I was a student at Michigan during the Fab Five years, and I knew then that it was the most fun I would ever have as a sports fan. I was vaguely aware of the cultural significance of the Fab Five, but as a 19 year-old sophomore I was swept up in so much of it myself, wearing baggy shorts and black socks on the basketball court and listening to Dr. Dre and Naughty By Nature off of it, that I didn't have the perspective I have on it now.
I hated Duke. Despised them. Not for any particular reason. Not for what they stood for. (They didn't really stand for anything except being really, really good at basketball.) They were the big, bad rival, and you wanted to knock their smug arses off their perch, that's all.
It stands to reason that Jalen Rose and his Fab teammates would view them a bit differently. To them, Duke were the kids from the right side of the tracks, and someone like Rose from Detroit Southwestern or Juwan Howard from Chicago Vocational would be understandably resentful of this. Rose, in particular, would be resentful of Grant Hill; as Jalen said, they both had professional athletes as fathers, but Grant's was around to raise him - Jalen's was not.
Now, I like Grant Hill a lot. I loved him when I saw him play like a man as a freshman in taking down the "Darth Vader" that was UNLV. And even while his Duke teams were beating Michigan, I found it hard to dislike him. He lacked the amorphously, A.J. Pierzynski-ish "annoying" quality of Christian Laettner or Bobby Hurley. Grant Hill was cool.
And I have been a fan of Grant Hill in the years since he left Duke. He has always seemed to be anything but a typical NBA prima donna. He has been an apparently nice and obviously intelligent guy who has persevered through a terribly unfortunate string of injuries to continue performing at the NBA level to a very advanced age.
I am absolutely a Grant Hill fan.
And this is why his exceptionally literate rebuttal to Jalen Rose in the New York Times so disappoints me. Hill had a visceral response to the term "Uncle Tom" and the other less-than-flattering words the Fab Five used to describe their feelings for Duke nearly two decades ago, and he so disregarded the context of what Rose had to say in the film that it makes me wonder if Hill even watched the documentary at all.
Rose openly said that this was how he felt at the time about Grant Hill and Duke, because when he was 18 years old he was jealous of Hill for his privileged upbringing. When Rose and his teammates used derogatory terms to describe Duke players, they were talking about how they felt then. Rose said in as many words that after the 1992 Championship Game, they respected Duke and knew they had lost to a better team.
Yes, Grant, we can all agree that "Unlce Tom" is a deeply insulting and derogatory term. And we can all agree that the accomplishments of your black teammates and of your own family are commendable - indeed, a model to be emulated by everyone, no matter their race. And we understand that it doesn't somehow make you "less black".
Jalen Rose bared his soul to the world in a moment of reflection, admitting to Grant Hill and to all of us the extremely undignified emotions he felt as a youth and how his experience taught him better. Before the documentary even aired, Jalen expressed an awareness that many were going to simply read the headline that included the words "Jalen Rose - Duke - Uncle Tom" and immediately draw their conclusions without even watching the movie. The response from others was predictable. But I expect more from Grant Hill.
Hill responded to Rose's honesty with an exceedingly pedantic missive that lectures the teenage Jalen Rose but doesn't acknowledge the words and feelings expressed by the grown man. Hill took the opportunity to celebrate his own heritage and the progress of his race, and, frankly, to try and show the world how smart he, his family, and his Duke teammates are. I expect better from Hill than self-congratulatory grandstanding.
What incredible irony. In 1992, the Fab Five represented kids with street cred playing street ball, shoving their game and their personalities brashly (and often inappropriately) in your face, while Duke represented the polished prep school set. And here we are, 19 years later, and this is exactly how each group is still processing and re-living the experience: the Fab Five, in your face, giving you the raw, unvarnished truth of who they were as teenagers and who they are now as grown men... and Duke presenting itself as skilled, soft and arrogant.
In one op-ed, Grant Hill manages to validate the resentment of college basketball fans everywhere who view Duke as the arrogant elite. Thank you, Dennis Green: they are who we thought they were!
That Hill has enough intellectual gravitas to write such a piece means he also has enough intellectual gravitas to have gotten Jalen Rose's point more clearly than he did and not displayed such rabbit ears.
As a fan of Hill's, I would have liked to hear him say, "That Jalen Rose could admit those youthful feelings to the world and show us all how he has grown beyond them is also a part of our great legacy."
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