Glad someone else remembers this...yeah, I guess he just wanted to be nice to them in the book...for those who didn't know, despite the notoriety and education of Grant's parents, when he got to Georgetown for a visit, one of the people he met with asked him to simply read a passage out of a book as an evident attempt to see if he was literate. Ouch. He did mention something about one of the Gtown academic advisors, then peeled away from the topic.
If you Google “Mary Fenlon Georgetown Grant Hill” the entire story comes up on HoyaBasketball.com
Last edited by WV_Iron_Duke; 06-24-2022 at 05:12 PM.
A terrific Grant interview from All The Smoke: 1 hour 45 minutes. Lots of ground covered.
https://youtu.be/kiC-fTPT1Ug
Last edited by TKG; 06-24-2022 at 05:59 PM.
The great posts tonight have convinced me this is a must read.Might try it on my Kindle first.
At the time that Thompson was hired at Georgetown, coaches were allowed 3 assistants. He chose 2 for basketball, and Fenlon for academics. She was his first hire, and she stayed for 27 years. Patrick Ewing said the players thought of her as a second mom. Thompson and Fenlon were known for being committed to education.
On the day Hill was asked to read, only Thompson and Fenlon were in the room, and they apparently never commented on the day. At the time she was hired, most of the basketball team would have gone to substandard schools prior to attending one of the most elite colleges in the country; few of their high school peers would have gone on to graduate from any college, much less a Georgetown. For so many of them to graduate, despite substandard preparation and the rigors of college basketball, is impressive.
I don’t know if it’s true, but I did read that all bball recruits did the reading test, that Thompson and Fenlon found it a good measure of whether kids could get through the Georgetown curriculum. Hill was offended, but I’m not sure if he found the request to be racist, that it didn’t take into consideration his family background, or that he didn’t want to be on a team that needed such a test. It’d be an interesting digression, for Hill to more thoroughly explore this sort of issue, but I wouldn’t expect him to be overly eager to discuss some of the less appealing aspects of his immense privilege. He’s an athlete, entertainer, and businessman, not a social critic or a memoirist interested in exposing himself to the sort of criticism leveled by Jalen Rose.
Hill is certainly not above nursing a grudge (particularly against specific doctors). And he’s got some Laettner/Jordan competitiveness (when briefly benched after an injury, he refused to stand with the rest of the bench until one of the Duke starters scored a basket—“I ain’t no 2nd stringer,” I think he says in the book).
Maybe he left out the incident because he respected John Thompson, or maybe because the other two people in the room had died in the last couple of years. My own hunch is that the Fenlon incident was deleted from a 1st draft because Hill didn’t want to detract from his core messaging, that he’s a sparkly success story.
Last edited by johnb; 07-27-2022 at 04:51 AM.
The reading aloud test could be likened to a dunk test.
Ask each current Duke undergrad to dunk the ball and shoot one 3 point shot. One try for each. Nobody on defense. Thirty second time limit. Full scholarship on the line.
My hunch is that an educated observer would be able to immediately edit out the 3000 undergrads whose fingers and 3 pointers (maybe) grazed the net, identify most of the former high school players who happened to wind up on campus and could then, based on the 2 shots (and height), pick out the current Duke rotation.
Last edited by johnb; 07-27-2022 at 05:13 AM.
The Old Man and the Three has an excellent, and also long, JJ interview of Grant. You can skip to about the 15 minute mark for the start of the interview. Among other things, Grant saved JJ from having Turkoglu pee on him for being late to practice as a rookie.
I’m in the middle of the book, and completely in. But pee? I’m drinking and hoping I’m in the twilight zone
When Big John got divorced, wasn't it substantially rumored that he and Fenlon, a former nun, were romantically involved? I remember their being Las Vegas real estate investments jointly in their name, but I don't know that he ever publically acknowledged the relationship.