talk about the ’59 team.”
“Where They Went, Speaks Volumes”
While the ’59 team featured Malloy, who would go on to Notre Dame first as a ball player then later as the University’s president from 1987 to 2005, and 6-foot-9 Hoover, who would go on to Villanova before playing professionally for the New York Knicks, the leadership of ’60 team fell more heavily on Leftwich and Thompson.
A box score from the 1960 season shows Thompson leading the way for Carroll with 15 points, and Leftwich right behind with 14 in a championship game. But the story is sweeter than the numbers.
In a game played on a Sunday in March at Georgetown University, Carroll trailed by one with 14 seconds left. Leftwich fouled a St. Catherine’s (Wis.) player. After a missed free throw and a Carroll timeout, Leftwich knocked down a jumper from the circle to put Carroll up one with a handful of ticks on the clock. Frantic, St. Catherine called another timeout, which they didn’t have. Bob Hanson, of a Wisconsin newspaper, The Journal Times, tells the story.
“John Thompson, 6-foot-11 center of the Lions then calmly stepped to the line and made the free throw and it was 57-55, Carroll at the buzzer.”
Thompson, who went on to Providence College before playing professionally with the Boston Celtics, would be back in D.C. six years later, coaching high school basketball at Saint Anthony’s. A dozen years after he sealed the deal from the free throw line at Georgetown, Thompson returned to the University as the head basketball coach. He held the position from 1972 until his retirement in 1999, winning the NCAA Championship in 1984.
But on that March day at Georgetown in 1960, it was the point guard Leftwich that was voted most valuable player of the national tournament. He went on to play at Villanova, but six decades later, he spoke highly of those he played with at Carroll.
“It was a pleasure to play with those guys,” Leftwich recalled. “Where those guys are now, where they went, speaks volumes.”
“Being a Part of Good People”
Like his Hall of Fame teammate, the point guard and tournament MVP went into coaching, winning two state titles as a coach at Maryland’s Gwynn Park High School.
“I learned a lot from basketball,” said Leftwich, “so I was happy to have been able to pass that on.”
The two state titles he won as a coach, Leftwich attributes, in part, to his high school team.
“All that plays into the team that I played on,” said Leftwich, “the people that were on the team, and how we interacted. It a very close, close knit team.”
In addition to Thompson and Leftwich, John Austin would go on to play collegiately at Boston College before being drafted by the Boston Celtics and playing for a time in the NBA.
“You just could not plan it,” said Price, who went to Xavier University in Ohio on a football scholarship, of the high school team. “The universe put it all together,” he said.
Price called the undefeated senior season “totally magical.” He gave as the “ingredients” for success “our families, the church, the school” and the coach, Bob Dwyer.
Dwyer’s philosophy, Price says, was “the best player will play, period,” critical for an integrated team playing just several years after the landmark school desegregation case. “He wasn’t just putting out a bunch of guys just to play,” said Leftwich, of Dwyer, “he was taking care of us.”
Over half a century later, Price said, “the most important thing is, the people that played on the team have the ultimate character.”
“History has proven that,” he said. Price cited both the athletic accomplishments and the off-the-court achievements, including the children, of those on the team (Both Leftwich and Thompson saw sons go on to Princeton). “Everybody in their own way has been a winner,” he said.
And while Thompson’s legacy is well-documented and his pupils include Ewing, Mourning, Iverson, and Mutombo, Leftwich’s influence on his teammates and players still resonates.
“I felt honored to know George and to play with George,” Price said.
Leftwich said in his first year of coaching one of his players went to Georgetown and one played at Duke. One went on to a career in law, the other in finance, he said. They still regularly meet for breakfast.
“We’re still together 50 years later,” Leftwich said.
“Winning is great,” said Leftwich, “but being a part of the team, being a part of good people is just as important.”
“All the guys on the team were good people,” said Leftwich, of his high school teammates. “We were all good people, all friends.”
A lot has changed since Leftwich and Thompson last played for Carroll during the 1959-60 season, but the teammates and 2020 DCSAA High School Hall of Fame Inductees team’s senior year record remains the same. Six decades later, they are still undefeated.
