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

by Jalen Rose

  By that point, I was pretty busy anyway. I had to figure out where to go to college.

  Please remember this fact—yes, fact—as you read this chapter: It is all about the money. It always is, and always has been. They may call it amateur athletics, but college sports is a for-profit enterprise. There are billions of dollars to be had, and if you run college sports at a school, getting as much of that pie as you can is your job.

  Please also understand this opinion as you read this chapter: If college sports are all about the money, what’s wrong with that? Money isn’t a bad thing; money’s a great thing. Money’s what pays for heating bills and mortgages. Money’s what pays teachers. Money’s what you give poor people when you want to make them not poor anymore. Money’s what rich people use to enjoy wonderful things. Money gets a bad rap in sports, where, for some reason, we try and pretend the whole enterprise is purely “for the love of the game,” when it absolutely isn’t. And thank God for that, because it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if it was.

  Look, a man like Ed Martin, who helped out poor players in Detroit, was all about the money, because everything Ed Martin did for us was based on the reality that he had money and we didn’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean Ed was looking to profit from the kids he bought shoes and seafood pizza for, or, worse, to try and screw us in some way. Not a chance. Ed was one of us, and he wanted us to have what he had. I’m not saying that the man wasn’t a hustler—everyone in the hood is a hustler. But in the hood, or, as we refer to it, on the block, hustlers can do a lot of good. That is what I was taught, closely coupled with another lesson: be careful about trusting people who come from outside the hood and tell you they have your best interests at heart.

  That concept was never made clearer than by one of the most important things Coach Perry Watson did for us during the college recruiting process: He intercepted all the letters that came in from schools as early as our freshman year and kept them in a box until the end of our junior year. If you got a lot of letters, you just got a bigger box—but none of us ever got to see a single one. Today, kids start getting letters in junior high, if not earlier. Don’t you think that goes straight to a young player’s head? Makes them think they’re better than they are, or that they don’t have to work to reach their potential? All Perry wanted us to focus on was basketball, and so even though we knew there were college scouts and coaches in the stands at our games, we had a shield over us, protecting us from the reality that awaited us senior year, when it would come time to figure out what the next step would be.

  Today, I don’t think Perry, or any high school coach, would have any chance of pulling that on his kids. Everyone else—the parents, the AAU coaches, the street agents—would find a way to band together and get him fired as revenge for keeping them from sniffing the sweet scent of money.

  —

  AS I write this, Perry Watson is about to turn sixty-five years old. Coach K, Gregg Popovich, and Pete Carroll are all around the same age or a little older than Perry. But he hasn’t coached in more than five years, and whenever anyone asks him about it, he just shakes his head. It’s not worth it, he says. The system’s changed too much. The way he ran his program, looking out for his kids, would be impossible now. So the greatest coach in Detroit high school history (and maybe Detroit basketball history, when you consider what he did after Southwestern) is enjoying the retired life from standing on the sideline barking orders—he is now a scout for the Orlando Magic. He keeps in touch with his old players, and keeps tabs on their parents and their kids. I don’t think he could look at me with a straight face and say he doesn’t miss it. Problem is, the game he misses is gone.

  My mom knew all about Perry Watson when she sent me to Southwestern. She knew she’d struck gold when I told her I was willing to catch two buses early in the morning to go from our house to school, to play for a man who was going to look after me, and straighten me out. Today, there are fewer and fewer parents who would feel that way. Nowadays, with the Internet and social media, there are scouting reports on ten-year-olds like LeBron James Jr. And everything’s national. It wouldn’t be a little local open secret that I was Jimmy Walker’s son. It would be a national story on ESPN by the time I was twelve. Which would mean there would be a whole lot of people who would have come out of the woodwork to try and grab a seat on my train. Too many people for Perry Watson, or my mom, to keep away from me.

  All that makes young talented players a lot different today. They, and the people around them, aren’t going to be up for playing JV ball. The competition for touches, stats, and highlights among players headed into big-time recruiting is more intense and starts earlier than ever. And a program like Southwestern can’t exist anymore.

  —

  WE LOST four games in my four years at Southwestern. I’m as proud of what we accomplished there as I am of anything else in my career, including Michigan. In retrospect, there could have been no more perfect place to play for a kid from the city. Playing at Southwestern made me love the game more than I ever had before. Even outside the team, I’d play pickup ball anywhere I could during those years: at the Northwest Activities Center, the Police Athletic League, and the Joseph Walker Williams Community Center. Meanwhile, at Southwestern, we worked harder than any other team, whether it was running 5-1-5-1-5s on sunny days (five laps around the track, a lap around the baseball field, and back again and again) or running the school hallways on rainy days. There was a tremendous level of discipline and professionalism expected of the team. On those rare occasions we lost, nothing was said on the bus ride home, and we definitely practiced that night when we got back.

  Above everything else, though, winning was the most important part of my experience at Southwestern. Those early victories turned me on to winning, got me addicted to winning. I learned what it takes to win, and that is the most important ingredient in becoming a great player. Winners put winning first, which means they’ll work harder at their games in practice (to win), and they’ll do whatever’s most important for the team (to win), from playing better defense to diving on the floor in pursuit of a loose ball to becoming a better teammate. That doesn’t mean a winner will be happy to sit on the bench while his team wins, as I did at the start of my AAU days in middle school. Winners want to be part of the winning; they need to be part of the winning.

  By high school, that’s the kind of attitude I had. Failure was not an option. And with Voshon Lenard and Howard Eisley on my team—two of the best players in the state of Michigan, two future college stars (at the University of Minnesota and Boston College, respectively), and two future NBA veterans—I learned how to be a star playing next to other stars, catching lobs, dunking, hitting threes, playing suffocating defense. Together, we set out to win Southwestern a state title, beating everyone in our path, including our archrivals at Cooley, along the way. We did just that. In the title game my junior year, with our big man Elton Carter hurt, I jumped center. The night before the game, I remember visualizing Magic Johnson in the 1980 NBA Finals against the Sixers—fantasizing about how I could be like him. And then I did it, and we won. Winning that title was as sweet as anything I’ve ever experienced in basketball. After everything Coach Watson had done for us, we were able to deliver him the one thing he didn’t have: the state title. Then we won it again my senior year. We were named the best high school team in the entire country by USA Today. One other achievement of our dominant Southwestern team: Michigan’s own Derek Jeter once said that after he played us with his high school basketball team, he realized it was time to focus on baseball.

  Now, even though Coach Watson kept my letters in that box, I thought about where I was going to go to college all the time. From the start, just four schools appealed to me. First and foremost, UNLV. They were the best team in the country, and, looking back, their image certainly fit their team name, the Runnin’ Rebels, and that was an image I naturally gravitated toward. Soon after the Palace of Auburn Hills was open, UNLV came to play a game t
here against Michigan State. The day before their game, the entire team came to a Southwestern game and made me like the school even more.

  Then there was Syracuse, where Detroit’s own Derrick Coleman had just gone to the Final Four. Another local connection there was Dave Bing, the Pistons Hall of Famer who added to his fame in Detroit by becoming a steel magnate after his playing days. Dave knew my family well, and he’d known Jimmy Walker when they were teammates. I worked at his company, Bing Steel, one summer in high school—one of the longest, hardest summers of my life. Nobody cut the basketball star any slack at all over there.

  Dave was never that interested in talking to me about basketball, really. He was more about talking to me about life. He was giving back to Detroit, staying loyal and contributing. That concept factored into my two other top schools, Michigan State and Michigan. Staying close to home, close to my mom, who had supported me as I’d become a star, and my grandma, who’d been making my scrapbooks going back to sixth grade at St. Cecilia’s, was something that made a lot of sense to me.

  There was one other factor: I wasn’t the only top recruit in the city thinking about staying local.

  —

  THERE WERE plenty of reasons why Chris Webber and I shouldn’t have been good friends. First, while the rest of us were taking two public buses across town to school at the crack of dawn, he was going to a beautiful private school outside of the city, with big, beautiful grassy fields; a parking lot filled with fancy cars; classrooms with rich kids; and the best education money could buy. He straddled two worlds, and some people left behind on the concrete resented him for that. I never saw it that way, though. To me, his scholarship was an opportunity that his family wanted to take advantage of, and I always had respect for that decision.

  Another reason we weren’t supposed to get along had to do with basketball. Going back to our earliest days playing together on the Superfriends, Chris was viewed as the prodigy who was definitely headed to the NBA. True, I got lots of attention, especially at Southwestern, and, like him, I was a McDonald’s All-American, a Dapper Dan All-American, went to all the camps, and played against all the other top players in the country. But there was only one Chris Webber. Local news cameras were following him around at practice, treating him like a celebrity. Even Ed Martin started going to more Country Day games than Southwestern games. (I remember Coach Watson getting on Ed for that in a joking way.) Senior year, when it was a foregone conclusion that Chris was going to be named Michigan’s Mr. Basketball, the top player in the state, I went to Coach and said, “Actually, I’m going to be Mr. Basketball. I’m gonna beat out Chris.” That was my goal for the year, and I did everything I could to make it happen. I was the best player on my second state championship team that was again named the top team in the country. But Chris was still Michigan’s Mr. Basketball.

  And I was happy for him.

  Part of my education was learning what competition is, and what it doesn’t have to be. Playing on the same AAU teams for years and carpooling to games, being familiar faces for one another at all these national camps, the experiences Chris and I had together had made us good friends. So why did competing have to get in the way of that? Why couldn’t my friend be my rival? Shouldn’t it have been a good thing that I had someone to motivate me to go to the gym every morning, to get better every time I got out on the court?

  From the start, I was never one of those guys who took my basketball emotions and turned them into my overall emotions. Sure, no one talked more than me on the court, and I got in my fair share of arguments and fights in games. But it never carried over anywhere else. Maybe that was because so many guys I played were coming from the same place as me. Maybe that was because at Southwestern, and on the Superfriends, I was used to playing with other great players and measuring myself against them even as I shared the ball with them. I was always able to be friends with my rivals off the court.

  Being ranked behind Chris Webber didn’t make me hate him; if anything, it strengthened our friendship. When we played together in AAU ball, I think Chris liked my style: my loud way of taking control on the court, my streetball Teflon Don mentality that provided a nice contrast from the private school league he easily dominated. We stayed close as senior year approached. And we both remembered the conversation we’d had back in eighth grade, when he told me that he was going to Country Day and not Southwestern.

  “Let’s not worry about high school,” we said. “We’ll go to college together instead.”

  —

  THERE ARE a lot of people who deserve credit for creating the Fab Five, one of the greatest recruiting classes for any school ever. I think the guy who sometimes gets forgotten is Juwan Howard.

  It’s well known that Juwan was the first member of the Fab Five to commit to Michigan, and that was thanks to a long recruiting effort by Steve Fisher, Michigan’s head coach, and Brian Dutcher, his top assistant, both now at San Diego State. Basically, for Juwan, there was one person more important than anyone in his life—his grandmother. She was the equivalent of my mom, my grandma, my uncles, Sam Washington, and Perry Watson all rolled into one. After a high school career that made him the best player in Chicago, on the day that Juwan announced he was going to the University of Michigan, his grandma died of a heart attack. A few days later, Coach Fisher and Coach Dutcher, sure enough, showed up at her funeral. If Juwan needed a sign of where the best place to go was, that was it. He knew he’d made the right decision.

  Juwan’s work wasn’t done. He’d gotten to know me and Chris through the top-prospect summer camps we went to together, and we’d become pretty friendly. It all sort of fit: I was the boisterous one; Chris was the prodigy, happy to let someone else lead the way; and Juwan was the elder statesman (even though we were all the same age). He was a quieter leader than I was, but definitely an important one all the same. He’d also gotten to know Jimmy King and Ray Jackson, two stars in Texas that Michigan was chasing, and through the recruiting season, after he’d already committed to come to Ann Arbor, he was on the phone checking in on all of us to see what we were thinking, and encouraging us to go through with what had become a crazy plan: to all go to the same school.

  This went on all the school year. Jimmy and Ray committed to Michigan in the fall. Meanwhile, at Southwestern, with Voshon dominating more fiercely than ever, my own decision started to crystallize. At UNLV, they’d had that scandal with a sports gambler in the hot tub, and it looked like they were headed for NCAA sanctions. Syracuse also had an investigation going on involving Billy Owens and some other players. So staying close to home began to look more and more like the right decision. Even though my idol, Magic Johnson, had gone to Michigan State, it became clear that the place where I’d be able to keep playing as a big point guard (just like Magic) was actually in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, alongside some incredible talent. Most notably, of course, Chris Webber. I remember Chris and I finalized our decision to go to Michigan together when we were at Ed Martin’s house one day—after Ed had taken us to ACT prep class. (Yes, he used to do that, too.)

  I never even told anyone at Michigan formally. Instead, after our state title game, there was a press conference, and in the afterglow of the win, I just decided to come out with it. Literally a few hours earlier, Chris had had a big press conference to announce he’d made the same decision. He’d worn number 44 in high school, but would switch to number 4 once he got to school, as he was the fourth to sign. I picked number 5. I was the last.

  Juwan, Jimmy, Ray, Chris, and Jalen. The consensus was that it was the best draft class in the country. We certainly agreed. Our goal was to win a championship together, and maybe two, three, or, hell, even four. Who knew what could happen from there.

  Five guys, one dream.

  There are people who will tell you that college sports have always been dirty—that shady things have been going on since way before the Fab Five ever went to Michigan. And they have a point. But the changes that have happened at wa
rp speed over the past several years have accelerated everything. College isn’t as much a destination for top recruits anymore—it’s more like a tollbooth, a place to fly through on the way to the NBA. When Steve Fisher or Brian Dutcher sat in our living rooms, they were selling us on a program where we were very possibly going to spend four years (or, if we became really good, probably three; ridiculously good, two); where they were going to develop us as players; and where we would be trying to build something together. They were selling our parents on the idea that they would be developing a quality young man and were offering a good education. Finally, they were selling both of us on the notion that all this together would give us the best shot at a professional career.

  Today when, say, John Calipari comes to talk to a player about Kentucky, it’s just one thing: the pros. He can say that he’s had nineteen NBA draft picks over his first five years with the Wildcats (Michigan, my alma mater, hasn’t had nineteen first draft picks in the last twenty years!), and if the player comes to play for him, he’ll do everything he can to make him the next player who goes right to the pros after one year. The emphasis isn’t on building anything or academics. It’s about one subject: the player’s best route to the NBA to take care of himself and the ones he loves.