With Grant Hill preparing to weigh in on last Sunday’s “Fab Five” ESPN documentary, Fox Sports’ Jason Whitlock accuses executive producer / subject Jalen Rose of a self-serving, revisionist version of events. “Rose took baggy shorts, black socks, bald heads and trash talk and created the illusion the Fab Five were some sort of transcendent, revolutionary freedom fighters cut from the same cloth as Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe and Muhammad Ali,” argues Whitlock, who suggests “rather than participate in the documentary, Chuck D should’ve remade “Don’t Believe the Hype” and replaced Elvis with Jalen Rose.”
It was John Thompson’s all-black, Ewing-led teams a decade before the Fab Five that shook the foundation of college basketball, changed the complexion of starting lineups across the country, opened coaching doors that had previously been closed to blacks and paved the way for black sportswriters at major newspapers.
They won championships — conference and national. They scared and intimidated the establishment. They were the inner-city black kids who left a legacy of jobs and playing opportunities for other impoverished minorities that exposes the lack of substance in the fads popularized by the Fab Five.
While making money for their white university and allowing their incompetent, white coach to learn on the job, the Fab Five were not man enough to harness the courage and focus to outduel — in their minds — inferior, racist teams.
Now tell me who the sellouts were?