From GQ:
The Rose Revolution
At just 23, Derrick Rose already has an MVP award, a $95 million contract, and a direct line to the White House, home of his number one fan. He also has Chicago—the city where he was born and bred—convinced that it's witnessing the second coming of you-know-who
By Will Leitch
May 2012
Derrick Rose, the reigning NBA MVP, lives on the eighty-fourth floor of the Trump building in Chicago, one of the tallest buildings in the country, right up near the roof, with wall-length windows overlooking the city he rules, the only city he has ever known. The view is disorienting and all-encompassing, sort of like he's living on an observation deck of the Willis Tower, which happens to be right over there, one of the only points above us in the mess of verticals downtown.
Rose also has a home in Northbrook, by the Bulls' training complex, but he says he has that place mostly for convenience, so he doesn't have to drive back into the city after practice. Someday he'd like to have a house, "my real house," where he'll "have kids and just live in my spot." But he can't do that now, not even close. This condo, the one he just moved into about a month ago—it is almost entirely unfurnished; two of his bedrooms have no sheets on the beds and are filled with stacks of unopened boxes—this is his escape for now. Eighty-four stories up in the sky, secured away.
"I like living here," he says. "They just try to make you comfortable. The people here, they are mostly from out of town; they don't know who I am. That's why I picked this place." (It's easy to understand why one would enjoy working in this building, too. When Rose orders two bottled waters for us during our chat, he hands the bellhop two $50 bills.) Presidents talk about how the White House begins to feel like a prison. Rose speaks the same way about the town that adores him. "It gets on my nerves that I just can't go out," he says. "It's just boundaries now. People are like, 'You can't go here, you can't go there, you got to let that person know where you're going.' It's just weird. I'm never alone. Ever."
The afternoon I visit his condo is a rare one for Rose during this truncated, lockout-compressed NBA schedule: a day off. Last night he played his first game in almost two weeks, and in the locker room post-buzzer, everyone desperately wanted to pick his brain. Rose had missed the last five Bulls outings with back spasms, but he certainly didn't look to be too agonized, scoring twenty-three points and notching six assists in a breezy 90–79 victory over the Atlanta Hawks. In one memorable sequence, he sidewinded himself through several Hawks defenders, pulled the ball above his head, absorbed contact, and then spun it just so, kissing the backboard and splashing through. He fell hard to the floor, popped up, and sunk the free throw. The back was feeling better.
Postgame, there were probably three dozen media members laser-focused on Rose's locker, from WGN to the Chicago Tribune to someone whose credentials seemed to say "MARS." Before too long the crowd grew even more robust, at least five people deep in a semicircle around Rose's chair. With the mess of Fourth Estaters spreading farther and farther out to the middle of the room, the odds I'd hear a word Rose said were approaching zero. I strained, I jumped, I peered, but nothing.
Just then, a Bulls rep burst into the room. "He's not coming, you guys," he said. "He already left." The media horde did this collective shoulder sag and, like the ripple from a drop of water, dispersed randomly in all directions from Rose's locker. They'd been packed in so tightly in anticipation of his appearance that I'd had no idea he was not, in fact, at his locker. Derrick Rose is surrounded even when he isn't there.
Nick Friedell, the Bulls beat reporter for ESPN Chicago, walked toward me and looked as though he'd seen some mythical creature, maybe a chupacabra. "He has almost never done that since I started working this beat," he said. "I'm stunned." Friedell joined some of his regular colleagues, and the conversation turned to how Michael Jordan never pulled this, how he always made an appearance no matter what. Off to the side, reserve point guard John Lucas III, the unfortunate soul saddled with the locker next to Rose's, politely nudged his way through the morass and dropped his towel.
In his condo, I ask Rose why he blew off the media the night before. He sighs and forces a wan smile. He has been expecting this question, if not necessarily so soon. "It was just too much," he says. "I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't deal with it. There were so many people. I saw them there from the other room. And when I thought about having to go in there, I just couldn't work my way up to it." He pauses and takes a sip of water. His eyes go somewhere beyond my left ear. "There were so many of them. I hope they'll forget about it."
A little later, Rose shifts to thinking about the twenty-four hours he has entirely to himself. "This is gonna be the best day," he says, smiling widely. "Some friends may come over. I might get on the phone. That's it. It makes me superhappy to have this whole day to myself, to be a little selfish, to eat whatever I want, to not have anyone asking me to do things. When you get a chance to have a day like today, you have to take advantage of it." But after I leave, he plans to exploit this rare opportunity by going nowhere.
As the star of a top team in a league that markets individuals more than any other sport in America (a league that has long had a reputation of harboring the hardest-partying athletes in America), Rose bristles at the thought of going out. In one way, this is refreshing. He just wants to do his own thing. But the more I think about it—the more I hear Rose talk about how little he enjoys interacting with strangers, how desperately he misses being able to walk around unnoticed, how mournful he gets when the topic of "attention" is breached, how obviously uncomfortable he is even in basic social situations outside his immediate circle—it strikes me as unbearably sad.
It's another reason his one salvation is on a basketball court, where he can focus on winning and nothing else. ("He came packaged like that," his agent, BJ Armstrong, says. "That box was already packaged. That is who he is.") But even that's becoming a problem. Because the thing that Derrick Rose likes to do more than anything else in the world—winning basketball games—is making it more and more di∞cult to avoid the thing he dislikes more than anything in the world. "Don't get me wrong. I don't take anything for granted," he says. "But it seems like the better I play, the more attention I get. And I can't get away from it. You play great, you get attention. But I hate attention. It is weird. I'm in a bind. The more you win, the more they come."
···
Rose has gone from wide-eyed freshman at the University of Memphis to one of the most recognizable athletes in the world in the span of about four years. Only Jeremy Lin, who made a comparable journey in approximately ten days, can possibly eclipse that sort of rise to megafame, and even he's older than Rose. Last season, at 22, Rose became the youngest ever NBA MVP; he has played in three All-Star games in his first four seasons; he is the signature star and unquestioned leader of one of the best teams in the NBA.
And he is doing all this in the city where he was born, where he sprouted his first mustache, a place he has really only ever left for away games. Chicago has a proud, historic basketball tradition, from Isiah Thomas to Dwyane Wade to George Mikan. But none of those guys ever played for the Bulls. And none of them, not even Wade, are nearly as electrifying. Derrick Rose is as much a Chicago hero today as Barack Obama.
When you watch a Chicago Bulls game, your eyes immediately smash-cut to Rose, no matter what else is going on, no matter where the ball is. It's as if he's glowing. Rose has an extra, automatic step, a palpable pep that often creates the illusion that he has tiny pogo sticks in his shoes. (One suspects Adidas, which just signed Rose to a "lifetime" contract reportedly worth more than $200 million, would like it if I claimed that he does.) Rose can pass and shoot and rebound (despite standing "just" six-feet-three), but Derrick Rose is Derrick Rose because of the way he drives the lane.
Simply put, Rose does things in midair leaps to the basket that break physical laws of accepted human behavior. To watch those moves in real time is to not do them justice. Rose's brilliance is such that slow motion is required to understand what, exactly, is going on up there—the same way you need to change frame rate to comprehend fully how a gun fires a bullet or a hummingbird flaps its wings. Rose seems able to control every muscle of his body while in midair: He's able to move past, over, and sometimes under defenders, almost always drawing contact. And he still finishes the play; Rose spins the ball on layups as if he's bowling on ice. My favorite ever was a dunk over then Knick Danilo Gallinari last season in which Rose appeared to speed up three-quarters of the way to the rim; it looked like someone dropped him from the rafters. His ability to finish is such a leap in basketball evolution that it feels like a mutation.
"When we used to play in the park," he says, "there were no fouls, so that's why I shoot the crazy shots I do. Because I knew I was gonna get fouled, but I still got to make the shot."
Rose grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in the Englewood neighborhood, one of the most notoriously dangerous communities in the country. (In 1991, when Rose was 2 years old, Englewood suffered ninety-nine murders. It's also the childhood home of Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew were murdered there in 2008.) Rose is the youngest of four brothers raised by a single mother. His talent was apparent at once and, by a family in challenging circumstances, nurtured and harbored as if it were the only hope on earth. "The people who are there for me have always been there for me," he says.
The stories of how Rose's family—his mother, Brenda, and his three brothers, Dwayne, Reggie, and Allan—protected him and one another are part of the Rose Legend at this point. How drug dealers were often more afraid of Brenda than any rival gangs, how the three brothers made certain Derrick was never left alone with untoward outside influences, how they created their own AAU team for Derrick so they'd be able to monitor all his comings and goings. The family heavily influenced his choice of both high school and college, protecting Rose against hardship and failure to such a degree that it's suspected someone else took his SATs. (Based on this charge, the University of Memphis vacated all its wins in Rose's one season with the team.) You can make a strong argument that Rose has been under protection since the moment he picked up a basketball.
"I was the best kid in my neighborhood at a young age," he says. "My whole life. I was always the one everyone was talking about. I've never really wanted the attention, but it has always been there."
The way the story is generally told, this attention and shelter is what saved Derrick from suffering the same sad fate as many Chicago basketball prospects—from Ben Wilson (a top-tier high school recruit who was shot and killed in 1984) to Ronnie Fields (the Chicago Public League legend who suffered a serious car accident, lost his shot at a scholarship, and never made the NBA) to Jereme Richmond (the former Illinois forward who pleaded guilty to unlawful use of a weapon just this year). And yet for better or worse, Rose has essentially been walled off from the rest of the planet his entire life. He has always been the person around whom pieces have revolved, but he has never been the one actively commanding those pieces to move. It has turned him into a quiet person, the one guy in any room who's always listening. This has brought its own advantages.
"I have said his greatest asset, his greatest quality, is that he is a phenomenal, phenomenal listener," BJ Armstrong says. Armstrong, who played on three of those Jordan championship teams, is now one of Rose's closest mentors. "He listens. He is able to take information, decipher what is important, decipher what is not important, and gets to the crux, right to the heart of what is going on right there."
Rose calls this going into stealth mode. "I was always the kid who didn't say too much, and people didn't think I knew that much," he says. "But I always knew everything that was going on in the room and always knew my surroundings."
I suggest that this is the sort of skill that might benefit someone who plays his particular position. "Oh, for sure. Paying attention to detail, that's part of being a point guard."
Rose is in charge when he's on the basketball court, but not in the way Michael Jordan, or even Magic Johnson, was. Jordan was the alpha dog who willed his teammates into submission; Magic was the host of a perpetual party everyone desperately wanted to be invited to. Rose's game is that of the covert observer, the assessor, the one who sits back, takes stock of the situation, finds the holes to attack, and then pounces. His game is aggressive, but only in a reactive fashion; he waits for you to show him your hand. Every game he is reading the defense the way you might survey strangers at a party.
"I can read people very well just from watching the things you do, just by how people talk," he says. "I'm quiet, so I'll sit here and not say anything and watch you for a couple of minutes, and I can tell what you're about." I ask the question I think anyone would in this situation. "I'm not a dick, am I?"