According to a staff memo, the arena has become more of an all-purpose facility since it was built in 1967. It now includes the adjacent William Davidson player development center with practice courts for men’s and women’s basketball teams, locker rooms and offices and other specialized spaces. The player development center had been renamed in honor of Davidson at the regents’ Feb. 16, 2012 meeting, following a $7.5 million donation from the William Davidson Foundation to the University of Michigan athletics department.

This brief was filed from the Michigan Union’s Pendleton Room on UM’s Ann Arbor campus, where regents held their March meeting. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

Davidson, a UM graduate and businessman who owned the Detroit Pistons and other teams, had been a major donor to the university over the past several decades. The William Davidson Institute at UM’s Ross School of Business was founded in 1992 through a gift from Davidson’s business, Guardian Industries.

UM president Mary Sue Coleman described Davidson as a beloved man who had been very generous to the university. She said she regretted that he wasn’t here to see how well the UM basketball team is doing this season. Board chair Denise Ilitch, whose family owns the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Tigers, said she spoke as member of a fellow sports family in thanking Davison’s family for their contribution. She said Davidson left a tremendous legacy, and that he’s sorely missed.

The new basketball player development center at Crisler is a two-story, $23.2 million addition to the basketball arena that regents initially approved in September 2009. According to a press release from the university, the athletics department will honor Davidson at halftime of the final home men’s basketball game on Saturday, Feb. 25.

This brief was filed from the boardroom of the Fleming administration building on UM’s central campus, where the regents’ meeting is held. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

John U. Bacon

The rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State in football is one of the best in the country. But it obscures the fact that, in just about every other sport, Michigan’s main rival is Michigan State.

In men’s basketball, there’s no team either school would rather beat than the other. The problem is, for a rivalry to really catch on, both sides need to be at the top of their game. Think of Bo versus Woody, Borg-McEnroe and, of course, Ali-Frazier, which required three death-defying fights just to determine that one of them might have been slightly better than the other.

The Michigan-Michigan State basketball rivalry, in contrast, usually consists of at least one lightweight. When Michigan got to the NCAA final in 1976, Michigan State had not been to the tournament in 17 years.

When Michigan State won the NCAA title in 1979, Michigan finished in the bottom half of the Big Ten.

When Michigan won back-to-back Big Ten titles in 1985 and ‘86, State wasn’t close. And when State rolled up four straight Big Ten titles under Tom Izzo, Michigan was headed for probation, and yet another coach.

Around that time, Izzo told me there was no reason, given the basketball talent in this state, that this rivalry could not be every bit as good as Duke and North Carolina. But for more than a decade, it was anything but. Izzo owned Michigan, winning 18 of 21 games through 2010.

But Michigan managed to sweep State last year for the first time in 13 years. And on Tuesday night, for only the fifth time in the rivalry’s long history, Michigan and Michigan State both entered their contest ranked in the top 20.

This was it. The rivalry finally looked like a rivalry.

The stage had improved, too. Crisler Arena used to be too dark and too warm, with seats that were too soft and students scattered high among the gold seats, with a jazz band, for some reason, playing standards more suited to a smoky night club than a basketball arena. Crisler was set up not for an intense basketball game, but a Saturday matinee – or a nap.

But the place has been redone. They added lights, then tore out a section of cushy seats and replaced them with wooden benches nobody wants to sit in, and put the students there – who stand the entire game anyway. They’ve reserved the endzone for the pep band, which plays – here’s a novel idea – band music. Now the place actually gives an advantage to the home team.

But none of the improved “atmospherics” could change the fact that the Wolverines hadn’t beaten a top 10 Spartan team since a guy named Magic Johnson played for the green and white. Yes, that’s 1979.

Tuesday’s game actually lived up to its billing, with the battle raging for the full 40 minutes. Michigan built an 11-point lead, State erased it, then it was back-and-forth the rest of the way. With just 36 seconds left, the Wolverines took a one-point lead. But with just one shot, State could take the game.

The arena was electric – something it had not been for decades. With just three seconds left, State’s Draymond Green drove to the basket, jumped up, and fired. The ball hit the backboard, then the rim – and out. They got the rebound, put it back up – and missed. The ball landed into the hands of Tim Hardaway, Jr., who launched it into the air to start the celebration.

To be sure, it was a big victory for the Wolverines.

But it could be bigger than that: the start of a truly great rivalry.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

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John U. Bacon

The past two Sundays, ESPN has been running a documentary called “The Fab Five,” about Michigan’s famed five freshman basketball players who captured the public’s imagination twenty years ago. It’s not quite journalism – four of the Fab Five produced it themselves – but it is a pretty honest account of what those two years were all about. And it is undeniably compelling. The first showing reached over two million homes, making it the highest rated documentary in ESPN’s history.

A lot of this story, you already know: In 1991, five super-talented freshmen came to Michigan, and by mid-season the Wolverines were the first team in NCAA history to start five freshmen. They got to the final game of March Madness before losing to the defending national champion Duke Blue Devils. The next year, they made it to the finals again, but this time they lost to North Carolina when Michigan’s best player, Chris Webber, called a time-out they didn’t have.

Along the way they made baggy shorts and black socks fashionable, and imported rap music and trash talk from the inner-city playgrounds to the college courts. It’s been that way ever since.

They stirred up a lot of controversy, but at the time the two most sympathetic figures were head coach Steve Fisher, a truly nice guy who seemed to be a hapless victim of his own recruiting success, and Chris Webber, the most polished of the bunch, due partly to his private school background. To many fans, the rest of the Fab Five were just a bunch of clueless, classless clowns who didn’t belong on a college campus.

The Fab Five certainly had its vices, but selfishness wasn’t one of them. In the history of college basketball, few starting fives worked better together than the Fab Five, mainly because they really didn’t care who scored.

I started writing stories about them after they left Michigan, and quickly discovered they’d known all along what they were doing, and did a lot of it merely to gain a competitive advantage. That doesn’t make all of it right, of course, but it dispels the popular notion they were just a bunch of out-of-control kids from the ‘hood simply seeking attention. They weren’t that needy, and they definitely were not stupid.

I found the ones I spoke to – Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard and Jimmy King – to be unfailingly friendly, respectful and helpful. At one point, three of the Fab Five were listed among the NBA’s top five charitable givers.

It also turned out Steve Fisher really could coach – witness the masterpiece over Kentucky in the 1993 NCAA semi-finals – and he wasn’t a victim, either. I learned the latter on a cold Sunday morning in 1996 – a year after the last of the Fab Five had left – when my editor called me to find Maurice Taylor’s Ford Explorer that had rolled over on M-14, near Plymouth.

After I tracked down the truck, a car dealer told me it cost about $35,000. The Secretary of State told me Taylor’s grandmother bought it, and the records showed the car cost twice as much as her home. Within 24 hours, we found several other Michigan players were driving cars they probably couldn’t afford, either. It didn’t take much to smell something fishy.

The investigation that started that day resulted in two coaches fired, two banners brought down, and the entire program put on probation for years.

But I had to wonder: If the press could figure all this out in about 24 hours, why couldn’t Steve Fisher connect the dots right under his nose over several years? They say he wasn’t part of the payola plan, and that’s probably true. But you’d have to be willfully blind not to see its effects by 1996.

When Fisher was fired, he said they’d built an elite program and “done it the right way.” That’s not true – and by the time he was fired, he knew it. To this day, Fisher has never accepted any responsibility for what happened on his watch, and Chris Webber has never apologized for taking over a quarter-million dollars from a booster. Fisher now coaches San Diego State, which played in the Sweet Sixteen last night, while Webber is a very wealthy TV commentator. Those who followed them at Michigan paid the price for their mistakes.

Twenty years ago, I thought the leaders of the Fab Five were Steve Fisher and Chris Webber. But it turns out the real leader was Jalen Rose, who finished his degree by writing term papers in the back of NBA team planes. He and the other three have proven to be thoughtful, successful and even honest men, committed to their communities and their families. I’ve come to have great respect for them – and much less for their so-called leaders.

What a difference 20 years makes.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009.

John U. Bacon

Fennville, Michigan – On Monday, I drove across Michigan to see a Class C regional semi-final basketball game, pitting tiny Schoolcraft High School against even tinier Fennville.

Both schools were undefeated – but that’s not why I was going. I was going to see the impact of a young man who would not be there.

Before I drove back, I also learned how quickly even a record-breaking basketball game can become utterly insignificant – and then, just a few days later, how the next game can matter so much.

Fennville is about 200 miles from Detroit, but it might as well be 200 light years. When you approach Fennville, you pass a sign declaring, “Hometown of Richard ‘Richie’ Jordan, Member of the 2001 National High School Sports Hall of Fame.”

You haven’t heard of Richie Jordan, who graduated almost 50 years ago and stands only 5-7. But everyone around here has, and down at the Blue Goose Café, they still talk about all the records he set in football, basketball and baseball. But the last few years, they’ve been talking about Wes Leonard.

When Gary Leonard joined his brother’s company in Holland, near Lake Michigan, the family could have moved to any number of nearby towns, but chose little Fennville, which has just 1,500-some people, a third of them high school students. Here, the whole town comes out for football and basketball games – and musicals and graduations, too.

“I left Fennville for another place,” English teacher Melissa Hoover recalled in the teachers’ lounge, “and I kept saying, ‘In Fennville they do this,’ and ‘In Fennville they do that.’ Finally, one of the teachers said, ‘Well, maybe you should go back to Fennville.’ She was right. So I did.”

The Leonards loved Fennville, and Fennville loved them back.

Their oldest son, Wes, often asked his teachers about their weekends, partly to avoid work but also because he was simply curious about people – all people.

Leonard would invite the special-ed kids to join him for lunch, and soon the other jocks were doing it, too. When English teacher Susan McEntyre read her students’ journals last semester, “Just about all the kids wrote that Wes was their best friend. They always wrote about that.”

No matter what you were like in high school, you’d want Wes Leonard to be your friend. And he would be.

As an athlete, Leonard was the best thing to come out of Fennville since Richie Jordan himself – something people around here don’t say lightly. Leonard was the team’s star quarterback – he threw seven touchdowns in one game this past fall – but it was on the basketball court where the junior center really connected with the fans. Sitting so close, they could feel his energy and drive and passion – and see his trademark grin.

But even with Leonard leading the team, no one dared to imagine they’d enter their last regular season game with a perfect 19-0 mark.

When the Bridgman Bees jumped out to an 11-point half-time lead, Leonard took over, pushing the game to overtime. Then, with about 30 seconds left, he drove the lane for a pretty lay-up – and the win. Fennville’s fans rushed the court, and hoisted their hero onto their shoulders.

It was the kind of ending that sends announcers into paroxysms of hyperbole: Incredible! Unbelievable! Unthinkable!

Then, just seconds later, the truly unthinkable actually happened: Wes Leonard’s enlarged heart gave out, and he collapsed, right on the court.

His father ran down to him, yelling, “Breathe, Wes, breathe! Don’t die on me!” The paramedics loaded Leonard into an ambulance, where they worked to get his heart pumping again. Gary and Jocelyn could only look through the back window, helpless.

Before midnight, the town pastor emerged from the hospital to tell the crowd Wes Leonard had died.

When a small town hero fulfills his fans’ every dream, they put up signs about him on the city limits. What happens to that town when its hero falls right in front of them?

The next day the grade school kids clutched teddy bears, and cried in the corner. Wes’s classmates hugged and sobbed in the hallways. The older townspeople gathered at the Blue Goose, talking about him softly, with tears in their eyes.

“If I was twice as good as everyone else, I’d be arrogant,” said Mike Peel, 57, a real estate agent in nearby Douglas. “But he never was. Never even argued bad calls. He was the kind of kid who could hug his mom in front of a thousand people and not feel embarrassed about it.”

Letters and posters came from as far away as the Philippines and Cambodia. The NBA’s Golden State Warriors asked what they could do to help, Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo cut practice short to drive to Fennville to talk to the family and the team, and Bo Kimble, whose Loyola Marymount teammate Hank Gathers died on the court from the same condition in 1990, drove all night from Philadelphia to be with them for four days, arriving as a famous stranger and leaving as a close friend. The Blackhawks’ arch-rivals in Saugatuck hosted the luncheon after the funeral.

The coach had to ask his players if they wanted to play their first-round playoff game that Monday. They thought about it. They discussed it. Then they decided, Yes. This is what we do.

They moved the games to Hope College, where the Blackhawks drew over 3,000 fans each night. When the other teams playing that day took the court, they were all wearing the same black T-shirts that Fennville wore, with Leonard’s name and number on the back, and “NEVER FORGOTTEN” on the front.

They struggled in their first game, caught fire in their second, then came back in the district finals Friday night from nine points down to win by three. “If you weren’t there,” Mike Peel said, “you wouldn’t believe it.”

This Monday, when Fennville faced Schoolcraft, the Blackhawks finally ran out of gas and luck in the second half and lost, 86-62. But if you didn’t see the scoreboard, you’d have no idea Fennville was getting trounced. The players kept working just as hard, and the crowd kept cheering just as loud, to the very last second.

Harder days are ahead. They know that.

They also know people like Wes Leonard come along in a place like Fennville every 50 years or so, and they might not see another like him the rest of their lives. But the very qualities Wes Leonard brought out in them – pride, unity, and joy – are the very traits they’ll rely on to get them through.

The people of Fennville will never be the same.

But they will be okay.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009.