John Bacon’s Blog is required reading each week & he recently posted a few thoughts on the Fab Five documentary and the legacy of the controversial quintet. Bacon broke the M-14 roll-over story a decade and a half ago (which sparked the investigation) and he ties that story to Fisher’s culpability: 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, which was true, and they’d “done it the right way,” which wasn’t – and by the time he was fired, he had to know it. Bacon added this: 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. There’s always interesting commentary on his site & Bacon usually joins in to respond. This time Bacs’ post elicited a comment Steve Fishman, the man who represented Webber in the federal criminal investigation: …there is one thing in the story that still…
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Red Berenson Ain’t Riding | Michigan Hockey’s Cold Night in the Soo
With Lake Superior State in town this weekend I thought I’d share some audio from my interview last fall with former Michigan hockey player and coach Dave Shand. This was published in the third segment of the interview, which was conducted over drinks at the great Mac’s Acadian restaurant in downtown Saline. I just made a comment about how Rich Rod hates to lose and this prompts Shand to go into a story about the night they lost 10-5 to Lake Superior State up in Sault Ste Marie in November 1990. Amazing story: MVictors: Sticking on the topic of coaches, we still don’t know a whole lot about Rodriguez but we know he really doesn’t like to lose. I think he cited it as a reason he didn’t want to film Michigan Replay after games (in case they lost). Shand: You haven’t seen fuckin’ Red after a loss. There’s actually a story in John Bacon’s book Blue Ice. We’re up in Sault Ste Marie, and we’re playing Lake [Superior] State. I think the previous 27 times we’d played them we beat them twice. This was 90-91. Lake State was defending national champions. They were big, physical and they’d bang the shit out of you, especially in their own building. I think we lost 10-5. It’s just Red and I up…