by Jalen Rose
You realize everything I just wrote about never happened, right?
I’m serious. Search NCAA record books, and try to find an official account of our sophomore year, our second straight run to the Final Four, the Timeout Game. You’ll find nothing. Just a big blank space for that whole season. Which makes no sense. If you were alive in 1992 and 1993, and a sports fan, you remember what happened, and you’ll never forget it.
The funny thing is, that actually almost makes too much sense. In our sports culture, an organization like the National Collegiate Athletic Association can decide to erase certain parts of history, while expressing no interest in giving back the billions of dollars it made off that history, and off the young men who were at the center of it.
As great as college basketball will always be, it has long been so great in spite of, not because of, the NCAA. Though just because it’s a terrible organization doesn’t mean that the problems it faces are easy to solve. The NCAA just so happens to do a particularly poor, shameless job of approaching its problems. College sports, with regard to Division I football and basketball, is really a square peg stuck in a round hole. This idea of amateur sports taking place within the confines of a multibillion-dollar business is ludicrous. Those two things don’t go together naturally. I understand universities have to make money. I understand shoe companies have to make money. I understand television networks have to make money. What I don’t understand is why the young athletes who are making every last cent of it possible can’t be entitled to any money in return.
As I write this, college sports is in what may be the early stages of a revolution. Lawsuits, a redistribution of power to the Big Five conferences, playoffs in football—all these things are changing the system. I have a few simple ideas of my own on some changes that could make things better. But first let me explain how I ended up in the middle of history that somehow disappeared into thin air.
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WE WERE never under investigation while we were at school. It all didn’t heat up until the cold of a Detroit winter, February 1996, three years after our second championship game appearance. By then, the Fab Five were all out of Michigan—I was playing in Denver with the Nuggets, and Chris and Juwan were together on the Washington Bullets. Meanwhile, Mateen Cleaves, a high school All-American from Flint, was being recruited by Michigan (Mateen—not only did you go on to win a title for State, but you set off this chain reaction!) and was on his official recruiting visit. Cleaves was coming back from a party with a bunch of Wolverine players—including Maurice Taylor, the driver, and the late Robert “Tractor” Traylor—when their car crashed. A Ford Explorer, to be specific. After the accident, when people started wondering how Maurice Taylor could own such a nice car, the trail led back to Ed Martin. Yes, the same Ed Martin who I’d first met during boot camp at Southwestern bringing those Chicken Littles to practice, and who I, like so many other young basketball players in Detroit, had gotten to know so well, and to appreciate so much.
The backstory of that night in 1996 is that the players were going from Ann Arbor to a party in Detroit and had stopped by Ed’s house; Ed gave them some money, and then they unfortunately had the accident (which broke Tractor’s arm and cost him the rest of the season).
Now, the NCAA report that later came out would like you to believe that Ed had a bunch of envelopes stuffed with hundreds on the table, and everyone got an envelope, and then got their pick of automobiles. And there were also rumors that Ed was actually hosting a party, and there were strippers and drugs there that he provided, even if no one had ever made an allegation of that nature about Ed before, or after. Eventually, after “sources” threw some tales like that against the wall, the raised eyebrows focused on the money, and the car, and the status of Ed Martin at the University of Michigan. But the fact is that the history of Ed Martin and these kids went far back before college. Tractor Traylor grew up in Detroit, just like I did. So did Mo Taylor. (Neither of them went to Southwestern.) Mateen Cleaves grew up in Flint. They all knew Uncle Ed like I did; all met him the same way, as young kids playing basketball. And they all lived in circumstances where they sometimes didn’t have a new coat for winter, didn’t have new shoes for the new season, didn’t have any pocket money to spend on a Saturday night. Ed was the guy who gave it to them. Because he wanted to help them. Because he could help them. That wasn’t going to change when they got to college.
I know it certainly didn’t change for me. Ed gave me money throughout my time at Michigan. Fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there, two hundred dollars there. All in all throughout my three years at Michigan, he probably gave me a couple of thousand dollars. I borrowed his car, too, plenty of times. Why wouldn’t I borrow the car if he offered? Don’t you think I’d rather use a nice shiny car on a date or to a party than my beat-up Dodge Shadow? I was a college kid, and for all college kids “meal money” means money to go out on Saturday nights. Meanwhile, Ed was also still very involved in Detroit high school basketball, with all the kids I just mentioned and dozens of others who you’ve never heard of. Nothing changed for him either.
The Big Ten and Michigan put together an investigation soon after the crash and found only minor violations. In plain English, that means no one had done anything wrong except break a few NCAA laws, which were misguided anyway. That didn’t stop the powers that be from wanting to show the public that they had done their due diligence in this supposed “shady situation.” They fired Coach Fisher because of his connections to Ed. Connections? Really, Coach got fired because he kept an eye on Ed and what he was doing for the kids and occasionally stepped in when Ed committed what the NCAA might see as a violation, like buying plane tickets for players’ parents to go to the tournament and watch their kids in person. Because Coach didn’t report all these so-called violations, he was charged with bucking the system. In a sad way, it was fitting. For years, Coach Fisher had straddled a line few other people could: operating within the confines of a silly system of rules while also understanding where his players came from; respecting us, while also disciplining us; giving us enough leeway to play the way we did while also setting limits we knew we could not cross. But being in the middle is never easy, and eventually Coach got screwed by it.
Still, the casualties weren’t close to complete. A few years later, the FBI came knocking, charging Ed in an investigation into a numbers racket at a Ford plant. The key charge was that he “laundered” the money he earned from running the numbers ring by giving it to basketball players. Basically, his money traveled the way money travels on the block: as straight cash. That’s how I ended up in front of a grand jury in the spring of 2000. The government knew I was one of the kids who knew Ed best, so I must have ended up with a lot of that money. I told them what I just told you—the truth. Yeah, Ed gave me some money, but not a lot and nothing more than what he gave me in high school.
Meanwhile, the government’s involvement sprang the NCAA back into action. They started a new investigation that turned up all kinds of new details, headlined by supposed five- and six-figure sums of money that Ed had given some players and their families, most prominently C-Webb. And that’s when things got really ugly.
First, it got ugly for Michigan, which decided to self-impose penalties in addition to the ones coming down from the NCAA. Those penalties included basically forfeiting our entire sophomore season, when Chris was allegedly receiving money from Ed, and our Final Fours, along with some other seasons after we left, when the next generation of Michigan stars—like Taylor and Traylor—were also allegedly getting paid by Ed. With the NCAA bearing down, Michigan basically gave in and did everything for them. That’s how we disappeared from the history books.
It also got ugly for Chris personally, because when testifying to the grand jury like I did, he told them he never received any money (or at least not very much money) from Ed, which contradicted other testimony. Chris was charged with lying under oath.
So that’s the quick summary of it in plain la
nguage. There’s a lot of stuff I glossed over. Like how every report ever written about the whole thing always notes that when the FBI came to Ed’s house, he had $20,000 in cash there—“and a loaded gun.” As if he were some kind of gangster, when millions of people across America (including millions that don’t live in the hood) also have loaded guns in their houses. Let me ask you: If he were white, would that have been part of the story? And the $20,000 may sound shady, but it’s also a “necessary evil” of doing business in the hood. It’s a cash world. Again, the hood mentality doesn’t translate well on the outside.
And here’s something more central that I don’t want to gloss over: How come Chris supposedly got $280,000 (that’s the number in the NCAA’s final report) from Ed and he was still driving a blue Corsica all through college? How come Chris and I were still saving our pizza cards from Thano’s, which you could use to get free pizza in the school dining halls, every week? How come the two warm-up suits we got from the team were the newest things in our closet? How come Mitch Albom was following us around for an entire season, and nothing about Ed Martin is mentioned in his book? And one more: How come I was never offered that kind of money? Chris and I were 1-2 in high school, we were 1-2 (along with Juwan) in college. Ed knew us both from the time we were kids. How come he didn’t give me anywhere in the stratosphere of what he supposedly gave Chris? We were both headed to the pros, both set to make millions of dollars, right?
Look, here’s the truth of what happened. In April 1993, when Chris declared for the NBA Draft, he basically held in his hand a lottery ticket—a rookie deal that would be worth almost $75 million. Of course, he would have to wait until October to start cashing the checks—even though immediately starting that April, he had to start living like a pro, getting his own place, getting a trainer, looking around for business managers, all without any money yet. Well, Ed could help, and then the idea was that Chris could pay Ed back as soon as he got his signing bonus. So Ed served as a bridge for Chris so that he didn’t have to reach out to agents or to boosters. That’s all.
Michigan was never going to acknowledge or make an exception for that scenario in their report. And to the NCAA, Ed was a “representative of the athletic interests of the University of Michigan.” Not someone who had a “preexisting relationship,” their term for someone…exactly like him. A man who had known Chris for years (and had grown close with Chris’s father), and who had no true allegiance to any institution, or anyone besides Chris. The fact is that Ed would have been behind Chris (and me, and anyone else he helped out in high school) anywhere we went to college. But somehow the officials behind the investigation came to a different sort of conclusion.
So what did the school do? It basically did what refs do when they don’t have an answer—it called the equivalent of a double foul. Chris was forced to disassociate with the university for ten years, our games and records were wiped out officially, Steve Fisher lost his job, and Michigan gave itself additional sanctions. Everyone gets penalized; let’s move on. The only problem is, in a basketball game, everyone does move on. In this situation, our banners, and our legacy, got buried in a box in a basement.
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LET ME ask you a question: If we had grown up in the suburbs and Ed were one of our dads, or our uncles, would any of this have been an issue? And I’ll say it again: If everyone involved were white, would they have ever reported that Ed had a loaded gun in his house as if he were some sort of threat?
Ed was a guy who used to take Chris and me to ACT class—made us go. Not get us drugs! He was the guy who brought food everywhere he went—seafood pizza, Chicken Littles, pies, cakes. Not guns! Ed Martin was a good man with a positive outlook, a big smile, and a wonderful family that included his wife, Hilda, and his sons, Carl and Bruce. To me, the measure of a man is how he treats people who can’t do anything for him. Ninety-five percent of the kids he helped were never going to be able to pay him back or reciprocate. No one wants to write about that. No one wants to write about the coats and sneakers he bought for kids who he knew were never going to play college ball, forget about the NBA.
Why can’t it be okay for a player like me to know someone with a little bit of money? Why can’t it be all right for that person to send me a few hundred dollars, or hook me up with their car once in a while, when I’m in college, trying to do the right thing? Because I’m a basketball player? Because I’m black, and from the hood?
Try this: Picture your favorite college basketball player. Now picture his mom or dad or uncle or godfather giving him some spending money, or a new Jeep. What’s the difference between that and Ed Martin? I didn’t have a father to help support me. Neither did most of the other players. We took whatever help we could get. In the eyes of the public and the NCAA, there was no gray area. We were either model students or thugs. They decided the latter.
I’m proud to make this clear right now: Ed Martin did have a huge impact on the Fab Five. I’m not talking about pocket money or borrowed cars. I’m talking about the fact that he helped inspire the Fab Five to begin with. Ed was someone who made me care about Detroit, and community, and people. He taught me about real charity, the kind that makes it to the block as opposed to the kind that’s about photo ops and good press. That example, from Ed, from Perry, and from others absolutely influenced my decision to stay close to home at Michigan. And to team up with Chris, and three other guys, to shock the world together.
That’s the real heart of the hood mentality. If you grow up with money and means, you can never truly understand what it’s like to be without money and means. You can never really appreciate how hard it is to, first, simply survive and support yourself and your family in the hood and, second, somehow pull yourself out. That’s fine. It’s nobody’s fault—until people start imposing rules and expectations and norms that exist in the rest of the world, on the hood.
People think of the hood as a place where people get shot, where they get robbed, where they get beat up. And, yes, that happens there much more than other places, because people in the hood are desperate. When people are desperate, they can be driven to do some bad things. But in the hood, you’ll also find people lifting each other up. Neighbors who look out for one another. People who find ways to not just survive, but thrive.
I’ll tell you what bothers me most about the whole thing. You know I’ve never minded the haters. I practically recruited the haters in college. But the one place I don’t need any hate is on the legacy of the Fab Five. Hate on the long shorts, the black socks, the bald heads, the earrings, the tattoos. That is all fine. But it’s upsetting to me that the final chapter of our saga is about violations and scandal, about our Final Four run getting erased and our banners being taken down. It’s upsetting to me that people think it was all a scam, that we were paid to play, and we didn’t really go to college. I hear the jokes and the comments all the time. The truth is that I had to save money to fill up my car every winter I was in Ann Arbor. The truth is, we played our hearts out because we wanted to.
But the truth has nothing to do with what people want to believe.
And as far as the NCAA is concerned, the truth has no place in history.
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I GLOSSED over something that I want to use to illustrate the problems of misconceptions and assumptions. When I came to Michigan in 1991, after graduating from Southwestern, Perry Watson, my high school coach, also came to Michigan as an assistant coach on Steve Fisher’s staff. There was nothing illegal about that, and no one ever really made much of a fuss about this specifically, other than to raise an eyebrow or two—but honestly, that raised eyebrow is what I’m concerned with. If you read stories about the Fab Five, writers use a certain tone when talking about Perry to imply that he was some sort of slickster who had an operation going. That’s complete bull.
The truth is important. Yes, Perry took a job and, yes, it was a tremendous asset to have a trusted mentor there as a guide during freshman year. He also knew Chris, and became a mentor to
my other teammates. It was good for the coaching staff to have someone who their star recruits would instantly trust, and be able to communicate with.
That doesn’t mean it was shady.
Perry was the coach of the best high school team in the country, a team that had been to nine straight Michigan state title games and had won two consecutive titles. Do you know what happens to high school coaches like that? They get college jobs. It’s the next step up the ladder. Perry got lots of offers to leave Southwestern for college jobs before 1991. It wasn’t like Michigan was doing him a favor by giving him a job.
For Perry it made sense, too. After nine straight state title games, and two straight state titles, he had pretty much proved he was the best. A new opportunity sounded enticing. Furthermore, the job led Perry to a place where he could make a larger impact on young people in Detroit than he was making at Southwestern. Perry stayed two years at Michigan and then left (before me) to take the head coaching job at the University of Detroit (now Detroit Mercy). That job gave him an opportunity to take his mission to a bigger stage. He could encourage the best players in the city to come to college and play for him while making a difference at the college in a number of ways. He spent fifteen years at Detroit, taking his teams to two NCAA tournaments and producing star players like Willie Green and Jermaine Jackson. He was the first guy to make that program relevant since Dick Vitale coached there in the 1970s. Perry retired a few years back, when, as I said earlier, the recruiting game changed too much, and he just found it too hard—too depressing, really—to reach the local kids he wanted to help. (Now he actually does some scouting for the Orlando Magic.)
Are there programs out there that give jobs to people associated with certain players as part of wink-wink recruiting packages? Yes, absolutely. It happens all the time. But let me ask you this: When a company hires an important new employee to run a division, doesn’t that employee often bring along a colleague they trust? Isn’t that understood as a smart thing to do? Of course, in college sports, as in any business, at times an associate, or a family member even, gets a no-show job or a position that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable. But that’s only on the margins. More often, it makes sense to bring in new coaches with new players. Though for what it’s worth, very, very few of them have the résumé that Perry Watson did in 1991.