by Jalen Rose
“Go shock the world.” Now you see why Jawon went crazy for the cameras, saying, “We gonna shock the world.” He also thought we were going on The Cosby Show, but that is another subject for another day.
—
SIX MONTHS before meeting Ali, I was just heading off to be a star at Michigan. But I felt like Jed Clampett. You know, from The Beverly Hillbillies. I was driving my mom’s green Dodge Shadow, which I’d gotten late in eleventh grade to replace the Omni she had given me when I got my license. Since my mom worked at Chrysler, we’d gotten both cars on a big discount using the “A-plan” for employees. The car wasn’t too big, and I’d loaded up the back with my stereo components, so for the thirty-minute drive west out of Detroit to Ann Arbor, I had to pack it to the brim to get everything I needed for school inside. Like I said, Jed Clampett.
When I got to town, I had no idea where my dorm was and had to call an assistant coach from a pay phone to have him direct me. That’s right, no cell phone! Finally, I pulled up and got out. I heard my name being shouted. I looked, and there they all were—Michigan’s other four star freshman recruits, hanging out of the window, welcoming the fifth and final member of the club.
It couldn’t have felt more right.
I’d obviously known C-Webb for years, and he and I had become friendly with Juwan Howard through camps. We’d met Jimmy King at the McDonald’s All-American game the spring before and had actually rearranged our dorm assignments with the other guys so all five of us could all be in connecting rooms. I’d never met Ray Jackson before, though—so this was really the first time, in my head and my heart, that the full brotherhood was formed. Instantly. From the get-go, we were all just giddy, joking around like we’d known each other for years, like we were destined to play together. After an hour or so it became apparent hanging out and playing video games wasn’t going to quench the adrenaline that we had going.
If you looked out the window of our dorm rooms, you’d notice a full-court basketball court right outside South Quad. And there’s no time like the present, right? So we headed outside and walked onto the court. There were some other kids playing and they were psyched to have us join them, pretty quickly figuring out who we were. At first, we played against them a bit, going easy. Soon, though, it turned into a highlight show. I threw an alley-oop to Chris, and he almost broke the basket dunking it. Jimmy and Ray started taking turns going coast-to-coast. Juwan, throwing bullet outlet passes, and two-handed stuffs. Total Showtime. The other guys who had been playing stood off to the side, egging us on to do more. Pretty soon people were hanging out of windows all over the quad, checking us out, screaming for us, giving us love.
Unofficially, it was the first day of the Fab Five.
It was the first sign that a revolution might be coming.
—
A COUPLE of weeks later, it was time for the Wolverine fitness test. Before you could be cleared to practice, you had to complete a run of a certain distance in a given amount of time, depending on your position. (Guards had to run faster than forwards and centers.) To be honest, I didn’t know how far we were going to have to run, either because they hadn’t told us or because I didn’t remember. I just knew to show up at the track on this one afternoon, and we’d go from there.
If only it were so simple. Because while the five of us had pretty much become inseparable over those first few weeks of school, none of us had really gotten the lay of the land of the campus, meaning we had no idea where the track was. Furthermore, we were college freshmen, and if anyone knows anything about college freshmen, it’s that they have no idea how to manage their time. So we went back to our dorm after classes, changed clothes, and then tried to figure out our way to the track. That didn’t work, so we piled into a cab. Fortunately the driver knew the way, and we got there with a minute to spare. As we walked up to the group, Coach Fisher was definitely giving us dirty looks for almost being late.
I remember I had my bag in one hand and a sandwich in the other. I’d been in class all day and hadn’t gotten a chance to eat anything until we were out of that cab. Meanwhile, all around us, the upperclassmen were stretching and almost salivating, as if they couldn’t wait to watch us huff and puff our way around the track. Rob Pelinka, a junior guard (and future NBA agent to the stars), had won the run the couple of years prior, and the guys were saying that he was going to toast everyone again. But there was one thing they didn’t know: At Southwestern, you couldn’t play basketball for Perry Watson if you didn’t run cross-country. So I’d been running like this for four years. Whether it was a one-mile run, or a five-mile run, or whatever (it turned out to be a mile and a half), this wasn’t going to be a problem for me.
Sure enough, with Pelinka as my measuring stick the whole time, I cruised in ahead of him, and far ahead of everyone else. Wasn’t even breathing heavy. And let’s just say the scene afterwards wasn’t exactly cool, calm, and collected. Chris, Juwan, Jimmy, and Ray were whooping and hollering—climbing on my back like we’d just won the NCAA title. Chanting my name, not caring about the looks we were getting from everyone else. All the adrenaline that had been pumping since we’d gotten to campus, ever since we’d signed with Michigan, really, was pouring out.
And we hadn’t even walked into the gym yet.
—
COMPETITION ISN’T a bad thing. Competition is what makes companies money. Competition is what gets kids into Ivy League schools. Competition encourages excellence. So the idea of us being concerned about what the upperclassmen on the basketball team thought of us when we came on board wasn’t high on our agenda. We didn’t hate them; we didn’t resent them. They were our teammates, and we were looking forward to playing with them. But because of the way we’d been recruited, we saw ourselves as a group. And because of our commitment to one another, we were planning to prove that we were the best players on the team, which we got a chance to do on our very first day of scrimmages.
In the fall, before official practices with coaches and drills, the team would do workouts on our own in the gym. When basketball players get a chance to work out on their own, that’s basically an open invitation for pickup games. So on that first day in the gym, with twelve or thirteen of us there, the upperclassmen started dividing everyone up into teams. Which is when I spoke up.
“What about us against you?”
Huh?
“Freshmen against all y’all. Our five against your best five.”
One, I was thinking that all we wanted to do was play together again, just like we had on that outdoor court in South Quad. Two, because there were more than ten guys in the gym, I was also concerned not all of us would get picked, and one of us would have to sit out the first run. Three, as far as my own situation went, I knew one thing I loved about playing with our five was that I was the point guard. In high school, Howard Eisley had run our offense. Here, with my new teammates, I could be like two of my idols—Magic and Steve Smith—big at the point, running the show. And last, most important, I was thinking, Well, yeah, this is a pretty quick and straightforward way to prove how good we are together.
Maybe a little reluctantly, the sophomores, juniors, and seniors agreed. But, hey, this was also a chance for them to put us right in our place. Five games later—after who knows how many alley-oops, fast-break dunks, threes drilled from way out; you name it, we hit it—I’m not sure they were thrilled with their choice. Because we dominated them. We won every game.
And, yes, we were going crazy the whole way, screaming at each other, talking trash, pumping ourselves up with every basket and great play. But, ultimately, regardless of all that, the upperclassmen had no choice but to accept the result. Because that’s what competition forces you to do. Once real practices started, and the coaches started dividing us up in different ways, competition revealed the same fact again and again. The freshmen were the ones distinguishing themselves as the best players on the team.
That left the coaches with a decision to make.
—
I’LL SAY this a bunch of times, and sound like an old man doing it: You have to remember how different college basketball was twenty-some years ago. Picking up from what I talked about in the last chapter, it wasn’t a one-year stop on the way to the pros. Lots of the best players stayed in school all four years. Almost all stayed three years. Which meant you could develop kids, bring them along, and move them through a system. I mean, before 1972, freshmen weren’t even allowed to play on varsity teams in the NCAA.
But Steve Fisher and Brian Dutcher and their recruiting staff took the first step toward a new era when they were able to convince five of the best prospects in the country to all come to Ann Arbor in the fall of 1991. They weren’t trying to revolutionize the system. They were just hoping to save their jobs. Two years earlier, Coach Fisher had had a really strange experience—which started when Bill Frieder, the longtime Michigan head coach, had announced late in the 1988–89 season that he would be leaving after the NCAA Tournament to go coach at Arizona State. Well, that didn’t sit well with Bo Schembechler, the Wolverine football coach and athletic director—a true “Michigan Man” if there ever was one—who saw Frieder’s move as disloyal, and fired him before the tournament, elevating Steve Fisher to the top job. So then what happened? Steve led Glen Rice, Rumeal Robinson, and company to the championship. It was an incredible job of coaching, but it also raised expectations just a little bit in Ann Arbor. And when Michigan was bounced out of the tournament in the second round the next year, and then had a losing record the year after that, he was in trouble. Until he made his Hail Mary pass and got us.
The staff knew they were going to have a situation to handle once we got to campus—because, very simply, we were brought in to improve the team, and, eventually, replace the players who had underperformed the previous year. But as confident and cocky as we were, even we didn’t expect to all start as freshmen. It just wasn’t the way things were done. So nothing was set in stone—and with the new faces meeting the old ones, that could have been a recipe for disaster.
Particularly since the guys on our team weren’t bums—they were good players. I mentioned Rob Pelinka. Mike Talley, a junior guard, had been Mr. Basketball in Michigan two years ahead of me and Chris—he had played against me at Cooley, Southwestern’s big rival. Mike drove a silver Mustang around campus with a Raiders logo on the hood. Definitely cooler than my Shadow. Eric Riley had been one of the best rebounders and shot blockers in a really strong Big Ten Conference the year before we got there. Huge stud. They weren’t good players—they were great players. How were they supposed to feel with these freshmen coming in and running and dunking past everyone?
In the end, there were a few reasons why our team didn’t implode before we even had a chance to get going, and why the upperclassmen stood with us once our story took off. One, the head coach. Steve Fisher, who I’m still very tight with to this day, was the perfect blend of stern and flexible. To this day, Steve; his wife, Angie; and their son, Mark, are among the best people I’ve met in my life. Good coaches need to adjust to their players. They know everybody’s different, and know how to nurture players in different ways. They don’t need to show the media how strict they are, and they also don’t need to bend over backwards to gain the approval of their players. Even today—after he’s had so much success at San Diego State, developing an NBA Finals MVP like Kawhi Leonard—Steve still doesn’t get enough credit for being a great coach. He’s not in the buddy network that way. But then, and now, Steve knew exactly what he was doing and set the right kind of tone for our locker room. He wasn’t afraid to give us, the players, a large measure of control of the situation. Remember, I had been on winning teams my whole life. I had played with other great players before. I knew, even as a freshman, ways to deal with that in the locker room. The amount of joking you do, the kinds of things you say and don’t say to older players, the ways you bond, the lines you don’t cross, all that stuff. That went back to following the lead of Uncle Paramore, really—being cool with everyone in a room, knowing how to be outgoing and friendly.
But, really, I bring it all back to that first day in the gym, and even before that, that day on the track. We showed up, we acted like we were the best, and we proved it. The competition was healthy, because the truth was to be found in what happened when we competed. Was instantly setting ourselves apart and challenging the upperclassmen dangerous? Maybe—but it also left them no grounds to ever say that the coaching staff was playing favorites. To their everlasting credit, Riley, Pelinka, James Voskuil, even Talley (who probably had the toughest time of anyone) all did an incredible job of welcoming us into the fold, supporting us, and being great teammates. That held true when the coaching staff inserted Chris, Juwan, and me into the starting lineup at the beginning of the season, moving three upperclassmen to the bench. And then, a few weeks later, when Mike Talley got in trouble for missing a meeting, Jimmy followed. And ultimately, in February, a little more than halfway through the season against Notre Dame on national TV, Ray became the fifth.
By then, no one would be able to call it hype.
—
FOR ME, everything in college was an extension of everything I’d come from. The trash-talk, the emotional play, being a leader on the team—that was all who I was as a kid at Southwestern, on display in front of a bigger audience. And so were the shorts.
I always liked my shorts longer than they were meant to be. For one, baggy clothes were in style in general, and I always wanted my image on the basketball court to be stylish—like anyone who takes pride in dressing well, it made me feel confident, and good about myself, and that helped my game. At UNLV, they had longer shorts than other teams, as did Syracuse with Derrick Coleman, and Illinois with Marcus Liberty, as did the Bulls in the NBA. So I wasn’t the only one who liked the look of long shorts, or to realize that longer shorts were more comfortable.
Not that I had too much experience playing with the perfect pair of shorts. In high school, while Nike sponsored Southwestern’s program and gave us game shoes, they didn’t provide uniforms. You would try to get guys who came back from college to give you their shorts for pickup runs, but for high school, long shorts weren’t possible. So I’d pull down the short shorts the school gave me as low as I could, and then pull my shirt out to cover them up. This became an issue with our principal, Ms. Hines, who brought me into Coach Watson’s office at one point and said to both of us, “Look, if you don’t stop sagging your pants, you will not play on the basketball team.” Well, I needed to come up with some solution to this ridiculous problem, so I actually started wearing another pair of shorts underneath my game shorts. No, not compression shorts (this was before they were popular), but actually another pair of gym shorts. They were longer, and let me rest my game shorts a little lower, on top of them. Weird solution, yes, but problem sort of solved.
At Michigan, I was ready to deal with the same issue. The first thing I did when they handed out practice gear was what I did in high school: I riffled through the pile of shorts and took the biggest pair. They were intended for one of the biggest players on the team—six-foot-ten, 260-pound Chip Armer. And Chip, thankfully, wasn’t as fashion-conscious as I was, and was okay with trading shorts, even if mine were a little small on his frame. That took care of practice. The next step was convincing Coach Fisher to talk to Nike, who sponsored the whole program, about ordering us longer shorts. All of us were into the idea, so we all worked to do some convincing, and Coach ultimately agreed to get them made for us.
And somewhere back in Detroit, watching the games on TV, I’m sure Ms. Hines, my old principal, winced when she saw us take the court.
—
FIVE FRESHMEN. In 1991–1992, the notion that freshmen could play major roles on one of the top teams in the country was a big deal in college basketball. We were ranked twenty-fifth at the start of the season, essentially based on sheer speculation of what people thought we could do, and that got us a lot of attention with the national
media. That’s when they first started throwing around the term “Fab Five.” We didn’t love that name—we felt like it was plagiarism, considering hip-hop legend Fab 5 Freddy had pioneered the term. (Of course, the media had never heard of Fab 5 Freddy, so they didn’t know the phrase was out there.) Anyway, we originally had a different name for ourselves. We wanted it to be “Five Times.” As in, five times one equals five, five of us as one. Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing you are. I’m glad it didn’t stick.
No matter the hype, winning was why we stayed relevant, even before our run in the tournament. We peaked when ranked eleventh in January, sat at fifteen when Ray became the fifth freshman starter in February, and were right around the same when we entered the NCAAs. That’s pretty good considering how deep college basketball was at the time. Kansas under Roy Williams, UCLA under Jim Harrick, and Kentucky under Rick Pitino were all great teams. In the Big Ten, Indiana had Calbert Cheaney, Ohio State had Jim Jackson, and Michigan State was strong with Shawn Respert. But, really, the reason we exploded on the scene, the reason we became not just famous, but infamous, even before our run in March Madness, was how we played. That story line became national news from the outset because our fifth game of the year was played on national television, in front of a huge audience, against the number-one team in the country: the Duke Blue Devils.
Any team I was ever on, I was a loud presence—full of will, determination, and brashness. That brashness was supplemented by the sense of destiny I had—the feeling that because my dad was an NBA star, I belonged to the club already. That in turn helped me become a pretty influential guy in any locker room I ever was a part of, right on all the way through the pros. People gravitate toward those who are confident and comfortable—and they also tend to follow those who speak their mind. Chris, Juwan, Jimmy, and Ray were obviously comfortable playing in the loud, brash, fearless, unapologetic style that we established in that very first practice. It fit them well, and bonded us closer together as a group. But I think any of them who were there would agree—they followed my lead.