Grant Hill and Jalen Rose have kissed and made up over the “Uncle Tom” comment, but that doesn’t mean the Duke Basketball program as a whole has gotten over it.
Coach K decided to chime in and throw fuel on what was a dying fire.
He thinks people aren’t bright enough to see what he is really saying, throwing a lot of subliminal messages out, but people aren’t dumb. Look at what he had to say.
“Obviously, that was a poor choice of words and very insulting to everyone here at Duke but especially, not just our African-American players, but any African-American students,” Krzyzewski said on “The Waddle & Silvy Show” on ESPN 1000 in Chicago Tuesday. “When you judge within a race, you start judging, like you put categories as to who you are. I think that’s just the wrong thing to do.”
“We were very successful against them and, to be quite frank with you, we recruited Chris Webber,” he said. “I didn’t recruit Jalen Rose because we had Grant Hill and I’m happy with that. We didn’t look at the other, Juwan Howard [because] we knew he wasn’t going to come to Duke. The other two kids we didn’t think were the caliber that could play as well as Thomas Hill and Brian Davis and Billy McCaffery. They’re good kids. They were good kids.”
“They had a heck of a run but, they didn’t leave anything, they didn’t establish anything there,” Krzyzewski said.
Even though the Fab 5 didn’t “establish anything”, they must have done something to have Duke so upset over the words..
Normally when you are as defensive as many in the Duke Basketball team has been over this documentary, that means there is some truth to whatever is being said about you.
Instead of crying, whining and writing op-ed pieces about it just move on. It was documentary about Michigan, not Duke and if that is how they felt about Duke at the time, there is nothing wrong with that, because it wasn’t like they were the only ones.
Coach K in reality talking about the skills of the rest of the Fab 5 minus Chris Webber is the reason people feel so strongly about Duke even today. It is that elitist attitude and the way he is thumbing his noses at their accomplishments is why people don’t like Duke now.
Just because you poison someone as oppose to shooting them in the head, doesn’t mean you are any less a killer. Coach K snobbish and insulting comments as a grown adult are much worse than Jalen Rose feelings as an 18 year old kid.
