Sep 4, 2021
Jalen Rose: In Defense of Michigan
A former Wolverine reflects on why Detroit’s own, Jalen Rose, is one of the most influential hoopers of his generation
It’s possible the only thing you need to know about Jalen Rose in the year 2021 is he’s smart enough to have found whoever his barber is. You could slice a steak with that man’s line-up. It’s like when you meet a guy who has great shoes or a killer shirt, but he’s not ostentatious about it? It’s just a sign that he’s thinking, that he has vision.
But Jalen’s not the only one. His mom had vision too when she cut-n-scratched the names of his dad James and his uncle Leonard into one jam and created the name Jalen. He’s the first Jalen. The origin point.
Yet, there’s more here than the best barber and name in town. Let’s go back a few years on Jalen. Let’s get Generation X about this:
Jalen and I were freshmen together. We both entered the University of Michigan in 1991 with a September so gorgeous the new world of Ann Arbor sparkled like a fresh-cracked geode and then an October so cold it cut.
Jalen took I-94 over from Detroit to Ann Arbor. I took US-27 to I-96 to US-23. He passed the airport on his way from Detroit Southwestern. I passed the Capitol and corn on my way from St. Johns, Michigan. Needless to say, we’re from different worlds.
I grew up two hours from Detroit with a thousand cows and a cricket calling my imagined games where I hit the winning shot over the Lakers. I grew up where Detroit was a myth. While I was riding my bike down a country road to explore woods with my red dog, Jalen was playground hooping. While I was practicing a jumper by myself for an hour most days and listening to Public Enemy, he was slashing to the basket past players bigger and older but not faster. But maybe also listening to Public Enemy. We might have that one in common, actually.
When I was opening my eyes to a new world in Ann Arbor and everywhere else by extension, he was already changing that world with Michigan’s Fab Five. I’ve never met Jalen Rose, but we’ve been in the same room a dozen times, though, admittedly, that room was Crisler Arena.
Maybe the Fab Five’s biggest splash was hip hop long shorts and black shoes. Maybe it was brash freshmen crashing the stage like Chuck D and Flavor Flav coming to own the place. Maybe it was that it worked, that they strutted all the way to the NCAA championship game, setting U-M single season records along the way only three years after the Wolverines won the whole thing and Glen Rice and crew hung that banner above us.
Maybe it was that we knew it would work when the team’s first loss came that December afternoon we watched them take Duke to the brink and beyond it, only to lose in overtime heartbreak. But at least Jalen jawed at Christian Laettner when we all wanted to jaw at Christian Laettner. Jalen left his legs on the court. I left my voice lost in the air of Crisler Arena.
But maybe it was the way we all knew something crooked happened to bring all five to campus at the same time. Maybe it was the way guys would say, “Did you see Webber in his Ford Explorer?” around campus.
And because tradition rises in dust from dirt roads, my farmboy properness hated the rule breaking then. But soon, I would blink and start to see it. I saw the resistance to the Fab Five wasn’t fashion, ageism, or NCAA rules themselves. It was that fashion, age, and the rules had been more whitewashed than Eddie Murphy’s Mr. White.
The Fab Five riled the establishment because the establishment was built on racist, exploitative bones. Don’t believe the hype — in some ways, these were rules that needed breaking and still need to be broken down. If your system blames Black kids in poverty or the middle class for taking money from rich white men swaying them with gifts, your system needs breaking.
But point of order, it should be noted that when the U-M recruiting scandal blew up, Jalen was never named. I don’t know if Jalen rose above it or darted around it or went right through it like his cut to the hoop right by Shaq in 2000, but he came out clean. Maybe that’s the vision again. Maybe that’s the Detroit hustle.
In some big or small way, Jalen and the Fab Five helped me start to see racism in all the small things. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t completely ignorant. My education didn’t skip the Civil War and I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X that September, but my education sure did skip redlining and the way admissions tests skewed in my favor. My journey from naïve to anti-racist is obviously about more than Jalen Rose, but Detroit and basketball and the worlds Jalen and them helped me see were part of that journey.
I’m more thankful to Jalen for that than for his jawing at Duke. And that’s saying something.
Now, 30 years later, I’m 90 minutes from the farm but only six miles from Detroit’s edge and 25 miles from downtown. (Detroit, my friends, is large, and it contains multitudes.) I say I live in Metro Detroit. I never say I’m from Detroit.
It only seems fair to me that if you say you’re from Detroit? You better be from Detroit. You gotta earn that. If Jalen Green (see that name?) and a whole lot of others can diss the entire city without setting foot in it, then I damned well can’t buy a 1960s colonial in Farmington and say I’m from Detroit. Detroit is a place, but it’s also an ethos. It’s an attitude and a wild range of experiences. Detroit is earned. I love it and in some ways I am of it, but I’m not from it.
I’ve learned a lot from Jalen and them who are, though. I’m privileged. My town has never been underfunded due to unspoken punishment for Blackness. Somewhere later in college and after, I started going to Detroit. I walked across downtown. This did not make me a Detroiter, but it helped crush the mythological Detroit of my childhood and start to see a real Detroit. An underfunded, kicked in the chin, tough and funny Detroit.
And it’s true, Detroit hustles harder. Jalen never sat still. A full life evolves. He was a point guard, then opened himself to playing small forward and shooting guard. He was a player, then opened himself to becoming a studio analyst. He’s a philanthropist. He has vision. He keeps going and excelling at all of it. Detroit survives but Detroit also thrives.
Of the many lessons of Jalen, that may be the biggest. He’s not flashy — he’s productive. Always moving. A full life evolves. It’s an exaggeration, but sometimes it feels like the only thing I have in common with my 1991 self is my name. When you watch highlights of Jalen in ’91 and then see his NBA analysis on ESPN now, you wonder if he thinks the same thing.
We change. We keep moving. The best players move without the ball.
And the thing about an origin point like Jalen is their impacts ripple outward. His name rocketed to become one of the most popular names of the next generation. His Fab Five phenomenon helped naïve guys like me wake up. His school in Detroit sends dozens of kids in the new generation to college too. Origins expand.
But you wouldn’t know all that about Jalen without researching. Whenever Jalen boasts about his NBA career, the first thing he mentions is setting Denver’s rookie assists record. This is a man who scored 32 in a Pacers win against the Kobe-Shaq Lakers in the NBA Finals in the same season he won the NBA’s Most Improved Player award, but the first thing he always mentions is rookie assists.
That’s Detroit. Pride in the work and pride in each other. Look out for your brothers and sisters, people. We all score more buckets when we first look to assist. Like it or not, life is a team sport. We’re in this together regardless of how you wear your shorts or where you’re from. And, yeah, I guess even if you root for Duke.
