NBA Sunday: Rose Doesn’t Care About Money
Not About the Money For Rose
Derrick Rose’s older brother Reggie, easily his best friend in the world, knows the Chicago Bulls’ MVP point guard is suffering during this lockout, and probably more so than a lot of the other players waiting for the 2011-2012 season to begin. Despite the fact that D-Rose is still on his rookie contract, it has absolutely nothing to do with missing paychecks.
“He dreams, sleeps, and he’ll die for basketball,” Reggie Rose told ESPNChicago.com’s Jon Greenburg. “A lot of these guys are just worried about the financial part of it. He wants to get on the court and play.”
It’s just the way Rose is. To him, NBA basketball is just about basketball, and the fact that it’s spilled beyond that into the realms of income percentage splits and salary cap super-taxes is more than a little bit of a buzzkill—for him and everyone else.
“The biggest thing is you just want to get back out there and play,” he said. “It’s going to hurt us, but I think it’s going to hurt basketball, period. Where we had a great year last year, and for us not to have a season this year, or taking this long to come up with a deal, I think that’s wrong.”
It’s an extremely simple way to say that the Chicago Bulls will be one of the teams most heavily impacted by the loss of a season. The ’11-’12 campaign would mark the beginning of the fourteenth season since Michael Jordan retired, and it was only just last year that the team finally started to look like a championship contender.
Taking a year away from a burgeoning talent like Rose could potentially re-write history. What, for example, would Jordan’s career have looked like had been locked out his entire fourth year in the NBA? Would Chicago’s jump to champions in 1991 have been delayed by another year or two or three?
“It’s sad. It’s very sad,” Rose said. “Everybody knows it’s not our fault. It’s definitely not our fault. If it were up to us, we’d be out there playing. But I think that it’s wrong. I know [the owners] can easily take care of it and not take advantage of people. But I guess that’s how people are.”
He added, “They (the owners) are not thinking about anything we’re saying. They’re not taking it into consideration, nothing that we’re trying to give them. We’ll just have to see how it goes.”
In the meantime, Rose isn’t exactly putting himself out in public on a regular basis. While players like Kevin Durant and LeBron James have made plenty of headlines with their summer-long pickup circuit, and Kobe Bryant and Deron Williams have stirred up buzz with talk of playing overseas, Rose has been quiet, focusing on training in L.A. and more or less steering clear of pickup games.
He has done and will continue to do some charity events, and of course there are promotional things he’ll need to do for adidas (which was the reason he was out and talking this past weekend), but when he can avoid all the extra attention, he will.
“You know I don’t like All-Star Games,” he said. “I don’t like pickup games. I think that’s when people look at your game and I just don’t like it, to tell you the truth.”
He’s the youngest MVP in the history of the league, and his perceived innocence and humble nature are huge reasons why he’s such a beloved character in the city of the Chicago. Still, residents of the Windy City would rather see him out there fighting for a championship than hear from him once every several weeks about how his training is going.
For the most part, sports fans will be quelled by college and pro football for the next few months, so basketball might not be missed by casual fans quite so much until we roll over to 2012. But Chicago doesn’t have a college football powerhouse, and the Bears aren’t looking like Super Bowl contenders themselves.
No, Chicago needs the Bulls, and the Bulls need Derrick Rose. Count that as reason number 1,592 that the lockout needs to end as fast as humanly possible.
Jerry West Set to Release Autobiography October 19
While we wait for wait for those mediator meetings next week to bear fruit (or not), one of the most iconic players in the history of the game will be putting out a biography that reportedly includes quite a bit of shocking details from the life of L.A. Laker great Jerry West.
“Frankly, I was sick and tired of reading things about me that weren’t even close to being true,” said West, whose autobiography “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life,” will hit stores this Wednesday, October 19th.
“I think,” West added, “it’s very important for people to know I’m not what they see or read.”
Despite his public persona over the course of the last fifty-plus years, West has remained a relatively private figure. His family didn’t want him to write the book, which controversially discusses West’s bout with depression and the physical abuse he experienced as a child at the hands of his father.
At the age of 73, West still isn’t over it.
“Self-esteem is something I still battle. People look at me and say you’ve got fame, you’ve got admiration, you’ve done this, you’ve done that. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t done anything. I’ve just fulfilled a dream of competing. I could be special in some ways. Even though I felt at times, ‘My goodness, you’re among the upper echelon,’ there is still a huge void there. A huge void. It is about self-esteem. That’s a thing that has always been a real complex part of my life.”
He added, “I see people that have success and I see how poised and polished they are and how they handle it. I wonder inside if they feel the same way that I feel.”
The book isn’t just about West’s life outside of basketball, however. After the man’s troubled childhood came a Hall of Fame playing career and a pretty darn good one as an exec, too. West even talks about his silhouette being used for the now-famous NBA logo, something he discussed further in an interview with Grantland’s Jonathan Abrams:
“I knew a long time ago, and they would always say it’s an urban myth. It wasn’t, and I knew it wasn’t. It’s not important. It’s not important. Some people say, ‘Oh, what an honor.’ Anytime somebody recognizes you, it makes you feel good. It’s not honoring a person. That’s not what it’s doing. It’s promoting an image of the league, which is always important to me.”
What matters now is his job with the Golden State Warriors, which opens up a new (and probably the last) chapter in the story about his basketball career. It’s been about as storied a career as one could have, and if anybody were going to write a worthwhile book about what he’s learned from a life of basketball, it’d be Jerry West.
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