Goalie masks evolve from the look of a fictional axe-wielding camp killer to high-tech artistry. Shoulder pads shrink. Baseball pants change length, get looser, then tighter again. Alternative uniforms multiply, some uglier than sin.
But no piece of apparel matters more to the American sporting public than a pair of basketball shorts. And no one deserves more credit for the peak of basketball shorts fashion — the baggy, billowy revolution of the early 1990s — than five Michigan freshmen who arrived in Ann Arbor in 1991.
The fact that there’s an argument, still raging after all these years, tells you what it means to people. And for those of us who were there, reacting in real time to a pre-internet trending wildfire, buying up oversized shorts, black socks and black shoes and flooding parks and gyms with them, it’s about the Fab Five. No question.
Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson, Jimmy King, Jalen Rose and Chris Webber. No history lesson needed. Here’s one anyway.
For decades, pro and college basketball shorts were short. Too short. Uncomfortably short. From the outside looking in, at least. Daisy Duke and John Stockton had the same sensibility, one in denim and one in polyester.
“Before the Fab Five, dudes was wearing panties out there,” Ice Cube said in “The Fab Five,” a 2011 ESPN documentary.
That’s not exactly true. Michael Jordan started the trend toward a roomier inseam in the late 1980s because he liked to wear his North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls shorts for good luck. Or because he wanted something to grab when he was catching his breath.
Or, as Nike shoe designer Peter Moore told HoopsHype, Jordan said, “I’ve got skinny legs,” and was self-conscious about it. Regardless of the reason(s), the difference was noticeable. The change was mimicked. A men’s college basketball team two hours southwest of Chicago did so to some acclaim during the 1988-89 season.
That would be Lou Henson’s “Flyin’ Illini” team, one of the best to fall short of winning it all. The Illini actually lost to Glen Rice and Michigan in the 1989 Final Four wearing shorts that were longer and looser than the norm, though still cut above the knee.
When “The Fab Five” was released in 2011, some of those guys protested.
“That was Kendall Gill that started that, that wasn’t Jalen Rose,” Stephen Bardo said on a Chicago radio show about one of his fellow stars on that Illinois team.
“Yeah, he’s telling the absolute truth,” Gill said on the same show. “And I can tell you they probably won’t admit (it), but Juwan and Chris Webber would come up to us, myself, Nick Anderson, Steve Bardo, when they would see us when they got into the (NBA), and they would say, ‘You know what? We wore our shorts long because you guys did it, the Flyin’ Illini.’ They bit off of us. They did.”
First, UNLV took it to another level — as one of its stars, Larry Johnson, pointed out emphatically on the “Knuckleheads” podcast with Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles in 2021. If you watch the 1989-90 team’s championship game win over Duke, and its stunning 1991 Final Four loss to Duke, you see a difference.
The UNLV shorts were considerably longer in the second meeting, quite a contrast with the length of Duke’s shorts. This was especially true for Johnson and Anderson Hunt. That’s Anderson Hunt, alum of Detroit Southwestern High, same as Jalen Rose. He was a mentor to Rose and gifted him some of those baggy UNLV shorts.
“Of course we saw it from Vegas and our big brothers, Larry Johnson and all those guys,” Ray Jackson told The Athletic. “I hate to give Illinois credit, but yes, Kendall Gill, that team, they were wearing the shorts a little bit longer, just like UNLV. But it didn’t get all the way there until the Fab Five.”
And that’s really the point. Others may have started the trend. But the Fab Five finished the job. The Fab Five made it “a thing,” all participating in a look that forced people to pay attention.
At the risk of equating apparel choices with the making of life-changing music, many bands were toying with rock and roll before the Beatles came along, too. (Also known as “The Fab Four,” for those who need a history lesson.)
These guys saw Jordan and Illinois and UNLV when they were in high school. Rose, also self-conscious about skinny legs, actually wore two pairs of shorts, which meant the outer one had to be awfully large. Jackson, like a lot of kids at the time, liked to hoop in cutoff sweats. Also, like a lot of kids at the time, he got into baggy Umbro soccer shorts.
The Michigan origin story involves Rose asking reserve big man Chip Armer in the fall of 1991 if he could trade shorts with him. Sure, Armer said, it’s not like my sweats are coming off during the game anyway. Soon, the Wolverines asked coach Steve Fisher if they could go baggier across the board, and he agreed.
But the iconic ensemble didn’t fully come together until the following fall, after the Wolverines’ surprise run to the title game and loss to Duke as freshmen. It wouldn’t have happened without Jackson’s desire to leave the program.
Dissatisfied with the same role as a sophomore — guard the other team’s best player, find shots as they come in transition — he wanted out. The preseason No. 1 Wolverines opened the season at Rice, in Houston, not far from Jackson’s hometown of Austin.
“I was trying to get left in Texas, trying to get kicked off the team,” Jackson said. “Back then, rewind, there’s no portal, players didn’t have the power they have today, and breaking a dress code was absurd, unheard of. So I was gonna play in some black socks as a form of protest.”
One problem: When one of Jackson’s friends brought black Nike socks to him at the hotel, Rose and King saw them, loved them and insisted the entire quintet go with them.
“I’m like, ‘Nah, man, the point is I’m trying to get out of here,’” Jackson said.
Too late — and, perhaps, by design. Rose went to the mall, but pickings were slim. He ended up having to wear dress socks. All five of them had some form of black socks on for the game. They kept it from the rest of the team — getting taped at the hotel, then showing up to the bus in warmup pants, which they normally didn’t wear to games.
It wasn’t until introductions that Fisher realized what they had done. During an early timeout, with Rice on a run, he laid into his team and, in particular, his five sophomores for pulling the sock stunt.
“I mean, he cussed us out,” Jackson said. “He turned so red, bro, I couldn’t stop laughing.”
The Wolverines pulled it together for a 75-71 win, the start of a season that would end with a championship game loss to North Carolina. To Jackson’s chagrin, the stunt did not get him booted from the team. His father talked him into sticking it out and staying anyway.
Fisher insisted only that the entire team be included in the latest daring fashion statement. Within days, Nike was flooding the Michigan program with black shoes and socks. The shorts were baggier than basketball shorts had ever been.
In the years that followed, they got to looking like parachutes on some players until Jordan’s GOAT rival, LeBron James, started popularizing shorter shorts and tighter jerseys in the mid-2010s.
Shorter, but not too short. Fashion is cyclical, but there are casualties. Daisy Duke basketball shorts, like plaid bellbottoms, are most useful in old photos as comic relief. For most people.
“I actually prefer the way we looked and the way we performed in those little hot pants that we used to wear,” Magic Johnson told Variety in 2022.
The Michigan look of 1992 remains one of the coolest and most impactful in sports history. It was an embrace of hip hop culture and individualism, and a rejection of conformity. It reached all who picked up a ball. It was preceded by expanding shorts, but the Fab Five completed it with socks, shoes, shaved heads and all-maize uniforms.
“The big thing is, we were in unison; it was a movement,” Jackson said. “It was a whole culture of change. Before that, did you ever see a team come out with a uniform with a totally different color? Who started that?”
Maybe we’re still not giving them enough credit.
