We have always had some mixed feelings about Jalen Rose. Like everyone, we were astonished by Michigan’s Fab Five. That group was really, really good - but never as good as they thought.
On a human level though it’s hard not to empathize with his complex feelings towards Duke and especially Grant Hill, who, he said, had everything he wanted and he was jealous and bitter.
He said some very harsh things about Hill, the other African-American players at Duke and the Blue Devils program in general.
Part of that was that both of them had fathers who were celebrated professional athletes - Calvin Hill in Grant’s case and Jimmy Walker in Jalen’s (Walker was traded from the Pistons in 1972; Rose was born in Detroit in 1973 and never met his father).