Ahead Of Their Time

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, MICHIGAN’S FAB FIVE STILL LOOK LIKE PIONEERS

- Alexander Wolff

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after I wrote about Chris Webber calling a timeout his Michigan team didn’t have, in the dying seconds of the 1993 NCAA TITLE GAME against North Carolina, let us hail the Fab Five, college basketball’s original and eternal It Boys.And the sport’s Id Boys: In the Big Ten, a league identified with the command-and-control excesses of Indiana coach Bob Knight, and at Michigan, which had just come out from under the autocratic rule of Bo Schembechler, they dared to scowl at the sport’s superegos. With limbs jangling beneath all that uniform fabric, they stage-whispered their secret while acting it out—pssst, we are college hoop.