The Fab Five backlash

I guess I missed it.

I guess I was so caught up in a documentary so candid that it brought all its viewers back into the present day. As the NCAA championship plays on in real time, it's easy to see why people can relive the Duke-Michigan rivalry of the Fab Five, Grant Hill and Christian Laettner days in real time as well.

Misconstruing Jalen Rose' and Jimmie King's comments as real-time perceptions, well that's another thing.

Are we the media so caught up in drumming up controversy that we forget what we were taught in basic English language composition? When a person uses the words "felt," it represents the past tense of one's feelings. So, maybe I was just enamored by the reality of the documentary, which helped people like me who didn't watch the rivalry play out in real time, feel like we witnessed the events when they happened. Or maybe, I just understood that when Rose said he felt Grant Hill represented the Uncle Toms of the black community or when King said he felt like Hill was a "b**ch," they were expressing how they felt as the teenagers that they were at the time.

For Hill to hear these comments made by people he views as friends today, I can understand why he was compelled to write a passionate rebuttal in The New York Times. To hear how the symbol and strength of your parents marriage is partly the basis for a deep-rooted hatred for you is insulting. But even Hill acknowledged that he didn't feel that those were Rose' sentiments today. What he attempted to do was make a case for the value of blacks striving for a quality education from schools like Duke and Yale; (I imagine) just in case there are still members of the black community who still harbor similar sentiments to Rose today. But his rebuttal mostly succeeded in giving the media ample ammunition to fire up the grill. Too bad Rose is the one being roasted.

The controversy has become the leading subject of discussion on many sports talk shows, forcing Rose to have to clarify that his comments represented the ideologies of an angry kid who grew up without a father and was unfairly judged as a product of his environment. It's forced both Rose and King to issue apologies to Hill, who they both expressed admiration and respect for in the documentary, and to the Duke organization.

But I don't understand why Rose and King should harbor the blame caused by decisions made by some members of the media to forget what one of the fundamental rules of the English language demands: that you regard verbs or words expressed in the past tense as an issue of the past.