COLUMBUS — One of the bromides coaches love to draw from their Rolodex is the one that states "adversity builds character."
For the Georgetown Hoyas, that adversity came early in the season in some scary circumstances. The Hoyas, who will play North Carolina State Sunday in a third-round NCAA tournament game with a berth in the Sweet 16 at stake, said their bond as a team was forged by an attack on them (note: not a brawl) during a game in a goodwill tour in China in August.
A game during the 11-day trip between the Hoyas and the Bayi Rockets — a Chinese Basketball Association team with players from the People's Liberation Army, according to the New York Times — degenerated into a brawl that stopped the game with the score tied at 64 and 9:32 left. The scene was ugly, with fans involved and chairs and bottles thrown with many punches. One photo and video from the nonsense shows a man in street clothes sprinting off the Bayi bench to stomp on a Georgetown player on the ground.
Georgetown defended itself, and left literally fearing for its life in a foreign country with no security or police escort for protection.
"There's no way on God's green earth that I would have wanted to happen, nor would I want that to happen again," Hoyas coach John Thompson III said Saturday. "But having gone through it, it without a doubt brought this group together. And (it brought) the realization that everybody's piece is important, that everyone for us to have success, for us to get out of here alive, everyone has to do their part."
Bonds form in strange ways sometimes, and a brawl from one night of an 11-day Goodwill trip that was otherwise memorable obviously is not the preferred method. But the Georgetown players agreed with their coach.
"With everything that happened over there in China, with the whole brawl, we all understood that everybody had each other's back no matter what," said guard and senior leader Jason Clark. "That's something you don't wish to happen, but when it happens you want to know that the guy you're going to battle with every day has your back."
The ugliness led to the knee-jerk reaction to blame Georgetown, which had issues with confrontations in the past. Hoya Paranoia, though, is long gone, and this time the Chinese were the aggressors. Clearly. There was a five-to-one foul disparity, and the incident started with a Georgetown player attacked as he tried to get out of a situation. It quickly escalated from the Chinese, who had been fined numerous times for starting fights in international games in previous years.
Hoyas players aggressively defended themselves. Thompson pulled his team off the floor and into a hallway and meeting room where the lights were out. He told his players to get what stuff they could, and get to the bus immediately.
"We were walking out to the bus, and we didn't have any security with us or anything," senior center Henry Sims said. "We didn't know what was going to happen. We made it back safely, but that was pretty much the biggest concern to me."
"The next morning, too," said forward Otto Porter. "Leaving to go to San Francisco."
A trip that included a visit to the Great Wall and many memorable moments could have ended problematically, but Thompson, Clark and Hollis Thompson met with the Chinese coach and some players privately at the airport, which soothed international tensions.
The Hoyas came together as a team on that trip — and it could been the shared experience as much as the brawl. Georgetown was considered too young to succeed this season. Picked 10th in the Big East and coming off losing their two best players, the Hoyas relied on their renowned suffocating defense to go 24-8 and earn a third seed in the Midwest. Freshmen played one-third of the minutes and accounted for almost the same proportion of points, as Clark and Sims (who told a Columbus Dispatch reporter to be sure to mention he would graduate with a degree in English and a minor in Theology) provided leadership.
They face a North Carolina State team that is just as tall as Georgetown, but likes to run more. If the Hoyas win it will be because of their defense, patience and togetherness, which was forged in a foreign country in some difficult circumstances.
"This group learned quickly," Thompson said. "That for us to have success we're going to have to protect each other. For us to have success we're going to have to be ready, willing and able to fight for each other.
"Now hopefully unlike then, it's more figuratively than literally."
