As if it needed a shot of electricity, Sunday’s Duke-Michigan game contains an undercurrent of racism and class.
Thanks to Jalen Rose’s thought-provoking ESPN film on the Fab Five, Sunday’s game — indeed, the entire N.C.A.A. tournament — has been given abundant food for thought. The subject of Rose’s film is the extraordinary group of freshmen who in 1991 decided to go as a package to the University of Michigan.
Most of the uproar focuses on Rose’s inflammatory Uncle Tom comment leveled at the black players on Duke’s team at the time and specifically at Grant Hill, who played for Duke from 1991 to 1994 and won two national titles.
The last time Duke and Michigan faced each other in the N.C.A.A. tournament was April 6, 1992. They played for the national championship, in a game loaded with symbolism.
Duke was the defending champion. Michigan was the hottest, most-talked-about, most hotly debated college team. With their baggy shorts, swagger and irreverence, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Chris Webber, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson were the balling troubadours of Generation X.
Eighteen years later, the Fab Five is still in the middle of controversy, thanks to the film produced by Rose.
In one jarring passage, Rose explained his resentment: “For me, Duke was personal. I hated Duke. And I hated everything I felt Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”
Rose admitted that he was jealous of Hill, who had two highly accomplished parents, was staunchly upper middle class and, on top of that, kicked the Fab Five’s collective butts.
Hill responded last week with an eloquent letter in The New York Times.
My view about the Fab Five, then and now, was that these young men had chosen the right pew but had gone to the wrong church. Seen through the prism of black power and empowerment, and also from the point of view of one who attended a black college, the Fab Five had simply made a wealthy white institution wealthier and had missed a grand opportunity to catapult a historically black college or university to the mountaintop of March Madness.
Did Rose have any idea of the impact they would have had on history had they elected to attend a historically black college or university?
Yes, the stage would have been smaller, television nonexistent, at first. But the novelty of their act and then the courage of what they represented would have attracted attention. The Fab Five would have been the story of March Madness, not simply a spectacle.
Americans love the underdog; we also respect those who stand for principle. What a grand stand that would have been for the Fab Five.
This was a rare opportunity, one that may have resonated for generations. Rose, Webber, Howard, King and Jackson could have done something revolutionary.
They opted for shortsighted rebellion, though you can argue that you cannot reasonably expect a group of young African-Americans to have the courage, vision and conviction to have made that kind of move.
Had they ever thought about the impact such a decision would have made?
During an interview several years ago, Webber explained his thought process.
“A lot of people put that pressure on me to go to an H.B.C.U., like, ‘Come on, Chris, you can change it around, you can change it around,’ ” Webber said.
“But I think that process has to start within the black college association,” Webber said at the time.
“Just like me not playing on MTV is not good enough. I want the world to see. I feel guilty because we could have changed that rhyme. But we had to do what was best for us at that time. But we talked a lot about going to black colleges.”
The reality is that, by the strict standards of black empowerment, neither Hill nor the Fab Five did the black community any favors.
Uncle Tomism, notwithstanding, Hill and the Fab Five both elected, for their own reasons, to play in the big house.
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