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

by Jalen Rose

  He should have won first, and found a time to walk later.

  —

  ULTIMATELY, WHAT winning gets you is something I call “media equity.” It’s an imaginary pass that entitles you to “benefit of the doubt” treatment from most people covering the sport. In today’s game, Kobe, LeBron, D-Wade, and Dirk Nowitzki are examples of superstars who’ve earned equity by taking home titles. But there are other ways to get it, incredibly simple ways. Like just being nice to a lot of writers and broadcasters. Giving them thoughtful quotes (even if they’re not always truthful). Complimenting them if you think they wrote a good column. Saying hi to them and being courteous. A ton of coaches are great at this. Mike D’Antoni would hold open practices in Phoenix to give the media the sense they were getting cool access. Doc Rivers was in the media before coaching and understands how to play the game. Gregg Popovich does, too. How else do you think he gets away with all those grouchy in-game interviews?

  Lots of players get it as well. Shaq was a master, acting like a class clown who the media loved. A couple of guys you might not expect—Allen Iverson in Philly and Tim Duncan in San Antonio—have always gotten great treatment in their markets. There’s a reason for that. There’s nothing shady about it. They just know how to play a pretty simple game quite well.

  Other guys take a while to get used to the media weighing in on their situations. Dwight Howard had a rough time in his one season in Los Angeles a few years ago. He even got on me when I said the Lakers should trade him. Then, when we spoke about it, I reminded him that he left the team in free agency—so they should have traded him! We both laughed, and moved on.

  For me, dealing with little brushfires like that is a hazard of the media trade. Because of course, every night on ESPN, and on every podcast on Grantland, my job is to give my honest opinions, and those opinions aren’t always positive. At other times, I drop a line like “Hey, this player might go here” or “Watch out for this team looking to make this kind of deal,” and it starts a little media forest fire with everyone else running to that team or player asking for comment. The best part of my job is accumulating a ton of information. One of the toughest parts is choosing what to say on the air.

  Because whether it’s on the record or off the record, the best way to think of NBA media—and sports media at large—is to consider it a giant information exchange. When I wake up in the morning, when I go to sleep at night, and when I’m on the air I get texts and calls from different people around the league feeding me information. Players, coaches, GMs, agents, entourage members, you name it. Sometimes they’re calling to give their side of a story. Sometimes they’re calling to get something out of me. A GM will call me up and throw out a little air balloon—“Hey, what do you think of So-and-So as a player? What do you hear about him?”—hoping for some insight into how it’ll be perceived if they sign him. They don’t always tell me to keep something secret; it’s understood that I’ll know what to say and what not to say. Sometimes they want me to say something on air. Remember, the first step to trading a player is to trade him in the media and let your fans know what might be coming. In a lot of cases, it’s an exchange. They need me as much as I need them.

  For a reporter who’s never played the game, who starts at a newspaper or a website, it takes years to build those kinds of sources. I had them from the get-go, because they were literally hundreds of individuals I knew from more than a decade in the NBA. Overall, I’ve kept pretty much every friend I started with, so I feel that I’m doing a good job of knowing what to say and what not to say, and how to do the job.

  But there is one friendship that’s on hold right now.

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  IT’S BEEN a long climb up the media mountain. Best Damn Sports Show was a really great show to cut my teeth on, because they were up for almost any idea we had. I did all kinds of crazy little features, sideline work at games, red carpets, big events, you name it. As I got experience, I was able to improve and get more comfortable. As I continued my media career, I learned to use my contacts and connections to get what other reporters couldn’t. Like at the 2006 Finals, when a PR guy—on air—tried to move me out of the way when Dwyane Wade walked by. Instead, I was able to get close to D-Wade, and we ended up walking down the tunnel getting the interview right then and there. And I also had a lot of fun with celebrities, interviewing Denzel Washington and Penny Marshall, and even Jack Nicholson once. And nobody interviews Jack, ever. Except for me, I guess.

  When I got hired by ESPN in 2007, I moved over to the studio, appearing on all different shows, spending a lot of time in Bristol, Connecticut, paying my dues. Also, I was getting better. I did as much moonlighting as I could, hosting live events like weigh-ins for big fights, and even a little acting. C’mon, you don’t remember my cameo interviewing Common in Just Wright? Of course you do.

  As I built up more and more cred at ESPN, I started pursuing my dream project: a documentary on the Fab Five. I wanted a chance to tell our story the way we wanted to, the way it hadn’t been told at the time. When ESPN got their 30 for 30 series going, it seemed like our story would be a perfect fit. In 2010, the higher-ups green-lighted the film with me as executive producer. The idea was pretty simple: Jimmy, Ray, Juwan, Chris, and I would tell our tale, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Almost twenty years after the fact, we’d have the official record of the Fab Five on film forever. But pretty quickly, I realized we might have a problem. Chris wasn’t returning my texts or calls about setting up our interviews.

  A lot had happened to both of us since we’d walked off the court in New Orleans in the 1993 national title game. While I had been doing my thing, Chris had had a terrific NBA career, probably a Hall of Fame career, if I had a vote. He was a former Rookie of the Year, a five-time All-Star, and had played for the Warriors, and then the Bullets (alongside Juwan), and then the Kings, leading all those teams to the playoffs. He led the Kings to the best record in the league in 2002. Unfortunately, they came up short in infamous fashion, losing to the Lakers in the conference finals, which was marred by Tim Donaghy and a bunch of very controversial calls.

  Chris had bad luck with injuries, too. He struggled with nagging problems in the early part of his career and suffered a devastating knee injury that eventually led to microfracture surgery, which compromised his game for his last several years in the league. He played pretty well for our hometown Pistons in 2007, though they were the team that LeBron basically beat single-handedly with the Cavs in the conference finals. To everyone else, that series was about how amazing LeBron was. To me, it was a reminder of how little is guaranteed in basketball. It felt like just a minute earlier, Chris had been LeBron, the guy who everyone couldn’t wait to see dominate the league.

  Alongside the game, there was our relationship, and C-Webb’s relationship with all of us. In Michigan, while the rest of us were basically bonded at the hip, Chris had always been, like, “I’m with you all, but I have my other friends, too.” We always respected that, but it could lead to some surprises. One example: I drove down to Freaknik in Atlanta with Ray and Jimmy. When we got there, we were surprised to see Chris there with some other guys. That wouldn’t have happened with any other member of the Fab Five. When he left school, the rest of us played another year together, so that distanced him a little further from the group.

  Once I went to the NBA, anytime our teams played each other, Chris and I would get together to have a few drinks and do it up like the Fab Five used to, especially in those early days when both Chris and Juwan were in Washington. But, over time, Chris’s relationship with us got more and more distant. The same thing happened to you, too, with high school or college friends, I’m sure. Little things change—like Chris started not calling people back. Or I’d hear from Ray that Chris had a game in San Antonio and said he’d leave tickets for Ray (who settled in Austin after college), but when Ray got to will-call, nothing was there, and there was no one to contact. It happened to me, too. There was an All-Star Game in Clevelan
d—my first season in Indy, when Larry Brown was keeping me out of the lineup, and Chris was in Washington. He had made the All-Star team for the first time, and he invited a few of the old crew to come out and support him. So a couple of our boys from Detroit, Tim and Kev, and I went to Cleveland, and to the hotel where he said he’d make sure we had rooms arranged (I was going to pay—but rooms are hard to get over All-Star weekend on late notice). Well, guess what? No rooms. So we ended up having to drive around for two hours, and eventually got rooms way out in the suburbs. Not the end of the world, but for me, it was a reality check as to what the relationship had become.

  Those are a few of the examples of what we had to deal with as a family. I’m not trying to be petty—I’ve talked about many of these things at one point or another before. I’m just keeping it 100, and telling you what’s happened, and doing it for a specific reason.

  Anyway, all that stuff was still bubbling beneath the surface when the 2009 Final Four came to Ford Field, where the Lions play, in Detroit. Michigan State had made it to the title game, and Jimmy had the idea to use the opportunity to have a Fab Five reunion. I got on board. We wanted to show the college basketball world that we weren’t erased from history, even if our banners weren’t hanging up in Ann Arbor. Our idea was to get some publicity behind it, have a few parties and engagements, and then sit courtside at the game. For us to be in the spotlight, in prime seating, at a big-time event with one of our archrivals playing—it felt like a fitting thing for the Fab Five to do. So we started getting things together. Buying tickets on the court, doing work, all that. Only then we get word—Chris wasn’t gonna show. No reunion. No family.

  That brings us back to the documentary a couple years after that. Which, as you probably know, Chris decided he wasn’t going to be a part of. We of course went ahead and did it without him, even though that meant we didn’t get the ending I wanted: all five of us chilling together, on a balcony at the Gansevoort hotel in New York, with a lobster buffet out in front of us, almost mafioso style, showing how we clearly won the game of life, regardless of what happened in those title games. Well, even without that ending it became the highest-rated doc in the history of the network at the time. People still come up to me almost every day with something to say about it. I’d like to think it squared our legacy away for good. Though of course, in the process, it pretty much put my relationship with Chris on ice.

  That’s my side of it. His side of it, as far as I can tell, is a couple of things. One, obviously, he didn’t want to do the doc, even though I’d gotten a buy-in from him before I pitched it to ESPN. I guess he decided he didn’t want to talk about the timeout, or what happened with the grand jury. But the question I have is, why did Chris go for a meeting with Ross Greenburg and HBO Sports, after we’d already started our project, to undercut ours and get his own Fab Five documentary going? And what’s he doing now with a documentary apparently in the works as I write this in 2015? Did he not like the fact that I was producing it at ESPN? All of us were going to be producers. If you watch the film, we’re all equally featured, and everyone gets their say. Maybe he felt like the doc should have been about him only. I guess we’ll have to wait for his documentary and see.

  In the meantime, let’s go back to Ed Martin. Yeah, that’s still going on in 2015. The punishments that Michigan received for the scandal included a ten-year “mandatory disassociation period” between Chris and the school. (If you could tell me the point of that, I’d love to hear it, but I’m done complaining about the NCAA at this point.) In 2013, that period was due to expire, so a lot of questions were coming up. Like, if they did “reconcile,” could there be a Fab Five reunion at the school? I always thought the best thing to do would be to just put a new banner up, with “Fab Five” on it and our numbers, and hang it on a night to remember with all of our friends and families and fans, and that would be that. Well, it became clear that Mary Sue Coleman, then the president of the university, made it clear that the banners weren’t going up on her watch. And Dave Brandon, then the athletic director, made it clear that, in his mind, the school was going to need a formal apology from Chris for anything close to that to happen anyway.

  I spoke out about President Coleman’s remarks quite loudly on Twitter, but as far as the apology went, when people started asking me about it, I said that if it were me, I would apologize. Why? At some point, you need to accept responsibility for whatever you did, even if you think you were wronged, and move on. Owning it, speaking about it—that helps you get over it. Plus, it would give everyone a path forward to restoring the legacy of the Fab Five at Michigan. At this point, I feel like the rest of us are kids in the middle of a fight with their parents. But in this case, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t clear the air on both sides and reconcile. And maybe that could start with an apology.

  Well, Chris didn’t like that I said that, and that’s led to some weird, ugly exchanges over the last few years. In the spring of 2013, when Michigan made it to its first title game since our day, I tried again to get us all together, let bygones be bygones with Chris, and go to the game and sit together. I talked about it on my podcast, went public with my request, but it didn’t work. Chris actually went to the game but sat upstairs while the other four of us were down below. Then, a few months later, at the NBA Finals, our ESPN studio set was just a few feet from the Turner set, where he was working. We had been through a similar scenario the previous few Finals, and had done a pretty good job of avoiding each other. On this afternoon, after we’d taped some things, I was with Bill Simmons. Bill and I had been spending a ton of time together on the road, he had heard all these stories, and he couldn’t believe everything I had been telling him was true—that there was this much animosity about something that could be easily squashed. Bill was egging me on to walk over to the Turner set, and so we did. We said hi to each guy on the set, and when I got to Chris he told me in five words or less—using stronger language than this—to get out of his face. I did. Then, that night at the clubs, I had the luck of running into him at Liv, and we had a few words. He mentioned the apology thing in the midst of another rant telling me to go somewhere else. Dale Davis, who’d played with me in Indiana, and with Chris in Detroit, was standing right there, kind of caught in the middle of it. I wasn’t going to go to start having it out with him at the club, so I just walked away rather than get in his face. That shouldn’t be our flavor, anyway, certainly not between two professional adults, let alone two brothers who aren’t getting along.

  Let’s go through what’s happened since Chris Webber and I first played basketball together at age thirteen. We went to Michigan together and were part of a team that will never be forgotten. We both had long and successful pro careers. We both are having successful careers in the media. But in the game of life, relationships are most important. The Fab Five showed that to me as much as anything else. Other than that national title game against Louisville in 2013—with him sitting in a suite, us in the stands, on the opposite end of the arena—it’s been twenty years since the members of the Fab Five have been together in one place. And, ultimately, that’s just ridiculous.

  Chris and I are both winning the game of life. He had a great NBA career, and he’s having a great career at TNT. And just like me—and just like anyone—he’s made some mistakes along the way. Fine. But it’s not right that the brotherhood has been fractured. It bothers me. It’s why I’m writing about it—not to sound like a jilted lover, not to reveal some secret gossip—but because it’s not right. Everything that shaped our lives happened to us together. We won as brothers, we lost as brothers. And as his brother, I think that if he owned the things that have gone wrong—namely, the timeout and the grand jury—then he would be better off. Forgetting and letting negative things out of your heart cure the soul.

  Only time will tell if Mayce Edward Christopher Webber III realizes that.

  —

  WELL, LET’S talk about the future, the future of basketball. I am a huge
fan of pretty much every sport you can think of, and maybe a few you couldn’t, but if you gave me a pot of money to bet on the prospects of one sport, I would put my money on the hardwood without fail.

  Right now, the league is in tremendous shape. David Stern was bar-none the best commissioner of any game in the history of sports. If you think of what the NBA was when he started, and where it is now, the comparisons end. Yes, the league was rising when he came in on the wings of Magic and Bird and then Jordan, but the vision to globalize was David Stern’s. He was the one who saw what could happen with the 1992 Dream Team, and the influence that team could have. Fast-forward twenty-plus years and basketball is right alongside soccer as the world’s game. That’s transformed the league for the better. The foreign players that started to flood the NBA in the second half of my career are more prevalent than ever. Also, you might note, more diverse. The trip to Taiwan and the Philippines with the Pacers and Rockets I told you about opened my eyes to how popular the NBA and the game are far beyond the hood and the playground in the United States.

  Now Adam Silver has taken over as NBA commissioner, and he’s probably open to a few more changes than Stern was, which is a good thing. You want to be flexible and willing to adapt: creating a longer All-Star break; changing up the playoffs a bit; and whatever else he has up his sleeve to make what’s already good, great. The new head of the players union, Michele Roberts, isn’t going to give him any breaks, but I’m hopeful that continued success leads to a reluctance to tolerate any more work stoppages when the next agreement is likely negotiated in 2017.