Got to Give the People What They Want: True Stories and Flagrant Opinions from Center Court

by Jalen Rose

  Well, in the middle of America’s heartland, who came along next, to give the sport its next turn forward? Us. Five black kids who played a certain way—and didn’t apologize for it. We were young enough not to care about the haters, close enough to know that we had one another’s backs, and good enough to win games and therefore matter in the big picture.

  Now, when you talk about race, and racism, you always have to consider the fact that you’re usually talking about two different kinds of people and their thoughts. First are the overt racists. The people who sent letters to Ann Arbor, letters in which they called us the n-word, and the c-word, and whatever other words they fancied. Coach Fisher would show us those letters, to fire us up, and to let us know that he took as much offense to them as we did.

  But those dummies (and they are dummies…some put their home addresses on the envelopes) are on the fringe; they’re not driving the national conversation. The people who are doing that are not overtly racist. They would probably swear to that on a Bible. But what they are is not knowledgeable. Not educated. They don’t know how to react to black players with tattoos and earrings, who listen to hip-hop music, who wear baggy clothes. It’s foreign to them, and it’s even threatening. And they respond accordingly—which, when they’re in the media, means writing columns and articles or talking on the radio or on television about how we don’t play the game the right way, we don’t represent the University of Michigan the way it should be represented, or whatever.

  Think about it: How many black journalists and editors were there in the early ’90s? Almost none. There wasn’t any Internet, so you had to go by what was written in newspapers and magazines and said on radio and TV shows, and that was it. And there was no way to question it. You couldn’t tweet to the radio station or send an e-mail to the newspaper. So all the young people who were energized by us, all the kids who suddenly were Michigan fans and college basketball fans, didn’t have an outlet to be heard. Who did? The writers and columnists and talk-show hosts were all old, and white, and clueless about what it all represented.

  Last point here: We were also part of the equation. We weren’t helpless victims. We were stirring the pot as much as we could. We may not have understood where the media were coming from, but we didn’t want to either. We liked being disliked, being misunderstood, being portrayed as rebels. We reveled in that identity. I think a lot of our fans did, too. So if reporters came into the locker room and we were listening to rap music, if anything, we would turn up the volume. I wasn’t going to cover up my tattoo; I was going to pull on my jersey a little bit to loosen it so the tattoo showed more. I was definitely going to put on my earrings before every press conference. I was going to scream louder after every shot, talk more trash after every play, puff my chest out farther after every win.

  I have no regrets whatsoever.

  —

  WE ACTUALLY needed a little winning streak at the end of the season to make sure we got into the NCAA Tournament. That’s how tough the Big Ten was. We beat Indiana, ranked two in the nation, at home, and then defeated Purdue on the road and Illinois to finish the regular season 20-8. (No conference tournament then.) We thought we deserved a high seed, considering we’d beaten six ranked teams over the course of the season, and almost knocked off Duke in that early game, but the committee gave us a six-seed, which of course we used as fuel for our fire heading into the tournament.

  We beat John Chaney’s Temple Owls in the first round, and then East Tennessee State, a Cinderella that had upset Arizona, in the second. Then, at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the most hallowed places in all of college basketball—whose all-white Wildcat team had lost to an all-black starting five from Texas Western for the national title in 1966—we got past an Oklahoma State team with Byron Houston and Bryant “Big Country” Reeves. And two nights later, against the Ohio State team that had beaten us in both of our Big Ten matchups earlier in the season, we won in overtime to get to the Final Four. Cut down the nets, the whole nine.

  Our opponent in the national semifinal game was Cincinnati, a team that was actually a lot like us. Bob Huggins has always been known as a coach who takes chances on some rough, tough kids, and his team that year was led by big Corie Blount and Nick Van Exel, the point guard who liked to talk just as much trash as we did. And some other guy on their team in the week leading up to the game said something to reporters about how he was going to deal with us, and not let us talk to them. Well, we did plenty of talking, and turned a three-point halftime deficit around, beating them 76–72, to get to the final against our familiar nemesis, the Duke Blue Devils. Still the number one team in the country, and who by this time hated us as much as we hated them.

  The first half, we played good basketball. We stayed in the game, we were executing, we were playing hard, making plays out on the floor to keep the game competitive. At halftime, we were actually up a point—no one remembers that! What they remember is what ultimately mattered: In the second half, they smacked us. They took it up to another level. They played like champions. They were the better team, and they won. Competition, remember? It settles everything. Duke was tremendous—back-to-back champs—no shame in losing to them.

  Tracing back to sophomore year of high school, it was the fourth straight year I had made at least the final of the biggest tournament there was. I’d won two championships and lost two. So that wasn’t anything new. Now, coming up one game short of a national title—one half, really—gave me something new to shoot for.

  But I didn’t realize how different, and how much more complicated, everything was about to become.

  JALEN’S FRIENDLY GUIDE TO TRASH-TALKING

  1. Respect your opponent. Recognize how good they are, and what it’s going to take to beat them.

  2. Be prepared to deal with the consequences. Because there will be consequences.

  3. Nothing is out of bounds. But cursing’s overrated.

  4. Do your research. It pays off.

  5. Win. It’s the ultimate final word.

  5. Nut Check

  In the movies, the sequel is almost never as good as the original. On the big screen, you can’t capture the same magic the second time around, the same sense of energy and uniqueness that comes with experiencing something for the first time. In real life, it’s even rarer.

  After we lost to Duke in the 1992 title game, the Fab Five were tighter than ever, thanks to all we’d gone through since we’d shown up in Ann Arbor the previous fall. We also were a better basketball team than we’d ever been. We’d proved not only to be five great recruits, but also five members of a team that blended together perfectly. Our skills meshed, our talents meshed, and we just had one goal: to win. Our box scores from freshman and sophomore years are split pretty evenly. One game it might be C-Webb who had the points, but another game it might be me, or Juwan, or sometimes Jimmy. Whoever had the hot hand, or had the best matchup, got the ball, and the results bore themselves out in the success.

  We had a name for our shared fight. Every time we took the floor, we didn’t say “Win on 3,” or “Defense,” but “One, Two, Three…NUT CHECK!” It was a reference to what we called “checking our nuts,” or checking our ego on and off the floor. We got the phrase from a Geto Boys record called “Gotta Let Your Nuts Hang.” And used it constantly to keep each other in line: “You’re not practicing hard…you’re late for training table…you say you’re going to do something, but you’re not doing it…We were gonna go out at 10:00…we’re still looking for you at 11:15, 11:30…You got to check your nuts.” It was our own little code, our signal of brotherhood and absolute togetherness.

  And in our Fab Five sequel, we were going to need it more than ever.

  —

  NOW, WHILE I wouldn’t say we had the most normal college experience, I also don’t want to let anyone think that we didn’t go to college. In our day, becoming part of the campus community was part of being a college basketball star. We didn’t have the same life as a kid w
ho came to study law or chemistry and join a frat, but we definitely went to college.

  In the beginning, I decided to be really proactive in class, to send the message to the professor and other students that I was for real. In Southwestern, I’d always made the honor roll and taken pride in not being a dumb jock. So in my first few big lectures, I sat up front, asked questions, and tried to be involved. Well, it didn’t take too long for me to hear the snickers of other people in the class, whispering things like “Oh, isn’t that cute—the basketball player wants to be a student.” Really, I was just adjusting like any other freshman, but immediately, my adjustments were going under a microscope. I didn’t speak up too much after that. I went back to my style of getting my work done under the radar, and making the dean’s list, quietly.

  Back in our dorm rooms, just like any other kids, we spent a ton of time playing video games. This was the Nintendo and Sega Genesis era, and our top games were Tecmo Bowl and Madden. Just like being at Uncle Paramore’s house, the trash-talking that took place during those games was epic—and perfect practice for the court. As athletes, we had to make it competitive. We kept records of who won what game, who owed money to whom from our bets, and who was up next in our circuit. We had a shutout rule: If you went down 21-zip at halftime in Madden, say, the game was over. No mercy.

  We went out just like other students on Saturday nights. We played beer pong at fraternities or headed to parties at the Union, the center of campus life at Michigan. I’ll never forget trying to sneak a forty into the Union freshman year. I had it in the pocket of my sweats, and it slipped out onto the steps and shattered. I just kept walking as if no one had noticed that the starting point guard of the Fab Five now had beer spilled halfway up his pants. You won’t find that little episode on any “Champagning and Campaigning” greatest-hits reels.

  It’s interesting to look back on the whole racial element of what we were going through socially. At the same time as the Fab Five’s national profile was giving us a crash course on the racial divide of our country in the early ’90s, we were going to a school that had a diverse, but largely white, student body. For me, it was the first time I was interacting with white people on a day-to-day basis. And learning how to play beer pong with some guys at Zeta Beta Tau represented a way more positive experience than getting taunted by opposing fans on the road.

  Still, we weren’t regular members of the student body—basketball players or football players at a top-ranked Division I school can’t be. No one else at school travels like those teams, no one practices like those teams, no one has that high-pressured a professional job while being a student. College is hard enough when all you have to do is study. We had to do it while also dealing with our basketball schedule—at the University of Michigan, one of the best colleges in the country. Now, you ask, would I have been able to get into the University of Michigan without ever playing basketball? Dating all the way back to junior high, if you were in my class, I probably made you think I was just fooling around. But that was a cover for the fact that I got my work done and got the grades. There was no need for everyone to know that I could handle the books. I’d rather surprise them when they didn’t see it coming. I was actually in an accelerated program at Southwestern called the Pepsi School Challenge, which gave me the opportunity to meet one of my idols, Magic Johnson, when he came to the school to meet the young scholars. Nothing nerdy about that. Looking back now, I wish I had been an even more serious student in college. That would have been helpful for life after I left basketball.

  All in all, it was a pretty strange duality that first year—becoming nationally known and surviving the college life—but we managed to get through it. In the sequel, things changed. Sophomore year we had the lay of the land a little more as far as academics went, so we figured out what kinds of classes we could take, how to study efficiently, what the professors were looking for. We moved off campus into our own apartments. And we became wary of the attention we received on campus at Michigan, so we started hanging more with friends we had at Eastern Michigan, which wasn’t too far away.

  No matter what we did, we couldn’t avoid the feeling that everything that felt so right during freshman year seemed to be slipping away.

  —

  EVEN THOUGH I always felt like I was destined to be a successful NBA player—that is, rich—from the time I was ten, I definitely saw college basketball as part of the plan. Playing in March Madness and getting to the Final Four were points that I wanted to check off in my career. As a freshman, the experience delivered in every way I could have imagined. As a sophomore, my eyes started opening up to some other, less idealistic details.

  It started during the summer between freshman and sophomore years when the team took a trip to Europe. We flew over for a nine-game exhibition series in several different countries. Coach Fisher figured it would be a good bonding experience for the team. I thought it was one of the worst ideas I’d ever heard. I still had the hood mentality. Why did I need to go anywhere besides Detroit? (Yup, it sounds like stupid reasoning to me now, too.) I acted about as immaturely as you could expect from someone with that attitude, and my teammates had the same approach. On our most infamous night on the trip, a few of us snuck out of our hotel for a little adventure. We knew there was a casino nearby, and figured we would be able to grow our per diem money if we found it. I’d been gambling since I was in junior high with dice and numbers games, so I steered us to the blackjack table and started doing my thing. Well, an hour later, “my thing” had cost me all my money—and everyone else had busted out, too.

  The only way to get home that late at night was a cab, but none of us had any cash for the driver. This was long before credit and debit cards in taxis, and none of us had any money left at the hotel either. So we hatched a plan to jump out of the cab a few blocks from the hotel. I’d jumped out of more than a few Blue Eagle cabs in my day in Detroit. Great idea, right? Well, not so much when, first, the hotel doors were locked that late at night and, second, we’d already told the driver where we were going! The coaching staff were thrilled to be woken up for that one. Good thing we were smarter on the court than on the street.

  What was most ironic about that little escapade is how young and inexperienced it makes us seem. During the rest of the trip we didn’t feel like kids at all. Not with the stands full, the pro teams opposing us, and everyone getting paid in one way or another, except for us. While the hotels, the meals, and the plane ride were nice, when we got home, what had we earned? We were going back to the hood where there were no free meals, or per diem, for the rest of the summer. And where I had to get a job to make some pocket money for the school year to come. You could find jerseys and T-shirts for sale with our numbers and likenesses on them. But we never saw a penny.

  The NCAA does permit players to get paid appearances at camps, but when we tried to make a couple of bucks that way, it turned out more trouble was waiting. One time that summer, Chris, Eric Riley, and I were booked, for pay, to judge a camp’s slam-dunk contest. We did that, and a few other things, and then began to leave, since we’d been there for the time that had been agreed upon. Except the people who had brought us in wanted us to stay longer. We weren’t guests at a party. We couldn’t leave until they paid us, and they were making us stay for our money. Nowadays, I know how to handle a situation like that. Everything—from what we were doing to how we were being paid—would have been clear well before we got there. At nineteen years of age, it wasn’t as smooth.

  There was another problem. They wanted to pay us with checks. I didn’t have a checking account. I looked at the check they gave me like it was anthrax—what was I going to do with that? So when we told the guy who was running the event we needed cash, it got a little contentious. Anyway, you know how it was reported: with a focus not just on our purported immaturity, but also the supposed controversy of us doing a paid appearance. (Which most people didn’t know was totally legal, according to NCAA rules.)

  The
incident was just another reminder of how far we were from the giant adrenaline rush that had defined our freshman season. Really, it was all too predictable. Nineteen-year-olds cast in the role of big-time stars, expected to go and charm huge crowds. On the one hand, we’d been in the spotlight since the start of high school. On the other hand, we were still young and carrying the ever-bigger chip on our shoulder about money we weren’t getting.

  —

  THE COURT remained our sanctuary. That was the one place where everything could still feel right. The cheers at Crisler Arena that year were as loud as ever. The boos and the taunting on the road made us actually feel at home. In the preseason poll, we were the top-ranked team in the country. No more of this upstart thing: We felt ready to go undefeated. And we were ready to make sure, just like last season, that basketball was just the beginning of the stories told about us.

  Before our first game, against Rice University, Chris and I were playing video games in our hotel room when Jimmy, Ray, and one of Ray’s homeboys, a guy named Little Rob, came in with some fly Nike socks that they’d just gotten at the mall. The socks were cool: gray, instead of the normal white, with the blue Nike swoosh. Ray was talking about how he was going to wear these out, and it made me think about my old high school teammate, Voshon Lenard. Voshon, to add a little style, used to wear dress socks over his white gym socks in Southwestern games. Eventually I followed him, as did a few other players on our team. It was just another way to add to our persona on the court.

  I had an idea. I asked Ray and Jimmy and Little Rob if they had any black socks at that store. Black, I thought, would be a fly match with our dark-blue-and-maize uniforms. (I know—not a perfect match.) They agreed, so we paused our video game and went back to the mall to get black socks for the whole team. We could barely find any pairs of black in the whole mall. We actually found only four pairs of Nikes, which would be for Ray, Jimmy, Chris, and Juwan—and then I got a pair of black dress socks in a department store, to wear over my whites, like I used to at Southwestern.