Wise on Wallace

Mike Wise has a great article about Jonathan Wallace in today's Washington Post. It's one of those pieces that makes you proud of the team and the players that the team is comprised of.

From Farm to Hilltop, Wallace Ascends
By Mike Wise
Friday, March 23, 2007; Page E01

It's not the recruiting pitch an all-state player wants to hear: "You're not going to be on scholarship and you will never play." But that's exactly how John Thompson III enticed Jonathan Wallace to follow him to Georgetown three years ago: a promise of nothing.

What else was he going to tell Wallace? That a farmer's son from rural Alabama, whom Thompson had originally recruited to play at Princeton, was suddenly starting point guard material for a program hoping to be nationally ranked again?

That a keep-to-himself, Southern kid who grew up on an 80-acre cattle farm would follow in the footsteps of the District's John Duren; the Bronx's Fred Brown; Baltimore's Kevin Braswell; Hampton's Allen Iverson; and every other floor general from a metropolitan area who played right into the mean-mugging Hoya mystique?

That a student government president bound for an Ivy League education was going to stand out athletically in the Big East? To fill the kid's head with those dreams would have been worse than disingenuous; it would be just plain cruel.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032202043.html