The Man Who Wasn't There
I don't actually have many memories of the Fab Five on the court. I remember being utterly heartsick when Webber called that timeout. That moment is undoubtedly the genesis of my obsession with rules that suck and should be changed*. I remember hating that technical when the ref could have just ignored it and left Webber to figure it out himself.
I also remember a black t-shirt I had commemorating the '92 Final Four, but incompletely. I know Cincinnati was on the shirt. I had to look up the other two teams, look up that Michigan beat the Bearcats in the semi before losing to Duke, look up the fact that Michigan was just a six seed. I remember the shirt being embroidered, because that's what happened in 1992 when you wanted something fancy. It was scratchy. I loved it.
I've got the heartsick and the shirt; everything else has melted away. When Wolverine Historian posted one of their games against Illinois I watched it and was stunned by… well, everything. A stone-cold packed Crisler full of people losing their minds. The helter-skelter nature of the game on both ends. Michigan—Michigan!—having a bunch of defiant, ruckus-raising black guys Jim Nantz remains terrified of to this day.
That is not the equilibrium state of Michigan basketball. That does not come from Earth. It comes from a planet with a green sun and marshmallow donkeys.
-----------------------------
Later I remember loathing Chris Webber. Years and years had passed and Webber was on a very good Sacramento Kings team playing the Lakers in the conference finals. Sacramento had just gotten legendarily boned in game six. I remember watching game seven smugly, thinking Webber was born to fail in the moment of truth as he clanged threes and the Kings evaporated.
Anyone with a soul roots against the Lakers for the same reason they root against the Yankees. Sacramento had just suffered through a game that Tim Donaughy could point to years later as an example of a fix only to have obsessives like Bill Simmons say "tell me something I don't know." My loathing for Webber overcame all.
Some years later Webber was a trade-deadline acquisition for the Pistons during the period when the Billups/Prince/Hamilton/McDyess core still had my full attention. I was unhappy with it but dealt. I watched Chris Webber play basketball again. By that point he had suffered a variety of injuries that left him barely able to jump. He was useless defensively, an old man devoid of the thunderous athleticism that I assumed must have been part and parcel of why he was so good in college, the #1 pick in the draft, etc. By all rights he should have been out of the league already. Like Shawn Kemp, basically.
The reason he wasn't was his passing. Someone who paid more attention to the NBA than I did or wasn't 14 the last time he saw Webber play much already knew this. I didn't. I knew Chris Webber, though. I knew he was a liar and a choker and not very smart and just a general all-around jerk who wouldn't even apologize. I knew the Fab Five was just a bunch of guys who played schoolyard basketball because they were so outrageously better than everyone they could get away with it.
I knew Chris Webber until I watched him play. He dropped passes in spaces that didn't exist until he saw them. He hit cutters that didn't know they were open until the ball was in their hands. He was brilliant despite having the athleticism of Artie Lang. He was incredible fun. Despite myself I really liked watching Chris Webber play basketball, and now I don't think I know one thing about him.
--------
To say Michigan has done a 180 in re: the cultural alignment of their basketball team understates things despite that being axiomatically impossible. The old ringleader just called black guys at Duke "Uncle Toms"; the new one is from Chesterton, Indiana, and once knew 62 digits of pi. After Michigan completed its season sweep of MSU the most desperate, laughable assertion I came across from some guy on an MSU message board was that Michigan had "thugs" on its team, an accusation that would have been uncomfortable during the Fab Five era and literally true when Ellerbe was running things into the ground.
Webber's been banned and feels repudiated and people feel free to demand an apology from him before he even thinks about setting foot in Crisler again, so I get why he doesn't feel like he owes anyone anything. If he wouldn't talk to Jalen Rose for his documentary, it's hard to believe he'll actually "tell his side soon" as he hoped on twitter.
This is immensely disappointing to me. I don't hate him any more and don't care about apologies, don't care about the crater he is often blamed for no matter how little input he had on hiring Ellerbe**. I'd just like to know every last detail of what happened.
Because I don't understand Jalen Rose, don't understand Webber, don't understand the lady in the gas station on the South Side of Chicago I asked directions of who responded "I don't know about any damn directions." I do understand the visceral thrill of those bald heads and black socks, but only vicariously, like a kid from Troy buying an NWA cassette. I can't say why I thought Jim Nantz's obviously racist distaste for the Fab Five was obviously racist, but I had a Nantz-like reaction to that lady in Chicago. I understand why my fiancée continually mishears Duke's mascot as the "white devils" and simultaneously have less than zero sympathy for Robert Traylor and would want to punch him in the face if I ever met him and he was tied to a rock and he had no idea who I was and I could definitely run away before he got loose.
Webber's redemption never happened with him or Taylor or Bullock, and while Bullock was from some suburb in Maryland and cannot be redeemed—seriously, he can die in a fire for all I care—maybe if Chris Webber said something brutally honest it would help me be less confused and sad about Michigan basketball in the 90s, and maybe a bunch of other things of greater significance.
It bothers me that Michigan's response to the NCAA scandal was to go from culturally black enough to have Ice Cube in your documentary to Duke Lite, but goddammit I also wanted some directions. I want Chris Webber to gently untie this Gordian knot in an hour-long interview on national television. When he's done the pieces will assemble themselves into a butterfly with big ears and a huge assist rate. This is the least he can do for 13-year-old me and my embroidered Final Four t-shirt. Thanks in advance.
*[Examples:
- Timeouts in basketball. There should be one, period, like in hockey.
- The NHL rule where flipping the puck into the stands from your own zone is a penalty. It should be handled like icing, which is what the NCAA does.
- Hockey offsides is brutal. Widen the line to reduce whistles.
]
**[Tom Goss, not Ed Martin, is the man who killed Michigan basketball.]
Of course, Duke talked tons of trash (even though held as a model for righteousness). Bobby Hurley (that little fucker) can't stop, even today:
http://www.freep.com/article/20110314/SPORTS06/110314049/Bobby-Hurley-W…-?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s
March 14th, 2011 at 11:06 PM ^
His NBA career after he was overdrafted lasted 5 minutes. (And spare me, he sucked before the car accident gave him an excuse for sucking).
To say Michigan has done a 180 in re: the cultural alignment of their basketball team understates things despite that being axiomatically impossible. The old ringleader just called black guys at Duke "Uncle Toms"; the new one is from Chesterton, Indiana, and once knew 62 digits of pi.
...has more in common with Grant Hill than Jalen Rose (on the surface, at least). We have 3 sons of NBA players (who grew up with their dads) on the team, another one who has verbally committed and another one on the short list for the final 2011 scholarship - while our biggest 2010 target (Zeigler) is the son of a college coach.
The Frieder teams had plenty of players with the appropriate amount of street cred (Grant, Joubert, Rice, Tarpley, Higgins, et al.), but combine the Fab5's arrival with the explosion of hip-hop culture and all of a sudden you get the phenomenon we all witnessed.
We do seem to be following a dramatically different recruiting paradigm than we ever have.
Those players dad's had more in common with Jalen, mostly. Even Dumars, who had a dad, grew up pretty poor, and without a silver spoon. Heck, the "son of" coming in next year almost WAS one of the Fab Five.
The first two seasons of the Fab 5 era coincided with my Junior and Senior years at Michigan and they were high times, I can tell you. In those days basketball came close to surpassing football as the dominant sport on campus. I will never forget sprinting out of my apartment on Church Street with my buddies after we beat Kentucky and partying with what had to be at least 15.000 other students on South U. Glorious.
I look back on those days now with mixed feelings because of the price we paid for those moments and wonder to myself if it was worth it. I may never be able to say for certain but I feel lucky that I was present to witness it, the good and the bad.
Chris is praised and cursed
But one thing people forget:
Pretty cool last name
The hard reality is that Chris Webber is the Reggie Bush of Michigan basketball. I loved those teams when I was a kid but I have to face facts. Webber took enough money to have his official records, and therefore the team's, erased. This is not the stuff of a successful college career, however flashy and fun it may be at the time.
More, I was struck watching the documentary at just how much aesthetics played a role in both the like and dislike of the team. So many of their detractors and fans pointed to their shaved heads, socks, and shorts as reasons why they were significant. I emulated their style when I was a kid, but that all seems pretty superficial now. The Fab 5's lasting legacy is that players now wear long shorts. That just doesn't excite me much.
The Fab 5 brought unprecendented attention to Michigan basketball, but the program was hardly a wasteland before them. The '89 championship season was pretty exciting and it's still on the books...Fast foward more than twenty years and, boring as it may comparitively be, I love the program as it is. I love knowing that any success that Beilein has will come from doing things the right way. That's what Michigan is supposed to be about.
You lost me with "he Fab 5's lasting legacy is that players now wear long shorts."
What else is their legacy? For all the talk of changing the game or of a "revolution," I just don't see how basketball is different because of them.
Talk, act, and look like the Fab Five today, much more than they resemble the players that played for Indiana and Duke at the time. It went from a coaching dictatorship to a Player's game. And talent can come in as a freshman and lead teams, vs. Sitting and waiting their turn.
<br>
<br>Maybe these aren't good things, but a lot of it started with the Fab Five. History has a tendency to go in these directions anyway, but they were a catalyst. It might have been something/someone else if they weren't around, but they were.
That's a great point. I wonder how much their success as freshmen stepping into what was then a junior and senior dominated sport had to do with the subsequent wave of high schoolers jumping straight to the NBA? If no Fab 5, is there still a straight to the pros Garnett?
If KG had passed the SAT one try earlier, he probably would've been in Ann Arbor, instead of jumping to the NBA. Michigan was his top choice.
That would've been interesting.
Kobe then probably goes to dook the following year. Maybe nobody tests the NBA waters?
If KG had passed the SAT one try earlier, he probably would've been in Ann Arbor, instead of jumping to the NBA. Michigan was his top choice.
That would've been interesting.
Kobe then probably goes to dook the following year. Maybe nobody tests the NBA waters?
Brandon should've kept his mouth shut. He was still with Valassis when all this went down, yet I found it interesting that he spoke as if he were in the room and played a key role in the decision making process.
I think if you aren't part of the culture, then you just don't get it. It's that simple. I don't care how much of a fan you are/were, whether or not you went to U of M, cheered for all the games, watched them on tv etc...if you weren't lower class, young, and black when they played ball, then you just don't get it. And there is nothing wrong with that. It was a purely cultural thing. The reason why they were so popular?? because everything you saw playing street ball in Detroit, and Chicago, and New York...was now on tv. They didn't do anything that couldn't be found in any city, but they did it for the world to see. I could buy into the resentment for a second, but the resentment started BEFORE all of this went down. The moment they stepped on campus, they were hated and it was fucked up. It was some extremely racist shit and it wasn't just outsiders. No one owns this fucking sport, and it's no ones responsibility to talk about what was "wrong" with what they were doing.
Did Webber really set the program back 15 years? We had a hell of a recruiting class after the Fab 5, that constantly underachieved. We also had two horrible coaches who couldn't recruit a fly to a pile of shit. When they took the banners down, we were already bad.
Webber felt like the school owed him something. They all did, and he was justified in feeling that way, but he should've considered that before signing up to play college basketball where people don't get compensated. Don't benefit from the process, but complain about how it didn't work best for you. Sometimes you gotta put your big boy pants on, and find another cause. He was able to make millions because of his time at Michigan (although he was leaning Duke and would've certainly been just as successful) so he didn't exactly get shafted. He was part of the biggest cultural integration that any American sport has ever seen, he is and will always be famous for that, and if he can grow up at almost forty years old, he can avoid being infamous for that.
Dave Brandon has been a UM Regent since the late 1990's and was involved when all the big stuff went down with the case in 2002 & 2002. He probably knows a lot more about the case than most.
Come clean and come home Chris. We really do want you back.
No "Chris Webber is dead to us at Michigan" stuff.
I know C-Webb could smooth some things over right now by owning up to everything that happened, but I don't see it happening. His non-admission has gone on too long and the rift between him and the school is too large now. I hope I'm wrong, though... When the sactions are overwith and he can associate with UM again, I hope they have a big reunion together & can just be the group of brothers they started out as.
I wish he'd just told the truth about it all back when Jalen did -- things would've been a lot different.
The refs did try and keep Webber from infamy. For whatever reason, when Webber brought the ball up court he was totally flumoxed. From the start it was doomed. He looked to Jalen who was covered. He walked. He attempted, half heartedly to call TO. All in Michigan's end. The refs ignored the walk and the first, sort of TO call.
It was the only time I remember any of the Fab Five let the pressure get to them.
I understand why they have to call technical when you call a TO you don't have. It would be very confusing for everyone having guys signaling TOs and nothing happening. It also puts the onus on the players and the not refs in the instance of quick or inadvertant whistle from the refs.
Now if a guys signals TO the whistle blows. It's either free throws or commercial break.
Webber's teammates had to help him out there. Only Jalen came back to the ball. I can understand Howard sprinting downcourt, but King and Pelinka should have looked back to see that we had someone to bring it up. And then someone, or multiple people, on the bench seemed to have called for a timeout. It was a teamwide failure.
Word to that. Webber gets the blame, but the other dudes didn't do him any favors. I'm always surprised that Rose didn't get free. At the crucial juncture, your floor general has to demand that ball.
Whatevs. I remember watching Donald Williams go off and being like WTF Fisher.
Once Webber traveled, and everyone but the ref saw him travel, he panicked and it all spun out of control. He was actually quite a good ball handler for a guy his size.
Re: Ballhandling. That's the one thing people always forget about Webber. Even though he played a lot like a big man, he had dimensions in his game that more resembled a point guard. For a guy his size to handle the ball like he did was special indeed.
But could legitimately hit college threes from the top of the key. Probably took too many, if anything, but it was a shot, not a prayer.
He was indeed a great ballhandler for a big man, but that's not to say that you'd ideally want him bringing it up on the biggest possession of the season.
Oh, absolutely.
I said that at the time, too. The '88 Pistons' loss from Bird stealing the ball on the inbounds play was still painfully fresh in my mind, and while the circumstances were somewhat different, there were still guys running downcourt when the ball wasn't safely following them.
No matter who's got the ball, even if it's an awesome point guard, someone's got to hang back and help against the press. They didn't, and that was that.
While I agree in principle that someone should have come back to help him out. Webber was a very good ball handler. I don't mean that in the sense he was a very good ball handler for a big man but he was a very good ball handler in general. His teammates had seen him numerous times over the course of two years take the ball up the court and often times through traffic with very few mistakes.
Yeah there are a lot of contradictions that's for sure. Chris Weber very selfish and self centered off the basketball court, totally unselfish and a great team player on the basketball court. Chris Weber in his prime could easily have been an integral part of many championship teams, that he wasn't was a mere matter of circumstance, the guy is a winner on the basketball court. 3 high school state championships, 2 college runner-up in 2 opportunities, and a near miss on the professional level.
If Weber ever had teammates like Kareem and Magic, or Bird and Parrish, or Isaiah and Joe Dumars, his fortune would have been different. That being said, his best Sacramento teams were damn good.
With Shaq....
<br>
<br>That would have been some front-court, no?
Yeah, I always wondered whether the high-low post game between those two would have been more successful than the (probably more intuitively appealing) combo of Hardaway (NTH) and Shaq.
Bill Simmons actually tackles this in his Book of Basketball coming to the conclusion the Magic and Webber would've been better off. Webber and Shaq could've worked a crazy efficient high low game. In fact, a team of Webber, Shaq, Scott Skiles (aka crazy assist master), Nick Anderson (shooter), and Shooter SF X would've been very, very good and may have challenged for a decade straight.
Instead...
March 14th, 2011 at 11:14 PM ^
Say....Dennis Scott?....who was on the roster at the time....
There is no denying his talent. C-webb was always my favorite and the reason I wore #4 in every sport I played ever.* I sincerely hope he gets the chance to say something about this issue that lets everyone take something away and move on.
*Freshman football the exception. A senior had 4, so I went with 22. After the senior left, 4 was mine (again).
but some other day, i would love a refresher on the Tom Goss basketball killing side of things. i remember seeing him at the orange bowl and thinking he was don king, but other than that don't remember much of the man.
Then wash your eyes out with hydrogen peroxide.
Is that as a 19 year old Chris Webber did that press conference after "The Timeout". The film did an outstanding job of showing the emotion after their first championship loss. Then, after a mistake (Blame webber, blame the bench, blame whoever) Chris had to go in front of the entire COUNTRY and answer questions at NINETEEN.
He's got a ton of respect in my eyes for that.
regardless of anything else, that took some mad balls to go up there and do that presser
also that he said he didnt remember, rather than shifting blame to talley/the bench or whoever else
Even the short clips from the press conference were excruciating."How did it feel?" "What was going through your mind?" Talk about getting kicked when your down.
It a small way that nonsense almost justifies Webber's reluctance to talk now.
That was incredibly painful to watch. "Chris, is this worse than the worst day of your life?" That's beyond journalism; that's just being insensitive.
No player (even a Buckeye or Spartan) should be prodded to pieces by the media like that.
That has to be in the Top 10 Dumbest Questions from a Press Conference. I think I would've spat in that guy's face.
March 15th, 2011 at 11:31 AM ^
The minutes after the timeout call on the documentary ,especially the media conference, were just so brutal to watch. Webber is just a broken and defeated kid at that point and is sitting there on a grand stage having to answer these ridiculous questions. Even then he recognizes "I probably cost my team the game." Even despite all the mistakes he's made after, my heart still breaks for him and that team when I watch/relive that moment.
I must first admit that Chris Webber remained my favorite player until he retired from the NBA. My love for his game started at Michigan with the Fab Five and continued on with the Warriors, Bullets, Kings etc... While he is undoubtedly the best basketball player to ever come out of Michigan, he is also is seen as the 1 person who brought the program down because of his transactions with Ed Martin (which I'm not sure is fair).
I do agree with most people that he should mend his relationship with the University at some point down the road. But I do not think he actually owes anything to Michigan. The minute they tried to sue him for restitution is when I knew things would never be the same. They made so much money off the Fab Five and Chris and now they were ready to throw him completely under the bus for making an idiotic mistake as a 19 year old kid. They took the banners, they banned him from the university and placed most of the blame on him for everything that has happened since 1997. That should have been enough, instead they went for the throat of 1 person.
Either way, I hope Chris can reconcile with the University and the Fab Five can help with recruiting (under the NCAA bylaws of course).
didnt do huge things for Michigan's recruiting in all kids of sports I'll be very surprised
Made us look bad-ass. Even Crisler looked like a place you'd want to play in.
i did my undergrad during the years of roy tarpley and richard rellford and butch wade, and let me tell you - some of the kids of those teams were driving some fairly spectacular cars. so i have a hard time burning webber to the ground because he "cratered the entire program," or some such. the thing that we vilify bullock and traylor and taylor and webber for were almost certainly not new to ann arbor.
that said - my years in grad school in ann arbor exactly coincided with webber's two seasons, and i happened to live in the same apartment complex as webber during his soph year. two notes on that - first, anyone that says that there was no evidence that he was on the take wasn't looking very hard...the whole poor college student / "i can't get a pizza" thing with mitch albom was as laughable then as it is now. second, that team was an absolute joy to watch, but if you were a few years older and figuring out adulthood, there were some definite mixed feelings. i think it's the moment when the disconnect between students and athletes really became obvious to me...those guys were so far removed from the student body. you have to wonder how many of them would have even shown up in college if they'd been of the kobe / kg era. not sure where i'm going with that, just that yes, they were my team, and i rooted really hard for them, but it wasn't as easy to identify with them as co-students as the teams that came before them. or since, for that matter. they seemed more like professionals than any other team we've had, so for that reason i don't feel any desperate need to re-raise the banners or even have them back around. they came here as a means to get somewhere else. they're not the first, nor are they the last, but it seemed really obvious at the time. even more so now, obviously.
</unfocused rant-like substance>
I was in the College of Engineering at that time, too.
Rellford/Wade/Tarpley/Joubert... Named the "Best Dressed" Team in the Big Ten, a result of the fine furs they wore...
Your points about the Fab Five not necessarily being part of the collegiate student body resonate strongly. They were just a world apart...
And not throwing money at Frieder to get him to stay was Bo always felt like something was a bit...unseemly....the way things were handled in the basketball program. Then we won it all, and it became nearly impossible to make the break he wanted. We would probably have hired whoever Bobby Knight recommended to Bo. Not sure how that would have worked out.
how he was uncomfortable with Frieder and all of the outside people that were always "hanging around" the basketball program (Ed Martin was one perhaps?). Had Bo stayed, there may have never been a scandal.
What I took away from the show (entertaining as it was), was the attitude of the kids that "Someone else is making money off of me" and they didn't like it. They (understandably) missed the whole point.
I realize (and remember) that the mind of an 18 year old isn't very clear. Once they went pro, Nike / the NBA / EA / et. al. would still be making money off of them. Did they think that was fair? Or just more fair? I guess it just shows the value they placed on free room/board, not to mention a degree from U of M - not much. Selling merchandice, filling the stadium, being on national TV - they didn't realize that money was going to them? Sure, they weren't getting a paycheck, and I don't begrudge them taking benefits from the boosters.
I don't know why the NFL/NBA can't use the same model as the NHL/MLB: sign the kids whenever you want, but they can still develop in college. Seeing how skinny they all were in their freshman year showed they weren't ready for the NBA. They may have thought so, but they would have ridden the bench for the first two years anyway.
What's more, I think they totally glossed over the Traylor/Taylor/Bullock era, and Fisher's involvement. If it had been just Webber (and Rose), we wouldn't have gotten the punishment from the NCAA. But continuing it, and having the coach turn a blind eye to it, showed the lack of institutional control. That's what got Fisher fired, and that's what got us put on probation. It really was a punishment to the program, and I think they were right in taking down the banners and vacating the wins.
Comments