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

by Jalen Rose

  Typically on the college level, the sports information office is supposed to protect players from the media when necessary. But by that point in time, late in our sophomore year, the athletic department viewed Mitch’s book as their book, because the program, and the university, were going to benefit from an exclusive inside look at our team. It was essentially free publicity, for recruits, for prospective students, and for alumni donors. They gave him access to us anytime he wanted. Now, forget about the fact that the five of us weren’t going to see a dime of the book money—thanks to Albom’s intrepid reporting, the school had put our team at risk by allowing a writer to possibly mess with the head of one of its star players right before the Final Four.

  I’m not bringing this up to make any excuses. I will say right here that Mitch had nothing to do with the result of the games, and nothing to do with how I played. I’ve never spoken to him about this, and it would be interesting to hear what he thinks of the whole episode now. And also, since he got paid twice—once for his job as a reporter, and then for writing the book (keep getting dem checks, Mitch!)—maybe we could talk it over and he could make a donation to JRLA to clear this all up. Mitch, you know where to find me!

  Anyway, back to New Orleans. Mitch hands me this letter from Jimmy Walker, and a phone number if I wanted to call him. I asked him where Walker was living. Atlanta, he said. Mitch asked me a few more questions, trying to draw a reaction and to get me to reveal my emotions at that moment. I wasn’t going to give him much of a story. Never let them see you sweat. Always stay in control. Street rules.

  Back in my hotel room, I came close to calling my father. I really did. But I didn’t. I had been dealing with distractions my entire life. I wasn’t about to let this one suddenly ruin everything. Learning who my father was in that basement at St. Cecilia’s had basically defined my outlook on what my destiny was. But that didn’t mean the man himself had any place in the story of where I’d ended up.

  I put the letter in my bag, the envelope still sealed. There was no good reason to open it, at least right then. The most important fact had already been made clear.

  My father knew my name.

  —

  THERE WERE three number one seeds and a number two in the Final Four that year. Kentucky was favored over us by seven points. Rick Pitino had taken over the program in the late ’80s after it had NCAA trouble, and had rebuilt it into a high-flying, up-tempo monster that had been blowing opponents out all season long. They’d won each of their tournament games by at least twenty-one points, while we’d barely snuck by in three of our four victories. They had Jamal Mashburn, who would go on to be a lottery pick just a few spots behind Chris in the upcoming draft, and Travis Ford, Dale Brown, and Tony Delk, all great college players, too. There was only one way to beat them: slow the game down, and be patient and confident in one another to work for the best shot.

  There’s one other key to the Final Four: remembering that March Madness isn’t made for teams who dominate. Being able to handle yourself in the midst of all that late-game pressure has always been what’s most important. No matter how experienced you are, no matter how many battles you’ve won over the course of the season, you almost want to be in that desperation mode, or at least familiar with it, all throughout the tournament. Coasting is easy, but the longer your run goes on, the more dangerous it gets.

  Everyone thought Kentucky was going to roll over us. Which was perfect. It made us the underdog, and gave us something to shoot for. Everyone in basketball thinks the Wildcats are going to win? Outstanding. Everyone in the country thinks these punks are finally gonna get their asses handed to them by one of the most storied college basketball programs in the country? Perfect. A couple of Detroit rappers named Kaos and Maestro actually wrote a song about us beating Kentucky, to pump us up. Not that we needed any extra motivation.

  Sure enough, when Kentucky came out expecting to blow us out of the gym in the opening minutes, we stood our ground and took an early lead. Immediately they were completely out of sorts. They hadn’t played a challenging game in almost a month. We went into halftime with a five-point lead, making it double digits early in the second. Beating them took relentless defense, and you know the referees never loved us. So while Jimmy kept Travis Ford from hitting any threes, he also fouled out late in the second half. Kentucky was able to come back to tie it, and to send us into overtime again. Nothing new for us. Just another nut check. Their best player, Mashburn, after scoring twenty-six points (one fewer than Chris), fouled out himself early in OT, and they were pretty much done after that. We won by three, 81–78.

  Were we talking trash the whole way? You bet.

  Were we playing a brand of team basketball we didn’t get credit for? Absolutely.

  And our second straight national title game was forty-eight hours away.

  —

  IN ’92, Duke had been the better team. The competition bore that out clearly, both in the game we played them at the beginning of the season, with nothing to lose, and in the title game, when there was a national championship at stake. North Carolina in the ’93 title game was a different story. We should have beaten them. We beat them in Hawaii in the holiday tournament, and that was with Ray injured. The Tar Heels were a great college team, with stars like George Lynch and Eric Montross and a great coach in Dean Smith. But we were still better. I think we could have beaten them that year nine out of ten times. I really do. But that’s the beauty of the NCAA Tournament. In a seven-game series, the better team almost always wins. In one game, anything can happen.

  It’s interesting to look back from the analyst’s perspective now, and try and break down what went wrong in the most famous game I ever played in. Did we feel like we had slain the dragon in Kentucky, and that let the air out of our balloon a little bit? Yeah, maybe. Did we feel like we had silenced a lot of doubters by repeating what they said was a fluke, getting to the title game the year before? It’s a possibility. Were we too confident? No way. We went into every game bursting with confidence and swagger. It was one of our biggest weapons.

  Whatever the reason, during the game we were just…a little off. Donald Williams went wild that night, scoring twenty-five points. He torched everyone who guarded him. I scored twelve points but didn’t get to the free throw line. In fact, we took just seven free throws all game. We were down six at halftime, and trailed most of the second half as well. Even when we were able to take a lead, we’d give it up quickly. Fans know the feeling when they’re watching their team play and it just doesn’t feel right, regardless of what the scoreboard says. The players can have the same feeling. It’s like when you just can’t get comfortable in a pair of shoes. On the court, there’s no way to go back into the closet and change into something else.

  The one guy who kept us in the game was Chris. Go back and watch the game, and you’ll see him single-handedly keeping us alive in the second half, with rebounds, putbacks, dunks, you name it. It must have felt like playing for Detroit Country Day for him, being the one guy in the middle who had to do everything. He was just as dominant against the North Carolina Tar Heels as he was against some private school in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. They could not stop him.

  We had to burn a timeout late in the second half, when Juwan couldn’t get an inbounds pass in off the press. That meant, with a little less than a minute to go, after Ray nailed a long two-pointer to get us back within three points, the timeout we called was our last. And in the huddle, it was reiterated by the coaches, the trainers, the other players. We had no more timeouts. That was clear to all of us.

  We turned up the pressure on defense, and they turned the ball over. Then Chris got a putback on a three-pointer I missed, getting us to one point down, and we fouled with twenty seconds left. They hit the first free throw and missed the second, and Chris got the rebound. We’ve got the ball, down two, twenty seconds to go.

  At this point, we’ve played together long enough that we all know what we normally do in this situatio
n, exactly what Coach outlined for us in the huddle just prior. Chris will get the rebound off a miss, outlet to me, I’ll take it up, try and get a three-pointer off a pick-and-roll, or, if they bottle that up, then I swing it to Chris to probably take a shot. If his man shows, then that gives him an opportunity to swing it to Jimmy or Rob Pelinka, who were in the corners. That’s our play.

  That didn’t happen.

  Chris hesitated a bit after the miss, and by the time he looked up to me, George Lynch had doubled back into the passing lane. Chris was halfway into passing it to me when he realized this, so he traveled, taking a step forward an instant before he started his dribble. The ref, right on top of the play, somehow didn’t call it. I remember this thought going through my head: Man, he just traveled…they didn’t call it…that’s our break…we’re gonna win this thing. Next, Chris decides to take the ball up himself. This didn’t mess us up one bit. In fact, Chris was probably the only power forward in the country—college or pro—who could be trusted to handle the ball in that situation. This wasn’t some gump forward with no business dribbling. This was someone who ran the break for us a lot of times and was capable of starting a lot of great plays. Really, one of the best passing big men the game has ever seen. But instead of going straight up the floor, he started veering toward our bench. And I remember wondering why my man, Derrick Phelps, and Chris’s man, Lynch, were still double-teaming him. Honestly, it was almost like they forgot we didn’t have a timeout left, and were trying to trap Chris and force him to call it. So I became a trailer in the play, like any fast break, going to the elbow area or the three-point area, and waiting for an open shot off a double-team on Chris. I had already calculated that if I didn’t have the shot, I could just take it to the basket. Our other three guys on the floor were surely thinking the same kind of thoughts. Your job on the basketball court is to always be prepared for what you’re going to do next, whether the ball is coming to you or not.

  I wasn’t thinking that Chris would try and call a timeout. But he did.

  Need I tell you the rest? With eleven seconds left, the timeout violation meant Carolina got two free throws and the ball. We’d had the chance to tie the game, or even win it, right in front of us. But now the game was all but over.

  My initial reaction, in the moment, was pretty much total denial. It had to be, considering my mindset: that despite how badly we’d played, despite the fact that the game never felt quite right, somehow we were still going to win that game. So in the huddle right after that, after Carolina called their own timeout, I remember being upset at anyone who was hanging their head, anyone who didn’t believe that we could still win the game. But when the final buzzer sounded, there was nothing we could do about it: We’d lost the game we were meant to win.

  —

  THE REALIZATION always kind of settles in gradually, amid the frantic scene of any postgame. In a national title game, with people running all over the court, and the other team celebrating, it’s more surreal than any game anyone plays all year. With Duke, it started to sink in with five minutes to go, maybe even more. So it wasn’t as dramatic; we had time to prepare for it. Here we went from having a chance to win the game to being finished in eleven seconds.

  The first thing I did was to go to Coach Fisher, who a lot of people had criticized for not “disciplining” us the way he should have the past two years. But he’d believed in us, and so as we walked off the floor, I put my arm around Coach, told him that I loved him, and promised him that I was going to get him back to this point again and win him a title.

  When we got into the locker room, Chris was already there, lying facedown on the carpet. Head completely down. Bruce Madej, our sports information director, came up to me and said, I need you to find a way to help me get this kid up, because there’s no way I can send him into the press conference looking like this. So the other guys and I, we got him together, got him to the media, and Juwan, Jimmy, and Coach Fisher did their interviews with him, together, as a team. I stayed in the locker room—if I didn’t have to, I didn’t want to be in a situation where I might say something I’d regret. Afterwards, we hustled Chris out to the team bus, and his mom came on the bus. He sat next to her and, honestly, he cried the whole way back to the hotel. Sobbed. It was the only sound anyone made that whole ride.

  The dynamic of the whole situation actually made it easier for me to deal with the loss, because I was so focused on looking after one of my closest friends in the world, who I’d been playing ball with since we were twelve, and who had made probably the worst decision he’s ever made on the basketball court in front of the biggest audience ever to watch him play. That took the attention off my sadness. Though what’s interesting is I remember starting to feel some guilt of my own, too. What could I have done differently? Should I have gone and gotten the basketball right after the rebound? Or maybe just followed him into the corner? Everyone has regrets when something rotten like that happens, thoughts of saving the day like Superman, even if they’re ridiculous. But those were the kinds of thoughts running through my brain at that time.

  We got back to the hotel and had to hustle through the back entrance of the lobby up to our rooms to avoid the craziness there, getting scrambled apart in the process. But upstairs, we all got together again, sitting in one of the rooms—on the beds, the floor, the chairs—still processing what the hell had just happened.

  —

  THE PROBLEM with one instant like the Timeout defining your legacy is that it’s impossible to ever put your finger truly on its cause. What does it really mean, anyway? When that game ended, Chris was still the best basketball player on the floor, for either team. He was still the best college basketball player in the country. So how did one bad decision change him as a player? Was it really some sort of window into who he really was as a player? I mean, how many other times, in the heat of battle, in crunch time in so many other games, did Chris come through? So was thirty-five million people watching in the final really that different from, say, a few million watching when he made big plays in other tournament games? That’s the problem with the way sports are analyzed. There’s no middle ground. He’s either the guy who makes the big play or the guy who blows it.

  But twenty-some years later, look what’s happened: It’s my job to be one of those analysts. To tell you why something took place, even if most of the time there’s no definitive answer. On the one hand, there’s the explanation of the heat of the moment. Chris was in the corner, near our bench, and it’s pretty clear from the video (as you can see in our documentary) that there were some guys on the bench who were screaming at him to call timeout. Guys who hadn’t played all game, who hadn’t been listening in the huddle when the coaching staff reminded us we had no timeouts. Whether or not Chris heard the coaches, when you’re in the corner, getting trapped by Derrick Phelps and George Lynch, and your teammates are yelling at you, the peer pressure can be pretty convincing.

  Going big picture: Can a player like Chris Webber be both an incredibly talented superstar and a player who, in a moment of maximum adversity, chokes? Can both those attributes and descriptions be in his basketball DNA? The answer is, Absolutely.

  And to me, his identity is further defined by the fact that he’s never come out and really talked about it in the twenty-plus years since. Since he doesn’t own it, he’ll never get over it.

  The impact of that fact, as much as the timeout itself, has tarnished the legacy of the Fab Five.

  —

  UP IN that hotel room, we talked about the play. What had happened, what could have been different, all that. We were dealing with our own devastation, but there was also the reality of how many other people had been rooting for our downfall and got to see it in brutal fashion. We wanted to silence the haters, the naysayers, the critics. Instead, we gave them an opportunity to celebrate our misfortune. That started to get the blood flowing a little bit. Hey, this loss was just another reason for them to hate on the Fab Five, which they were going to
do anyway.

  Then we moved on to everything else that awaited us, particularly Chris, regardless of what just happened. To me it was clear he should leave school after that season. He was set to be the number one pick, to make millions of dollars. Winning a national championship had been our goal from the outset, but in this sophomore sequel we’d learned that life was only going to get more complicated. It wasn’t worth Chris staying to live through that again.

  At that moment, the writers were typing away at their computers, writing stories about how the Fab Five were a failure, how we’d blown it again, how we had it coming to us. But in that hotel room, we were the same guys we’d been that afternoon, before the game had taken place. Losing the game didn’t make us losers. It signaled the fact that we sucked during that game. It meant we were the losers of that game. But there were a lot more victories available to us in life. I understood that then, and I understand that now. We thought, Okay, Chris, you made a terrible mistake, a dumb-ass mistake. You know it, we know it. But we’re still brothers. What else is up?

  We got dressed, and headed out as the Fab Five one more time. Bourbon Street wasn’t far away, and it was packed. Some people high-fived us, and some people screamed at us. We took it in stride. We found our way to the club with the longest line, walked to the front, the bouncers lifted the velvet rope, and we strolled in.

  The last thing I remember that night is looking back over my shoulder. The Carolina players were standing there, still waiting in line.