At Georgetown, you always had to go through John Thompson Jr. to get to Patrick Ewing, and more than three decades later nothing much has changed. You need to enter the new campus facility named after Thompson. You need to pass the bronze statue of the bespectacled coach, whose likeness stands with arms folded and a towel dangling from his shoulder while he stares through someone in the distance.

To see Ewing, you need to go four floors up in the Thompson Center, where the elevator opens wide to an outsized picture of Ewing in his No. 33 jersey and omnipresent gray T-shirt, his 8-foot wingspan stretching from wall to wall. At 55, roaming the hallways above the practice court while checking his cell messages, Ewing looks every bit the towering presence he was during those years in the 1980s when he made the Big East the Big East.

If you spend a few decades around basketball players, you know that standing beside 7-footers like Ewing as an average-size man can be an interesting experience. Some appear to be a mere 6-foot-8. Ewing? He always appeared to be 7-foot-4.

He is Georgetown's head coach now. In other words, he has Thompson's job in Thompson's building, where Thompson still keeps an office. The man who first called Ewing and told him he needed to pursue this opening? John Thompson Jr., right after his son, John Thompson III, was fired by the very school his old man put on the basketball map.

It was an awkward series of events, but it made sense, too, since Big John has always looked after Bigger Patrick. Thompson started protecting Ewing in 1981, when the center from Cambridge, Massachusetts, ended the mother of all high school recruiting wars in an announcement at a Boston restaurant owned by Thompson's former Celtics teammate Satch Sanders. The coach had made quite an impression in his visit with the Ewing family. "He spoke extremely well; he carried himself with class," Ewing recalls. "And as a young black man, he was somebody I could be like." The recruit was most struck by Thompson's way with words. "I was mesmerized."

Ewing wanted Thompson to keep doing the talking for him at Georgetown, where "Hoya paranoia" was born of the restricted access to the phenom. "A lot of times," Ewing recalls, "he took the hit, especially for me, if I didn't speak. ... I didn't like speaking to the media. Growing up in Boston, I learned from a young age that the media builds you up, and at a certain point they start chopping you down."

But all these years later, Thompson won't be able to protect Ewing from anything. Big John remains a father confessor to Ewing, and yet he will not be making halftime speeches or diagramming plays on the board. This is Ewing's program now. He has never been a head coach on any level, and he will rise or fall on his own.

Enough people out there believe he will fall and that there must be a good reason nobody in the NBA offered him a head-coaching job despite his Hall of Fame playing career and the better part of 15 years as an NBA assistant. And there are plenty of legitimate questions to ask about this monumental gamble Ewing is taking. Can he adjust to college basketball after being away from it for more than 30 years? Can he navigate the sport's overwhelmingly corrupt feeder system and outrecruit opposing coaches who have far more experience delivering the pitch? Does he have the requisite charisma to persuade some of the nation's top high school players to sign with Georgetown?

"The college basketball lifestyle is awful," says Jeff Van Gundy, one of Ewing's coaches with the New York Knicks. "The job in the NBA is 90 percent coaching, 10 percent everything else. The job in college is 30 percent basketball, 70 percent everything else."

If the doubters believe that 70 percent will ultimately doom Ewing, his backstory suggests he might just find a way to return the Hoyas to national prominence. Though it isn't a story he told in his 15 years in New York, where he guarded his inner thoughts as fiercely as he guarded the paint, the Jamaican-born Ewing defines himself as an immigrant who made good against the longest of odds. When he moved to the U.S. at age 12, the idea of Ewing someday becoming the face of one of the nation's leading academic institutions wasn't within 10 country miles of possibility.

He made it happen anyway. So Ewing believes he will weather his new career challenges the way he weathered his stormy transition to a new world, shaped by the cancer of racism, to become what he became.

"I'm what America's all about," Ewing says. He means the good and the bad.

Patrick Ewing is a problem solver. To understand where he might go with this attempted Georgetown reconstruction, you have to understand where he's been, what he's seen and what he's conquered.

Ewing had dreams of becoming the next Pele when he moved to America in the mid-1970s, just as Pele started turning the New York Cosmos into an iconic disco-era brand. Ewing had been a soccer and cricket player in Jamaica, but when he arrived in the Cambridge office of Steve Jenkins, junior high basketball coach, the dreamer was little more than a lost soul in a strange land.

Classmates mocked his size and Jamaican patois. A friend named Richard Burton had introduced Patrick to basketball, and the older playground players laughed at his awkward attempts to execute even the most fundamental moves. Burton mentioned Ewing to Jenkins, a bearded white man raised in the predominantly black Boston neighborhood of Roxbury. The coach figured Patrick could learn the game while playing for his team at the Achievement School, an alternative program that helped young immigrants with their English.

The kid asked Jenkins nearly every day if he could stay after practice and work on passing, boxing out, turnaround jumpers, you name it. The origin of his work ethic was easy to trace. Patrick's mother, Dorothy, was the first of the Ewings to leave Kingston, Jamaica, for Massachusetts. She was what her son called a "maid-slash-nanny" who ended up doing double shifts in the kitchen at Massachusetts General Hospital. Carl Sr., a mechanic in Jamaica, followed his wife to Cambridge, where he would work as a laborer. Soon all seven Ewing children -- five girls, two boys -- left for the U.S., and the family settled in a five-room home inside a three-decker near the Charles River.

Patrick counted five Ewings in one bedroom. Visitors to the home recalled seeing a bedsheet used as a makeshift bedroom door. Dorothy used to tell people that her family was poor but never wanted for anything, and she made it clear she didn't much care about Patrick's gift for playing ball, insisting that he spend his summers focused on the Upward Bound program at Wellesley College. On Ewing's way into high school, Jenkins suggested he might want to take general math instead of algebra to ease the transition. Ewing angrily dismissed the idea and did just fine with Algebra 1.

He grew to 6-9 as a freshman, 6-11 as a sophomore, and he was a four-year varsity player at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, first for Tim Mahoney and then for Mike Jarvis, who met Ewing shortly after he arrived in the country. Jenkins made the introduction and asked the future head coach at St. John's to help refine Patrick's skills. This was during the turbulent time of forced busing in Boston to desegregate the city's schools. Rindge was a team of African-American students with an African-American head coach, traveling to play in the largely white suburbs. Many who lived in these suburbs, Jarvis says, "were folks who had left Boston. They were part of the white flight. Maybe it was too black for them in Boston, and it was very racist at the time.

"We had the No. 1 player and the No. 1 team. ... We were the hunted. Everybody wanted to beat us and nobody could."

In his early days in Cambridge, Ewing says, he needed to ask a friend what the N-word meant. He knew all too well by his high school days. Jenkins recalled hearing a fan and an opponent direct the word at Patrick -- then a freshman -- during a game in Brockton, hometown of Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler, and advising Patrick not to punch back. "I think they were talking to the wrong guy," Jenkins said. "All Patrick learned to say was, 'Look at the scoreboard.'"

Rindge once had its bus tires slashed and windows broken and two players sent to the hospital to treat cuts caused by a thrown brick and shattered glass. The Warriors were never deterred by the ignorance and hate. They routinely shredded their opponents, and major college coaches from all over assembled at their games.

In a February 1981 news conference attended by some 150 reporters, Ewing, dressed in a three-piece suit, announced he was picking Georgetown. (Today he says UCLA was his runner-up.) But before he'd play for Thompson, Ewing had to play before an angry standing-room-only crowd in his final high school game, for the state title against Boston College High, which sent many of its students to Boston College. Some of the Boston College High fans verbally vented over his college choice: "Ewing can't read," they chanted.

The hostility intensified after Jarvis' letter to all schools recruiting him, outlining Ewing's need for academic support, was made public. Jarvis informed the schools that Ewing needed daily tutoring, untimed testing, permission to use a tape recorder in class and a program to develop and monitor his basic skills -- all within NCAA guidelines. During Ewing's final high school game, Jenkins recalled, "Patrick leaned over to me and told me, 'You know, Mr. Jenkins, they may think I can't read, but I sure can count the money they'll pay to see me play in the NBA.'"

Ewing had nothing left to prove at Rindge, yet he remembered that in his first high school game, as a freshman, he'd fouled out and scored one point against Boston College High. He told his mother before the rematch three years later that he wanted to score 40 points as payback. He ended up scoring 41 -- 30 on dunks -- in a victory that gave him a third straight state title and 77 victories in 78 games. Says Gerry Corcoran, the 6-6 opponent assigned to guard him: "The young kid I played against in high school was the same competitor who never changed at Georgetown or with the Knicks. Pat played one way. It was ferocious and to make a point."