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

by Jalen Rose

  Now we had to figure out how to actually wear them in the game that night. They call it a “uniform” for a reason. You can’t just change it when you want. Our equipment manager, Bobby Bland, would never let it happen, and neither would the coaches. We hatched a plan: We would slip away in the locker room to get dressed one-by-one in bathroom stalls, then put on our warm-ups and keep the pants on in the pre-game and layup lines. At the very last minute, we’d strip down to our shorts. That’s exactly what we did. The coaches were shocked, but they weren’t going to stop the game and make us change our socks. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

  Socks or not, we played sloppy in that opening game, winning by four against a Rice team that wouldn’t make the NCAA Tournament. The papers and the fans took notice of our new look. What was the response? Well, think about how many black socks Nike (and Adidas, and Reebok, and Under Armour, and whoever else) has sold since that night in Houston.

  Now think about how much of that money went to the kids in that hotel room in Houston who came up with the whole thing.

  —

  WE DIDN’T go undefeated. We lost to Duke, in Durham, which sucked; twice to Indiana; and also to Iowa. The conference losses pretty much cost us the Big Ten title, though not the big prize we were eyeing. Still, with a 26-4 regular-season record, there were lots of highlights. We won a holiday tournament in Hawaii, knocking off North Carolina in the semifinal, with the game-winning shot by yours truly. We beat Kansas, Purdue, Iowa State, Michigan State, and a whole bunch of other tough teams. The game that stands out for me—not just because it was a great victory, but because of everything else it represented—was Illinois. It proved the media’s lack of understanding about where I came from and its desire to portray me and our team in a certain light.

  Let’s rewind to October, just before the season started. Like a lot of weekend mornings, I was kicking it at my boy Freddie D’s house over on Cloverlawn Street in Detroit. Freddie and I had known each other since Southwestern, when he was the manager of the basketball team. His mom had died at some point, and now that high school was over, he lived alone. And like a lot of kids whose parents aren’t around for whatever reason, Freddie’s house had become the hangout spot, the place we could go to play video games, drink a little bit, just chill out. Hanging out on the block wasn’t something I had stopped doing just because I’d become part of the Fab Five. Just because I got a scholarship didn’t mean the whole neighborhood got one, too. School and the hood were separated by just a half-hour drive, and I tried to straddle both worlds. Freddie was a good dude, not into anything real bad, but you couldn’t say the same thing about everyone else who came through his spot. I knew that, and for better or worse, I didn’t care.

  Anyway, that morning I was sitting on Freddie’s couch, playing Madden with a couple of other dudes that I knew a little bit. What I didn’t know is that one of them had some crack cocaine rocks in his pocket and had gotten himself mixed up with an undercover officer to sell those drugs. One minute we’re playing Madden, and the next minute a team of undercover cops is banging on the door, barging into the living room, whipping out the badges and guns, securing the premises. It was pretty much what you see on TV. They came in vans, disguised as dry cleaners.

  While the scene unfolded, I was defiant, laughing at the cops, talking to them, asking them incredulously what they thought they were going to find. They proceeded to go through bookshelves, knife up the couches, dump out cereal boxes, looking everywhere they could for some huge stash of drugs that wasn’t there. Then, boom, they go through this one guy’s pockets.

  I’ll never forget when the cop said, “We got rocks.” What? “He’s got rocks. You’re all arrested.” “But what’s our crime?” “Loitering in a ‘place where drugs were stored.’ ” “So what now? We going downtown?” “No. Here you go.” They literally gave me a ticket. You know, the kind you get when you miss a stop sign. And that was that. We all go home.

  Okay, what now? Honestly, I didn’t know. I told my mom what had happened, told my friends, but my (foolish) plan was to tell no one else—thinking that no one in Ann Arbor would ever find out. I didn’t want it impacting my scholarship or eligibility or anything like that.

  The plan worked, for about five months. Inevitably, the story leaked out to someone, and the press investigated it. One morning in early March, I got into my green Dodge Shadow, wiped off the snow, and drove to my normal breakfast spot, Bob Evans. I opened the paper while I was waiting for my food, and—Whoa!—I’m on the front page. Jalen Rose, caught in a crack house bust. Jalen Rose, drug dealer. Jalen Rose, crackhead.

  A couple of things to set straight before I wrap up how this story ended. First, that house was no crack house. I know what a crack house is—knew it then, know it now. This was a friend’s house where we hung out, and a dude happened to come by who had drugs (three crummy ten-dollar rocks) in his pocket. That could have happened in the suburbs as easily as it could have happened on the block. Second, the subtle criticism associated with the coverage implicated me for hanging out in my old neighborhood. Well, where was I supposed to hang out when I wasn’t at school? Today, a lot of programs build infrastructures where athletes can live year-round if they want to, to keep kids out of situations they shouldn’t be in. Back then, there was no such thing. Plus, I didn’t have the desire to do that anyway. My old friends were the best way I could get away to escape from the craziness of the Fab Five. I loved the mania most of the time, but quiet times back in reality can be refreshing, you know?

  I got huge support from my Michigan family. I didn’t get suspended, and everyone had my back the whole way. We ended up having a press conference to address the whole thing. But I wasn’t going to give the media what they wanted. I let them know I didn’t feel like I had done anything wrong that day, and also that this hadn’t fazed me one bit. Chris came to the conference for moral support, and helped keep me calm with a bunch of Scarface jokes. Still, I was not happy about the whole thing. I was upset and disappointed in myself that I hadn’t dealt with the situation the right way from the beginning. But I wasn’t going to let anyone else, least of all the media, see that. Part of me even felt, Hey, let them attack me, fire me up even more.

  So our next game was at Illinois, at Assembly Hall. We win the opening tip, and as the point guard, I get the ball first. The chant started immediately: “CRACK HOUSE…CRACK HOUSE.” Initially, I didn’t even realize they were talking about me, until it occurred to me, who else would they be talking about? Then I get to the free throw line, and they’re chanting the Nancy Reagan chant: “JUST SAY NO…JUST SAY NO.” Was I embarrassed? Yeah. But that other part of me said, I gotta embrace this. I gotta be a dogg about it. My teammates are here with me, we’re playing together—that’s all that matters.

  After a while, I started putting my hand to my ear during their chants, like Hulk Hogan, egging them on as if I couldn’t hear them. It only made them get louder, which was perfect, because it stoked my adrenaline higher. My teammates sensed that. They were watching out for me, staying close to me on the bench during timeouts, making sure I knew I had their support, and feeding me the ball every chance they could get. It was close all the way, and then, when we were down in the closing seconds, I hit a shot to tie it, and then got a steal to force overtime. In OT, I couldn’t be stopped, putting on the finishing touches.

  I played all forty-five minutes. Twenty-three points. Eight rebounds. At the end I put one index finger to my lips, letting the crowd know when it was time to quiet down.

  Take that to your crack house.

  —

  SMALL SIDE note before I get to the tournament.

  We were college boys, and we were famous.

  The Fab Five did okay with the women.

  Enough said.

  —

  SOPHOMORE YEAR actually should have felt more familiar to me. We were the favorites. As freshmen, we weren’t expected to win, something I wasn’t accustomed to. That had mad
e us an easy team to root for if you were young, understood what we were about, and liked being part of the oldest story in sports: the underdog.

  In the sequel, we were the Big Bad Wolf. The team that was easy to hate. We thrived off that energy, though when things like the “crack house” incident arose, it could be a reminder of just how intense it all was, for the fans and for us. During our game against Michigan State, in East Lansing in February, the chants were real bad. The n-word was flying at us, and that was just from the uncreative fans. We ended up winning the game, and even though Michigan State sucked that year, considering the rivalry, it was a great win. We decided to celebrate in front of fans by rubbing it in—literally. A few of us sat down on the Spartan S near midcourt after the final buzzer, and—how’s this for classy—rubbed our butts on the floor.

  It’s easy to look back twenty years later, shake your head, and call us immature. Argue that we should have walked off the court, not try and incite a riot. But that would be ignoring the reality of our situation. The fact is, we had accomplished the most important mission in our lives that week: beating our archrival. To do that we had to get ourselves into a mental state in which every fiber of our bodies, minds, and hearts was devoted to that task. That meant getting hyped, that meant a lot of shouting and trash-talk, that meant—to paraphrase one of my favorite athletes of all time, Lawrence Taylor—“goin’ out there like a bunch of crazed dogs and havin’ some fun.” There are going to be consequences to that once the final whistle blows.

  The only thing I regret about that particular stunt is that I forgot that from center court we still had to walk to our locker room. And on that short walk, the fans got us good. They threw change at us, water bottles, food, and showered us with beer and soda. And then, when we were leaving, they tried to tip over our bus.

  They couldn’t. We drove back to Ann Arbor with the win.

  —

  A LITTLE bit of spice in the Michigan–Michigan State rivalry—a little bit of beer throwing and bus tipping—wasn’t particularly distinctive to the Fab Five. What was unique was something else that rained down on us: hypocrisy.

  It started right at Michigan. The so-called distinguished alumni started calling in, writing letters to Coach Fisher and the administration, complaining that the way we conducted ourselves wasn’t befitting of “Michigan Men.” These, of course, were the same alumni who would have fired Coach, and his entire staff, if they hadn’t successfully recruited us. And the same alumni whose university was suddenly back in the national spotlight thanks to us, which had invaluable benefits for the school as a whole. I’d also venture to guess that as often as they were shaking their heads about us at their country clubs and inside their law firms, they were also sneaking off into their dens and family rooms on weekends, putting on their Michigan hats and shirts, and screaming just as loudly as we did when the refs screwed us out of a call.

  Then there was the hypocrisy everywhere else. Maybe the episode that sums it up best is what Bill Walton told Roy Firestone on Up Close, the old interview show preceding SportsCenter on ESPN. I remember watching the show in my apartment, just before the tournament, sophomore year. He called us “one of the most overrated and underachieving teams of all time,” “guys who epitomize what is wrong with a lot of basketball players,” which apparently was that “they think they’re better than they are. They don’t come out to win games. They come out defending something they don’t have.” (I guess he was referring to a national title there.) He continued: “They come along, they cruise, they come in and say, ‘We’re Michigan, we’re really great because everybody says we’re great.’ ”

  Now, that was a long time ago. I’ve gotten to know Bill Walton pretty well since then, and I have become a big fan and a good friend of his. He’s always frank and candid, and will always be one of the best college players of all time. But let’s talk for a second about where Bill was coming from. The UCLA tradition. The legendary John Wooden, who apparently did everything perfectly and was a model of what college sports aspired to be, even if when you sniff around the history of that program, you find out that there may have been a few envelopes being handed around to a few players during his era.

  So while we’re at it, how about a few quotes some UCLA fans might be familiar with?

  “Failure is not fatal, but a failure to change might be.”

  “You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.”

  “Be true to yourself.”

  I don’t know about you, but to me, all those quotes sound like they could be about the Fab Five.

  Every one of them was uttered by John Wooden himself.

  Oh, one more quote. This one from Walton again. His thoughts on how we’d do in the 1993 NCAA Tournament.

  “This is a team I don’t think is doing well and won’t do well in the tournament.”

  Oh, is that right?

  —

  WE GOT the top seed in the West, which meant we’d start our journey back to the summit in Arizona. We beat Coastal Carolina by thirty, but then got a wake-up call against who else, Bill Walton’s alma mater, UCLA, in the second round, going down by nineteen in the first half to a school that would win the national title two years later. Nut check. We came all the way back, got through some hairy moments to get it to overtime, and then Jimmy tipped in a miss off one of my shots to win it. Consider us woken up. We got past George Washington, led by the late Yinka Dare, and then met the team we’d played at the beginning of our freshman run, John Chaney’s Temple Owls. Chaney had come to my house in Detroit to try and recruit me in high school. His teams played a familiar brand of basketball, tough and unforgiving. They were as strong a team as any we played in that era, and that game was like being back in west Detroit. They had a forward named William Cunningham who spent the whole game just trying to punk Chris. But we fought and fought, and found a way to win. We were going to our second straight Final Four.

  It was hardly a flawless tournament run—but look back at the history of March Madness, and you’ll see how many Final Four teams barely get through most of their games. It becomes as much about guts as skills, as much about staying together as playing great. Your goal should be to peak when you get to the Final Four. Which, after shaking Temple in the last ten minutes of the game, is what we were doing.

  Finally, the sequel was feeling right again. We knew Chris was probably going to do something very, very few players did back then—turn pro as a sophomore after the season ended. We knew the stakes as we went to one of the party capitals of the United States, New Orleans. The media frenzy was nothing new. The hype was nothing new. Duke was long gone—Jason Kidd and Lamond Murray at Cal had upset them in the second round. We had Kentucky in front of us, and then the winner of North Carolina–Kansas. Three of the most storied programs in the history of college basketball, and the Fab Five.

  The day before our game against Kentucky, we got off the practice floor and Mitch Albom, the Detroit Free Press columnist who’d been working on a book about us, came up to me. Mitch and I had known each other a little bit back in high school, and for the book, he’d already been talking to me, my mom, and a bunch of other people. Just another guy making a dollar off the Fab Five, even if it was cool having a book being written about us.

  As we walked to the locker room, Mitch handed me an envelope with a letter inside.

  What’s this? I asked him.

  It’s a letter from your dad.

  6. The Inside Story of One of the Most Famous Plays in Basketball History

  It’s a funny thing about time, and life. Even if you’re lucky and you’re around for eighty, ninety years, everything comes down to things that happened in one day, or a few hours, or even just a couple of seconds. A job interview, a first date, some stroke of luck or fate that changed everything. Sports amplify that reality. You could do everything right 99.9 percent of your career, but if you can’t get it done in that 0.1 percent, then that’s what people
remember, and that’s what defines your legacy.

  On the one hand, it’s unfair. So much of what happens in that 0.1 percent of the time is out of your control. On the other hand, those instances aren’t isolated moments of time; they are part of everything else. Not just how much you’ve practiced, and how much you’ve prepared, but what you’ve gone through—experiences, adversity, successes, and failures. All set you up for those handful of moments that, for better or worse, matter more than all the others.

  People still come up to me to talk about the Fab Five. They tell me how they remember our games, and how they appreciate all the ways we impacted basketball, and everything around it. Once in a while, though, usually when I’m at a bar or a restaurant, when someone’s had a few drinks, they bring up the Timeout. They tell me where they were when they watched that title game in ’93, what they remember, how they couldn’t believe it. It comes up, and all of us—Jimmy, Ray, Juwan, myself, and of course Chris—have to live with it. Because no matter who called the timeout, and why he did it, for the Fab Five that moment was about all of us. We can’t detach it from everything that had happened in the 99.9 percent of the rest of the time. We walked into the Superdome that night in New Orleans as brothers, and we walked out as brothers.

  That will never change.

  Despite what may have happened since.

  Despite why it happened at all.

  —

  OVERALL, I’M a big fan of Mitch Albom. He’s a great writer, and he’s done great things for Detroit, including a ton of charity work headlined by his organization, S.A.Y. Detroit, which helps out the city’s neediest people in many ways. Mitch has had a lot of success in his career. He’s even had a bit of controversy. But I’m not sure anyone has given much thought to the fact that in 1993, he took it upon himself to seek out the father I hadn’t had any contact with in twenty years. Then, on the eve of one of the biggest games of my career, to hand me that letter with no warning. I understand, now more than ever, that it’s the media’s job to sell papers and magazines. Still, looking back, taking it upon himself to create a story that he could use for his book crossed a line.