The Fab Five: How they changed American sports

Preface: This entry comes after the viewing of the Fab Five documentary.  Some background is given in my entry, but I don’t get exhaustive.

Brief overview of the Fab Five

            Everyone loves an underdog story. That’s exactly what was provided when the University of Michigan men’s basketball team, featuring a starting line up that included the Fab Five, coming from inner-city Detroit, went up against Duke University in the 1992 national championship game. Duke University is a private University that represents wealth, privilege and everything that marginalized groups had learned to resent. The five men collectively referred to as the Fab Five, from the start, did not have any advantages in their favor – their smack talk, which was a simple marker of cultural difference, was used against them, alleging them as unfit for representing a University. Similarly, the men were not able to foresee how their baggy shorts would be perceived by audiences. Sports can bring the most unlikely of people together – is there a better match than a story of inner-city versus prep school kids?

The Fab Five were the first to wear long shorts. All other teams wore short shorts.





At the same time, no one likes a failed underdog story. In such a circumstance, people typically choose to turn a blind eye and avoid thinking about the loss (exempting Duke fans). If you ask someone their first “underdog loses” story, they most likely don’t have one at the top of their heads. More profoundly, no one likes to see a deserving underdog lose their shot at a national championship two years in a row. The scene towards the end of the Fab Five documentary that shows Chris Webber with his head hung down towards the floor, silently leaving the court after losing the championship game against Ohio State, is plainly painful to watch. I believe that is what is powerful about the Fab Five documentary - It forces us to pay attention to a failed underdog story. The documentary forces us to watch and contemplate a set of underdogs with true talent, coming from the most unpromising of circumstances, be exploited and presented with a chance at glory, only to have it be snatched away. Even after the men’s college basketball careers were over, the men were being punished for merely trying to get by on 3 meals a day while being on the team and earning large sums of money for the University. I believe that when a system works to exploit and not support the underdog, it becomes blatantly unjust. 

3 players after losing to Ohio State

In a broader sense, the story of the Fab Five touches on some dominant issues within American sports. Firstly, it reveals a fundamental aspect of why we love sport - sport allows two areas that would never otherwise come together in competition, such as inner-city Detroit and a team of students coming from prep schools all over the country. It gives the underdog an opportunity to prove that it can prevail even despite coming from unequal circumstances. The Fab Five represents the hearth we associate with college sports – we associate amateurism with passion, for better or for worse. Simultaneously, it represents the worst of the circumstances where college athletes are not fairly compensated for their time, commitment and passion, and what happens when they try to get their hands on money to merely get by.