Jalen Rose is loquacious, honest and opinionated. He also happened to be one of the best players in Michigan basketball history.

In advance of the debut of the film he helped produce, "The Fab 5," the former Michigan star conducted a teleconference to discuss the film, Michigan basketball and more.

Former Michigan player and Fab Five member Jalen Rose acknowledges the Crisler Arena crowd in February 2008.

File photo

Q: I noticed a lot of the documentary is about the style you brought to the game, the on-court attitude when you played the game. I realize this is about Michigan and not something else, but at the same time, UNLV was getting a lot of attention. Do you think there was any connection between the styles you all brought to the game?

Jalen Rose: I’m going to give you a direct connection. A lot of people don’t know that Anderson Hunt, the 1990 Final Four MVP, was an alumnus of Detroit Southwestern. So I looked up to the Vegas team, spent time in Vegas during my high school period, and there was a time they were recruiting me. They came to play a game at the Palace, they came to my high school game. I was familiar with that entire team, Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon, Greg Anthony, obviously Anderson Hunt. … Remember in the early 90’s, being high school athletes you gravitate to the teams and the players you see have success. If a player from Detroit was going to go to a major college program, I followed them, followed their program, and I looked up to what they did. Vegas was obviously no different.

I watched Vegas lose to Duke in 1991 in Anderson Hunt’s home with UNLV shorts, never knowing I’d be playing against Duke the following year in the finals.

Q: In the film, you went into a lot of explanation why you didn’t like Duke. Why did you feel that was a real important thing to get through early in the film?
JR: In the early '90s, social consciousness was different for high school and college athletes. That was pre-Internet, pre-YouTube. Everything that you got from public consumption was through magazines, through print, through local news and even through "SportsCenter" on ESPN. A lot of that was a bias spin by the majority that didn’t represent the minorities in urban situations and didn’t really understand the pulse of what made a lot of inner city kids tick. In particular, our style, talking trash, the music we listened to and also there was a boom of the hip-hop culture in the early '90s, and Duke represented just the opposite of what we did.

Yes, Christian Laettner was a terrific player, and I got to respect his game when I got on the floor with him. But a player like that represented exactly the opposite of what we ended up representing, so it was like two forces of nature. When we played against them, it was like good versus evil, and I have a lot of respect for Coach K, and I have tremendous respect for his program, but there is an unwritten rule in college sports and we all know this.

When you sign a letter of intent to play football at the University of Miami or go play basketball at UNLV or University of Michigan, you were viewed one way. If you were to sign to play at Indiana, at Duke, at Notre Dame, you were viewed another way. That’s just a fact, and it still exists today. They recruit a certain type of player. The majority of their black athletes, and there are exceptions to every rule, are from well-to-do families.
“That is, as I’m 38 I respect and appreciate that but as an inner city player you knew that that type of school didn’t recruit a player like you, and that was frustrating.

Q: What do you feel is the most insightful or explosive part of the film?
JR: The most explosive part of the film is that it has brutal honesty from beginning to end. It showed how we dealt with success, how we dealt with failure. It shows a lot of the hate letters and messages we were getting, whether it was from complete strangers or even from Michigan alumnus. So that was a shocking development, and that’s something a lot of people are going to be surprised to see when they see this documentary, how hate-filled a lot of the messages and overtones were toward our team.

Q: Steve Fisher has said many times what he’s doing at San Diego State isn’t vindication at all for what happened at the end at Michigan. Knowing him that you do, do you think a season like he’s having right now is some vindication for what happened?
JR: It’s a vindication for the world that only felt that he just rolled out basketballs, didn’t discipline us and just let us play and do whatever we wanted to do, run all over him. A lot of people felt he was a brother-lover, I’m not going to use the N-word, somebody that a lot of people didn’t like as a basketball coach because they felt like the prisoners, so to speak, ran the asylum. While he does have a Top 10 program that he’s built basically from the ground up at San Diego State in 12 years into a Top 10 program, a program that to be honest is a better program, basketball-wise, at this time, than Michigan is. 

So there isn’t any vindication, per se, because he loves the University of Michigan that much, and I wish he would have gotten the same opportunity for failure and success that a lot of other big-time coaches. Working in the media, we see Bruce Pearl get suspended this year, Jim Calhoun, Tom Izzo. Look at what happened with Terrelle Pryor, Cam Newton. Scenarios happen in college while players are in college and they are not disciplined and the school didn’t take further action. Well, our situation, allegedly, didn’t come up until four or five years after we left. That shows there was a distance there. And at that time, the university was ready to distance themselves from us and that four or five years later gave them vindication for why they did.

Q: Have you seen Michigan in person this year?
JR: I have actually. I went to a game earlier this season. I am happy that I think we’re going to make the tournament. I do wish we were a national power, which we are not. I do think there are ways and steps we can go for the university to do that and the elephant in the room is this. The parents of the players nowadays were Fab Five fans, grew up in our era. So if you’re not totally vindicated and don’t really bring peace to that situation I don’t think they’ll really truly be able to excel and take that next step to being a national power in basketball again because those players, those parents are going to pay attention to how this situation is handled.

Q: When they come away from the film, how do you think Michigan fans will be thinking of the Fab Five? What do you think the impression of you guys will be?
JR: It will be a range of emotion. This documentary gives you an opportunity to celebrate with us, gives you an opportunity to scratch your head and wonder what were we thinking? It gives you an opportunity to chastise and question us on and off the floor. It gives you an opportunity to have joy from us, but it also gives you an opportunity to get to know us better. Those that have no clue about the Fab Five until they sit down and watch this documentary will get a wealth of knowledge about what made us tick.

Also, for those that didn’t like us, I think this is going to make it worse.

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein