The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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WHERE ARE THEY NOW? acknowledged. "I have my degree, and I still had a 13-year NBA career. I feel blessed and pleased about that." Long before embarking upon seven seasons with the Los Angeles Clippers, followed by stops in New York, Miami and Portland, Grant came up a prep superstar at Canton (Ohio) McKinley High School. Even back in the early 1980s, high school athletic heroes drew plenty of atten- tion, and folks knew Grant appeared to be saddling up for a long, success- ful basketball career. So they took Grant, along with a teammate dubbed "Smooth," and put them together in a photo shoot leading to a nickname that stands more than three decades later. "One day they put me on a horse, and had him stand right next to the horse while I was sitting on it," Grant recalled with a laugh. "My last name is a war name, like Gen. Grant. They said 'A Smooth Ride For The Gen- eral.' It just stuck from there." Michigan head coach Bill Frieder wasn't afraid to thrust The General into battle upon his arrival in Ann Arbor, even with the Wolverines' abundance of talent. Grant imme- diately became part of a 26-4 crew captained by Leslie Rockymore and Butch Wade, one that surged to a 16-2 conference record and a Big Ten championship. Everyone considered Michigan's subsequent second-round ouster from the NCAA Tournament by Vil- lanova a monumental upset — at least until the Wildcats clawed on to a national championship. That com- bination — a sterling regular season and too-early NCAA exit — proved a foreshadowing. The following year, Grant and the Wolverines knocked off Georgia Tech at the Tip-Off Classic in Springfield, Mass., a highly anticipated matchup that helped U-M rise to No. 1 in the nation. The 49-44 score surprised many, but Michigan's stalwart soph- omore defender didn't mind. "We'd been fighting going into the season to see who was No. 1," Grant recalled. "They had Mark Price and Bruce Dalrymple, and we had An- toine Joubert and I, The Judge and The General. We beat them. It was a sloppy game, but we beat them to take No. 1 in the country. We ended up winning the Big Ten again that year. "That was the most impressive team we had. It was my second year in college, and I was better at know- ing the situations. Playing with Roy Tarpley, Butch Wade and those guys made my job a lot easier. Throughout that year, we just had a lot of fun." Michigan did indeed nail down back-to-back Big Ten championships for the first time in two decades. Grant and his teammates saw a big- ger title on the horizon, but a second- round ouster in the NCAA Midwest Regional in Minneapolis put those dreams on ice. Iowa State rose up to send the Wol- verines home, 72-69, in one that a number of participants from the U-M side still can't quite reconcile. "It seemed like we were overconfi- dent," Grant mused. "A lot of things