The Fab Five as a Cultural Movement
by Mickey Cloud, Digital Strategist, @mickeycloud
“It just so happened that this revolution was televised” – Jalen Rose
ESPN Films debuted The Fab Five this past Sunday night, a documentary that told the story of the University of Michigan freshman basketball class of 1991, a group of five elite black high school players who took college basketball by storm when they joined forces on the court in 1992 and 1993 in Ann Arbor, MI. The film was executive produced by Jalen Rose, the talented point forward who was the leader of the group that included future NBA big men Juwan Howard and Chris Webber, and guards Jimmy King and Ray Jackson – and was as gripping and emotional as anything I’ve seen on TV this year.
The Fab Five left their imprint on college basketball and American culture as brash, talented, African-American 18/19 year-olds with an “us-against-the-world” attitude – imprints that can still be felt today in the sports and marketing world.
It has been fascinating to watch the conversation and reaction about the film play out. Much of my Twitter feed was taken up with lavish praise as the documentary aired from sports media and fans alike, and on the flip side, more negative reactions from Jason Whitlock and Grant Hill have continued the debate this week.
However, I’ll leave the pontificating about the film’s merits and our reactions to it to more credible sources (read: Bomani Jones & Andrew Sharp), and instead want to focus on the cultural significance of the Fab Five – and how it relates to Cultural Movement marketing.
The Fab Five were certainly not the first black players to make their mark on college basketball – but it’s difficult to deny how they resonated with basketball fans (young and old, black and white) in a way that transcended just the basketball court. The Fab Five were important not only because they were five African-Americans taking their team to back-to-back national championship games in a time when freshmen and sophomores rarely started, but because they had an energy, style, and attitude that reverberated among black and youth culture, and ultimately, helped introduce hip hop culture to mainstream America.
Of course, their place in history would not have been possible without black college basketball predecessors like the Texas Western 1966 team (the first to start all black players in a national championship game), Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Patrick Ewing (as Whitlock points out rightfully).
But every cultural movement needs a strong base and then one controversial or transcendent moment to push the movement to the next level of adoption. The Fab Five’s influence as that tipping point that helped push hip hop culture as a very real part of the American fabric and economy is what fascinates me. What I know now as a planner (and could feel but probably not articulate as a 7-8 year old basketball fan back then) is that this kind of “idea on the rise” would have huge implications for youth culture and commerce.
While we can debate the ethics of using amateur athletes as marketing tools without compensating them personally (and the documentary certainly makes a great argument about the murkiness of the NCAA), you’d be hard pressed to deny that savvy marketers from Nike to Tommy Hilfinger to McDonald’s to Starter jackets to MTV all tapped into the power of hip hop culture to become even more culturally relevant brands in the early-mid 90s.
These were brands that merged the worlds of culture and commerce to great success – and influenced marketing in multiple ways consistently since.
And after watching the documentary, I have to think they owe a large portion of their success to the awesome story of Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Chris Webber, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson, the Fab Five.
