Fab 5 Clown Show Last Night

[RDF]

Let's see, a feature "story" on guys who "were bigger then the score"---YEP-that's what LOSERS always say.

1. You don't win a league championship or National Title---but "changed the game".

2. Changed the game how? Baggy shorts were a Jordan thing-black socks were a Jordan thing--UNLV brought baggy shorts to CBB in 1990-91.

3. Chris Webber is shown to be what he's always been--a Poser who wanted to be "down" but not when it got him into trouble. Then he threw everyone under the bus and let Michigan basketball suffer.

4. Jalen Rose who I enjoyed watching as a player and think is a pretty good commentator when he's natural and not "coached" making over the top statement about being "bigger then score". Sure you were.

5. Ice Cube and Chuck D turning this into some sort of racial/socialogical story--when it was far from it. Being a JR in HS when Fab 5 entered college--nobody cared that they were black kids, acted brash, and so on--they just enjoyed watching them play ball. Michigan has how many Alums? They focus on letters from racists/biggots but how many alums actually sent in favorable stuff?

6. Mitch Albom being a punk--Check. He's a piece of garbage--always has been. Stick to anything NOT sports related.

7. NOBODY knew of Webber/Ed Martin--until Jalen Rose admits it--and yet nobody knew? Sure. Believe that one.

8. Highlights of the special focus mainly on LOSING--but they looked cool doing it and were brash.

9. Ice Cube/Chuck D being exposed as "bandwagon" fans--Check. D commented on Georgetown, Cube is all over the spectrum. Lil Wayne changes allegiances more then anyone. Snoop Dogg has millions of favorite teams. These guys are clowns and bandwagon beeyatches. (tribute to snoop)

10. No mention that Rob Pelinka has become one of the most powerful agents in sports--he's Kobe Bryant's agent for 1 and has numerous other big name clients.

11. Brian Dutcher mentioned seeing Ed Martin--and wondering who he was--but didn't mention why he didn't pursue this more--especially when Martin was a big booster of Michigan basketball? Believe that.

12. Webber is shown as he always was on court--a talented guy who didn't get most out of his talent because he was too worried with being "cool" and not winning. It was more important for him to be on highlights then to win. Never accepted responsibility and never has. He is quick to bash current NBA guys--who have done far more then he EVER did--but he's MIA to answer the bell. Coward.

13. NCAA exploiting them.....cry......blah blah blah......then don't go to college. Leave. If you don't like how things are--leave. I agree NCAA is hypocritical-but the game is always bigger then guys who play it.

14. When the highlight of your "era" is losing--then why were you important? These guys didn't change any culture--this is complete garbage. Most of us were very much alive during this "era" and it was seen as these guys could play--and most of us wanted them to beat Duke--who was despised-especially so in the '92 Title game--remember Laettner was allowed to stomp on Aminu Timberlake and didn't get disqualified in the East Regional Final--which is known as greatest game to ever be played in NCAA's. So Michigan was a "villian"?

15. Being that Final Four was in MPLS that year--I attended the Open Workout portion and BY FAR the Wolverines were the most well received. Little kids, old white people, you name it--in Big 10 country--the choice was Michigan or Indiana and everyone hated Bobby Knight--so the favorite of the Final Four was Michigan.

16. Amazing that Dean Smith for all of his reported "greatness" won 2 championships in same building because other team screwed up--not because he beat them. Fred Brown's pass and Webber's timeout.

It was a talented group of players--but this tired "story" has been repeatedly told---"The U", "UNLV", Georgetown in the Nova-GTown special from ESPN and difference being those programs did change a lot of things/were big deal for reasons that drove people to "love/hate". Michigan was/always will be loved--due to their clout. Miami FB and Georgetown basketball are sticking points to this day--racism, hatred, how they didn't give a rip if you liked them or not, and popularity of the sport. Georgetown is why ESPN is what they are today, the Big East is what they are today in reference to CBB coverage. Georgetown is why the tournament was expanded, why it's a Dome hosted event, Nike influence on basketball (they were flagship program in regards to shoe changes/uniform changes and Duke was Adidas/Carolina Converse for those who weren't around) and was focal point program of creating the "David Vs Goliath".

Seems every team who has their "spurt" wants to have their story and tries way too hard to resemble the Ewing Era Hoyas about the "cultural significance". Tying Rodney King and Fab 5 is the biggest bunch of dog feces I've ever heard. Did Fab Five ever have banana thrown on court or racial signs with monkeys in the stands during a game? Webber would've cried if he had to deal with Ewing's taunts. It's a joke/tired.

[DFW HOYA]

There is a tendency in these ESPN films to oversell cultural significance to sports. Michigan in 1991-93 was no more or less culturally significant than a half dozen other basketball teams out there. I guess ESPN could have done a film on the 1991-92 Duke teams as well but ESPN would probably lose the street cred it is trying to build with these presentations.

Two things vastly underplayed in the presentation:

1. Webber's claim that the bench told him to call time out.

2. The dichotomy that the players said they struggled to make ends meet, yet Ed Martin was already supporting some of them. Mitch Albom's contention that Martin's funds appeared after Webber declared for the draft was all but refuted by Rose but glossed over.

Also, Webber's no-show notwithstanding, why not reunite the other four for the film isntead of hosting individual interviews?

I will always give Juwan Howard tremendous credit for graduating on time despite leaving a year early. The ability to take classes long distance and maintain an NBA career is a notable accomplishment.

[Boz]

I enjoyed it if for no other reason than to listen to Jalen Rose talk about how everyone really felt about Duke, Christian Laettner and Ohio State.

[whatmaroon]

I was one of the guys who hated Michigan back in the day, partly because of the style, partly because of the way they were. And you had hints of why I still hate them for the way they were in the documentary.

1. "Duke scored on their last 12 possessions" in the 1992 title game. Read "THEY GAVE UP." They realized they weren't going to win, so they basically stopped trying.
2. Name the 5 starters on UNC. I could give you Montross, Donald Williams, George Lynch, and that's it. That's about where I am with most championship teams. Lynch had a good NBA career, but Montross was kind of a stiff and I don't think Williams had any career. Michigan had the better players, but didn't have the better team, and when you're going against Dean Smith, that's a tough feat to pull off.

[Boz]

IMO, this is why the Fab 5 WERE great for college basketball.

Lots of people loved them. Lots of people hated them. There was barely a single college basketball fan (and lots of people who were not college fans) who did not have very strong feelings about them one way or the other.

And regardless of which camp you were in, everyone wanted to watch them play.

Did they have some lasting cultural impact on the game or society, or whatever? I really couldn't care less. I suppose that is an answer in and of itself.

[RDF]

If you change how the game is covered/played--then you make an impact. These were a group of talented guys who played together. Great. This is also when the Atlantic 10 had hype/articles about how they made the Big East "has beens"---and beating Yinka Dare and GW and Temple to get to Final Four--wow--that's a big feat. Hell--the Fab 5 got Temple 2 years in a row--including the Cosby "jinx".

I'd simply have enjoyed the Fab 5 basketball angle and instead washed up rappers and racial garbage that had no impact at all played into the focal point of the show. Who didn't hate Duke back when Laettner/Hurley were around? CBS, ESPN/Vitale, and........well how have things changed today? If you make an impact things change. These guys were just talented guys, fun to watch and that's it.

[CAHoya07]

All I can say is I liked it. Kinda weird that Webber didn't participate in any of it, but I guess that's the way it is. I found Jalen Rose's parts pretty honest and funny, especially when he was calling Duke "bitches" and Ohio State "Editedeyes."

I wouldn't mind if our team carried along a little bit of that brashness into the tournament this year. I'm also not so sure if Michigan really started the whole baggy shorts and black socks thing. I really thought of that as more of a Michael Jordan and the Bulls trend.

I'm still waiting for the 30 for 30 on the Ewing years at Georgetown, from 1982 to 1985, and how that affected college basketball and society. Now that would really be something.

[hoya95]

ESPN is addicted to self-promotional hyperbole. They won't help themselves, and it's the biggest drawback to the 30 for 30's. The Fab 5 did not start a single revolution. Spike Lee and Reggie Miller yelling at each other didn't change the NBA. The Raiders moving to LA didn't create west coast rap. Mike Tyson's "friendship" with TuPac is a mild coincidence, not an excuse for over the top poetry. I could go on and on.

That said, some of that was entertaining last night. It's a pretty good story, and there was plenty I'd forgotten. Also, I notice that HBO did a documentary on UNLV this weekend. Now THAT would be interesting. Did anyone see it? Was it any good?

[tashoya]

They were the most captivating team at the time and kids wanted to be like them. That's all. They were entertaining and they came in together. Interesting story that gets blown out of proportion. Kinda like Tupac. You hear all about his mom's drug problems and the Black Panther angle but very little about the performing arts high school and stage dancer angles because those diminish the story that people want to further.

[FLHoya]

Mar 14, 2011 13:39:15 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

There is a tendency in these ESPN films to oversell cultural significance to sports. Michigan in 1991-93 was no more or less culturally significant than a half dozen other basketball teams out there. I guess ESPN could have done a film on the 1991-92 Duke teams as well but ESPN would probably lose the street cred it is trying to build with these presentations.

I'll use that as a jumping off point, because it brings up an interesting question to me.

This is the third documentary in the past year about a team from the early 1990s--The Fab Five, HBO's UNLV doc that also premiered over the weekend, and the 30 for 30 doc "Guru of Go" about Paul Westhead and Loyola-Marymount that aired last April. DFW makes the point that you could do a doc on Laettner's Blue Devils, but actually Duke is a major character in both the Michigan and UNLV stories...basically switch out Jalen Rose for Stacey Augmon and the commentary is the same (no less accurate!).

"Guru of Go" is probably the outlier--it didn't really make the claim that LMU was culturally "significant" per se, but rather focused on the unusual character of Westhead and the tragedy surrounding Hank Geathers. The UNLV and Michigan stories certainly do make that claim however.

The way I'd put it: how much of the attention paid to remembering these teams now is a sign of their cultural significance, and how much is just the natural cycle of nostalgia?

Nostalgia tends to work in 20 year cycles--there was a wave of 50s nostalgia during the 1970s, 60s nostalgia during the 1980s, The Tombs not coincidentally started a 90s night within the past year or so...you get the idea.

Here we are nearing the 20th anniversary of Duke's win over UNLV in the Final Four...seems only natural that the late 80s/early 90s era in CBB is getting its day.

Were UNLV, Duke, and Michigan culturally significant in some larger way in that era? Tough to say. They were certainly culturally relevant--we definitely saw a lot of Duke and Michigan on TV during those years, and I can actually remember the Duke-Michigan game featured in the film even though I was about 9 at the time, as well as some other Duke-Michigan games during the 1990s.

I'd be curious who else DFW would call significant from that era. Maybe there does need to be some kind of buffer to properly judge a team's larger importance...certainly better than the knee-jerk reactions we get nowadays, where every game is an "Instant Classic" and every moment timeless.

Perhaps it's the buffer getting in my way, but I was having a conversation with a friend last night and wondered: has there really been a college bball team since Michigan that could even approach being called "culturally relevant" in the way the film was trying to argue for Michigan? At the very least, it certainly felt like college basketball was entering a new era of some kind with the UNLV-Duke-Michigan years. In my mind, for whatever reason, the dividing line between eras: one ends with 1985 and the GU/Nova game, and the next starts with those UNLV teams and ends with the 1993 title game.

Does any team really leave an impression after that? Pitino and Kentucky had a great run in the mid-late 90s and produced a boatload of NBA talent, but do they leave a mark years later? The 2000s kind of became a revolving door until UF went back to back. Maybe in the era of one-and-done there isn't time to establish a legacy...or it's too much of a business now for the players.


As for the films...


The best part of The Fab Five for me was the footage of the Michigan players walking through the tunnel after losing the title games in 1992 and 1993, at different moments dejected, petulant, angry (throwing stuff!), almost scared. Chris Webber's press conference is downright devastating as well.

But I think it probably underlines a weakness in the film. I think it probably lets The Fab Five off the hook too easy to have Jalen Rose or whoever dismiss a 20 point loss in the National Title game by saying Duke was just the better team, and that's that. The film has a few great moments showing how poorly the team handled those losses, and the random Italy home movies with them complaining contribute to the point, but it's got to be said stronger: those guys came up really small in the clutch...maybe they were just really immature and it caught up to them when it mattered most.

The Zapruder film stuff about the timeout was amusing, but I still wanted more, which we weren't getting without C-Webb's participation.

Same kind of problem I had with the UNLV film: you know the big money shot in this whole story, but it took a heck of a long time to get around to the hot tub...and the film really underplayed IMO what was a pretty damn significant scandal. Did a decent job placing the school in the context of 1980s Las Vegas, and Tarkanian is a great character who lived with his middle finger extended to the NCAA...but it was all too generic (and too short, and too much like an episode of Real Sports, and too...Jimmy Kimmel).


RDF brings up a great contrast to "The U". I think one thing that film did well is laid the groundwork of the social/political context of Miami and South Florida during the late 70s/early 80s and how the Hurricanes became of that culture. Was "The U" culturally significant in the 1980s? I'd say yes...but then, I'm biased because I grew up in South Florida during part of the 1980s. No doubt though, the Miami teams represented a "real" culture of their region.

By contrast, Michigan and UNLV just feel like "Meh, Steve Fisher and Tark had good recruiting classes".

[HoyaTejano]

A couple of things:
1. Now that I have perspective 20 years later, one could argue that the Fab 5 was a poor man's UNLV, insofar that the latter carried a lot more experienced firepower on the court than Michigan did. UNLV's loss in the 91 semifinal was truly a surprise. I didn't feel surprise watching Duke crush Michigan. I felt the dull sense of painful inevitability given the delta between the two squads' experience.

2. That said, the Fab 5 was infinitely more likeable than UNLV to a lot of people and seized on a certain element of the zeitgeist in a special way - half gangster, half fun bunch. However, it's clear that these guys carried a lot of internal baggage; if it wasn't playing time, it was about the money. If the Fab 5 revolutionized anything, they did so for athletes' self-awareness.

3. I had never seen a frame-by-frame breakdown of the Webber rebound-travel-timeout sequence. I had only seen normal speed replays. What a freakin' disaster, but on the other hand, when you put 5 19-20 year-olds of enormous talent but perhaps limited foresight on the court at the same time--and another 8-10 on the bench, your margin of error is narrower than you think it is.

4. The remnants of the Fab 5 actually acquitted themselves very well in 1994, going all the way to the Elite 8 where they fell to eventual national champ Arkansas.

[nashvillehoyas]

What would be interesting is a doc of the Georgetown Hoyas of '82 - '85. The lows and high of a great program. A coach that would become the first Black to win a NCAA championship. A program with a predominant black team at a predominant white university. A coach that was despise by most in the media. The boycott in protest of entrance level qualification....And many other stories around this program. Would be interesting.

[HoyaTejano]

I think one of the reasons nobody does a GU documentary is the infamous silence around the program. The one good documentary about us is really more about Villanova's victory, which is annoying.

[joey0403p]

I actually have enjoyed most of the 30 for 30 s. You have to remember that doc are told from a person or persons point of view. For example jalen rose said "we wanted to wear shorts like Jordan..." but that comment was glossed over and it was about the fab five, not Jordan.
The weber stuff I really wish he had participated. I imagine he knew he'd have to talk about the timeout which I'm sure still haunts him. And he'd have to comment on the sanctions which I don't think he wants to do for fear of more prosecution.

Here are my questions.
Jalen rose admitted to taking money and gifts from a booster...without the weber stuff would that have been ok? He made it seem like it had nothing to do with Michigan, but maybe I am just nieve
Second the reporter who claimed the real money changed hands with weber after he declared but before he was drafted...doesn't he forfeit his amature status the moment the season is done if he declares? And if this was true, shouldn't they be allowed to show the banners?

[joey0403p]

On g town. Unfortunately I'm sure a big big part of the reason the has not been a doc like this on gtown and there will not be is the "code" of silence around the program.
You would need jt jr you would need pat Ewing. You would need the uniiversity's sign off. And unless something big has changed in the last five years, that ain't going to happen

[bmartin]

One interesting thing is that now it is easy for everyone to portray Duke as the evil empire but it is based on their current status, not their standing at the time. Up until the 1991 upset over UNLV, Duke and Coach K were the biggest Final Four chokers in college basketball history.

Duke had made the Final Four in 4 of the previous 5 years and lost in the final twice.
They were competitive in the 86 final loss to Louisville, but they were upset by 6 seed Kansas in a 1988 semifinal; by 3 seed Seton Hall in a 1989 semifinal, and had been creamed by UNLV by 30 in the 1990 Final. (After Duke's 1991 win, the choke label passed to Roy Williams in Kansas.)

Duke was a big favorite over the Fab 5 in the 1992 final because no one had expected Michigan to get there. It was not as if Duke and Michigan had been on a collision course all season. Duke was a 1 seed, defending champion, and had won the historic game against Kentucky in the regional final and then beat Bob Knight and Indiana in the semifinal.

Michigan was a 6 seed whose big win of the tournament was on their 3rd try at Ohio State in the regional final. Their semifinal was against 4 seed Cincinnati who won the upset region where 1 Kansas, 2 USC, and 3 Arkansas all lost in the 2nd round.

[Boz]

Yeah, but some of us, I like to call us the smart ones, have always hated Duke.

;D

[theexorcist]

A few things:

1. The 30 for 30 docs are not about the most compelling names. ESPN/Simmons asked directors loosely to choose their own stories.

2. I remember the years of the Fab Five, and they were unquestionably THE story in college basketball in the early 90s. They were not UNLV, which was a superpower college team, but the baggy shorts and everything sucked up all the college basketball air those years.

3. Other suggestions for fun sports docs...

A. UCLA/Princeton, first round. A real good/evil subplot.
B. Arkansas. Forty Minutes of Hell, First Bubba, Nolan being quotable.
C. The 1989 Tournament. First scene is Bo saying he wants a Michigan man to coach Michigan. The NCAA tournament's a lost cause this year, right? And the talent in the final was sick.
D. The Oklahoma State plane crash.
E. David Robinson at Navy.

[tashoya]

joey, I don't think one forfeits amateur status until hiring an agent. And I'm with Boz. I've hated Duke since around the Big East/ACC Challenge days.

[hoyarooter]

Maybe I'm just an old white curmudgeon, but to me, none of those teams were culturally significant. It's just basketball.

The Loyola story to me carries the most weight, because Loyola played a unique, entertaining and crazy brand of ball, and was afflicted by a real tragedy.