Two farewells

I'll always see one of them weeping in the desert sun on the day Dan Wheldon died, because friends are friends and no one has ever had more friends than Tony Kanaan.

I'll see the other one looming over our breakfast table one morning in Springfield, Mass., because he was John Thompson and John Thompson was larger than life both physically and in every conceivable way a man can be larger than life.

Both exited the stage in their different ways the last two days. No two men could have less in common. And yet both are splendid examples for how to move through this world.

Tony Kanaan is a Brazilian IndyCar driver who stands all of 5-5 and won the Indianapolis 500 in 2013 after a dozen tries, and Sunday he drove what could well be his last IndyCar race after two decades in the seat. John Thompson was an American college basketball coach and a mountain of a man at 6-10, and Monday he died at the age of 74.

The former became first famous and then beloved not just for the way he drove a race car, but for the way he lived his life outside it. In a sport that is one giant exposed nerve, it's easy to get under one another's skins. Yet TK seemingly never has. If there's a better man who's ever wheeled an IndyCar, history does not record it.

He led all those laps at Indy for all those years, and year after year bad stuff kept happening to him. . Yet he maintained his perspective, not to say a cheerful countenance. There's a word for that, and it's not one we get to use very much in these uncharitable times.

That word is grace.

And John Thompson?

Well. There was grace to John Thompson's life, too, even if manifested itself in entirely different ways.

He took over a barely breathing Georgetown program as that rarity of rarities in the mid-1970s -- a Black college basketball coach -- and he built it into a national powerhouse. His Georgetown teams went to 24 straight NCAA tournaments and won the national title in 1984, and Thompson ended up winning almost 600 games as a Hall of Fame coach.

But those are just numbers. Far outweighing them in the ledger are the doors he opened for all the Black coaches who came after him, and the influence he had on the lives of all the young Black men he coached -- and for whom he was a shining example of what a man can achieve in America if he lives his life correctly and fearlessly and with unwavering integrity.

That was John Thompson to a fare-thee-well. Sure, he coached teams that beat you with talent and discipline and unrelenting defensive pressure, but he also stood up when the standing up required a measure of gumption.

He was a fierce advocate for his players, to begin with. And he was fiercely aware of his place in the game; in 1989, for instance, he staged a walkout during a Big East game to protest Proposition 42 because it targeted Black athletes in particular.

He took some heat for that from the usual suspects, naturally. Not that John Thompson gave a damn. He saw a wrong and called attention to it, and anyone who had a problem with that could let the door hit him in the you-know-what on his way out.

It's one reason he loomed so large that morning in Springfield.

It was 1999 and I was there as the guest of a wonderful gentleman named Carl Bennett to cover the Hall of Fame induction of Fred Zollner. As it happened, John Thompson went in the same year. And here he came over to our table, where Carl introduced us.

I don't remember what we said. I only remember how awed I was, because how could you not be in the presence of a man who had done so much and impacted so many lives?

Would that there were more like him. We could certainly use them.