This past Sunday night, it appears that all of us basketball fans tuned in to watch ESPN’s awesome documentary The Fab Five, about the University of Michigan’s all-frosh starting five that went to the NCAA Final Four in both ’92 and ’93. For me, this documentary didn’t serve as a reminder of the theatrical legacy that those five dynamic individuals, and friends, created during their short, but bombastic, time playing together. I never forgot about the Fab Five—my favorite college basketball team of all-time, and also 85% of my inspiration for applying twice to the U of M for grad school, which I didn’t get into, twice.
I was seven years old and in the suburbs in 1992 when the Fab Five commandeered college basketball with an artistic style of game that was unapologetically black, and drenched in personality. My middle-aged, white father and I watched them ardently. We were enraptured by the black sock, baggy short street sensibility that seemed so fresh, so beyond modern, that watching their games, you’d think they were five guys from ten years into the future playing guys from ten years in the past.
I’d been waiting for this documentary, albeit unwittingly, for the last fifteen years, and it delivered on all fronts, but one. There was one obscenely noticeable omission in the film, the principal element of the Fab Five. My favorite player from his time at Michigan up until the time he quit playing, which was really when he was traded from the Sacramento Kings to the Philadelphia 76ers in 2005.
Webber was the only member of the Fab Five to not do an interview for The Fab Five documentary. I’ve been thinking about why that was, but I think it seems pretty obvious now…The Timeout.
I’ve always been blatant in telling people that C-Webb is my favorite player. Nine times out of ten, my declaration will be followed by the unintelligent, giggling rebuttal by whatever jagoff I’m talking to at that moment, as they wish to discredit Webber’s genius entirely with the mere mention of his infamous calling of the timeout at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans on April 5, 1993 at approximately [TIME OF GAME UNKOWN] P.M. (EST), with 11 seconds left in the second half of the NCAA Division I Championship Game, Michigan trailing North Carolina 71-73 with no timeouts remaining, which resulted in a technical foul on Michigan, giving North Carolina two shots and the ball, effectively ending the game.
After the game, Chris Webber said little to clarify his cognition at the time of The Timeout, and has said little to nothing about it, publicly, since that game ended nearly 18 years ago. But still, The Timeout is what Webber seems destined to be remembered for. Type his name into the search bar on any search engine, and “Chris Webber timeout” will be in the dropdown bar that archives popular searches. A summary of that single play, almost as detailed as my transciption above, is on his Wikipedia page. It is the defining moment of his career.
Well, I call B.S. on that.
Chris Webber may never have won the NCAA Championship, or an NBA Championship, but he’s always been a winner. And he’s always turned teams into winners. Not teams that already had superstars on them upon his arrival, but losing teams with little recognizable talent, where Webber would obviously be the best player, but still would gain success by excelling the game of his teammates. For my money, that’s an attribute of a superstar.
After being drafted into the NBA as the #1 overall pick in 1993, he played on a Golden State team coming off a sub-.500 season. In Webber’s rookie year, the Warriors made the playoffs, while he put up Blake Griffinesque numbers. After just one year, the Warriors traded him to the Bullets, who’d been worse than the Warriors had upon Webber’s arrival. The Warriors crumbled after the Webber trade, while he re-united in Washington D.C. with Fab Five teammate, Juwan Howard, and they turned the Bullets into a playoff team. Then the Bullets became the Wizards, then traded Webber to the lousy Sacramento Kings for the one jewel they possessed, an aged Mitch Richmond. The Wizards then crumbled on cue, while the Kings started a steady assent to greatness.
In Sacramento, Webber dazzled. Statistically, his numbers were always astronomical—with the exception of his free-throw shooting—and he’d always played hard, but in Sacramento, Webber played at another level as he took a team of Europeans, Doug Christies, and shoot-first point guards to that next level with him. All players with the Kings during that time, minus Gerald Wallace at the end of the bench, played their best basketball behind Webber.
The Sacramento Kings during the ’01-’02 season were the pinnacle of finesse basketball, and the best all-around passing team I’ve ever seen, led by Webber, the best passing big man I’ve ever seen. Webber was good at everything during that season. Post defense, offensive/defensive rebounding, shot-blocking, steals, making defenders look foolish. I still feel robbed and hoodwinked of that later-controversial Western Conference Finals series against the Lakers, in which the Kings were up 3-2 before losing at home in game seven—a series which would later have footnotes to it that referenced disgraced referee, Tim Donaghy.
The Kings continued to make the playoffs after that, but Webber’s knees started to fail him. In the prime of his career, he was injured nearly half the time, though he’d always come back as a major contributor to lead them, come playoff time, even as his defensive prowess became antiquated.
When the Kings traded Webber to the Sixers in 2005, because they thought they were better off with Peja Stojakovic at the helm, the Kings entered into the denouement of the franchise, still declining.
Webber was the kind to be heartbroken over getting traded. He was heartbroken when he was traded to the Kings. I imagine he gave up after being traded by the Kings, as I imagine anyone forced to go play in Philadelphia with a twenty-five-shot-a-game-taking Allen Iverson would give up.
Still, after a storied NBA career in which Webber led nearly every team he played on, by example, I wonder why typing his name into the search bar on Google turns up “Chris Webber timeout” as the fourth most popular search option. I can’t answer that question. But I think I know why Webber wasn’t on that Fab Five documentary. Because he knew what doing the interview would force him say.
The Fab Five inevitably covered The Timeout, I knew it had to. Everybody involved had a say about the derailing lapse in Webber’s otherwise extraordinary basketball IQ. There were several accounts, one from career benchman, Eric Riley, that allege Webber heard shouts from the Michigan bench when he neared, in-game. The shouts instructed him to call a timeout, which he did in the confusion and pandemonium of the ugly sequence, despite that he had to have known full-well that they had no timeouts left. You can actually see a couple players/coaches motioning for timeout with the t-gesture on the right side of this video’s frame at precisely 1:31.
I’d known about these sideline calls before the documentary. I wasn’t stirred by any of that. I can’t argue that Webber’s actions—or maybe just that singular action—sealed the loss for Michigan. There should never be any reasonable excuse for the best player of any team. I think Webber knows that. I witnessed him knowing that in the documentary on Sunday night. His recognition layered the truly heartbreaking footage of his lengthy walk, shown in its entirety, from the court to the Michigan locker room immediately following the final buzzer. Webber intensely silent, his head down the entire way, a myriad of photographers and cameraman all floating and snapping repeatedly, several feet in front of Webber’s unremitting gait, the desperation in the voice of an unseen security guard, commanding the photographers and cameraman out of the way. Also, in the press conference that followed that game. Webber answered nearly all questions posed to him by recounting what millions of viewers had already seen live and then in slow-motion replay again and again. He offered no insight into his mindset at the time of The Timeout, and only blamed himself.
To me, that’s a leader. Someone who accepts fault, and continues to accept fault even when the blame keeps coming for an inordinate amount of time. Someone who refuses to sell-out a teammate for their part in a team’s failure. Someone who denies themselves the euphoria of participating in, quite possibly, the last re-hashing of some of the most glorious of glory days, because of an 18-year loyalty. So maybe I will ultimately remember The Timeout as the defining moment of Chris Webber’s career, but I will remember it as that because of the leadership he displayed even after arguably one of the worst mistakes a player could make at inarguably the worst time. Chris Webber has always led his team by example. He still is.
