Derrick Rose means a lot of things to a lot of people. That statement is true for any MVP of the NBA, or any superstar in it, but for Rose it is especially so. The former Chicago Bulls point guard and current quixotic glory reclamation project for the New York Knicks has long stood, been injured at, played basketball within, and generally lived at an intersection of fame and basketball and culture all his own. Chief among the social hobgoblins chasing him everywhere is the weight of Chicago’s south side, where he grew up. Rose’s home neighborhood of Englewood is host to a poverty and violence so profound that it has shattered death and gun violence records almost every year since he entered the league, and he is one of the few famous people to emerge from this cauldron unscathed.
The amount of pathos Rose thus inspires has kept many stans at his side through the sordid year and a half he’s just had. Following the acrimonious 2015 ouster of Tom Thibodeau, a friend of Rose’s difficult to penetrate family and the man who once pushed him to league-destroying levels of offensive aggression, Rose made the news for gang rape accusations. The reports largely faded away after a few weeks, stalled within ever-bureaucratic legal halls until a year later when Rose had been traded to the Knicks, following a year with new Bulls coach Fred Hoiberg, which can only be described as ****. As his tenure with the Knicks began, the rape accusations re-emerged, with Rose missing action during training camp and preseason to attend a civil trial. His efforts to reconstruct his mythos, signified by his return to the No. 25 jersey he wore at Simeon Career Academy, would have to wait.
When Rose was acquitted, pictures of him smiling with jury members just outside the courtroom made for a less than complete sense of justice. But Rose, guilty or not, is from the part of America where justice is most made a joke, and many who thought his brief, Iversonian rise through basketball’s hierarchy brought any balance to the morals of the world was faced with how hollow so many of sporting’s cliches are in that moment, throughout his two missed seasons due to injury, and now again this week in which he decided to entirely skip a Knicks home game against the New Orleans Pelicans, and without first contacting the team. Rose’s explanation, in a press conference the following day, involved elliptical reference to family. Some reports said he “missed his son,” a former Riley Curry-like meme star, P.J. Rose.
Full disclosure: I have once kicked a soccer ball around with said meme star, and interviewed his father in the empty Adidas store where this happened. I also own a Derrick Rose action figure—now buried at the bottom of a box since the rape reports came out—and have worked in several Chicago schools where I’ve encountered daily a rhetoric of hate-as-agency that is, at its core, malnourished for love. None of my conversation with Rose or any of the second-hand contact with what lies on the south side gives me a laser through the forest of issues that surround the man, but it does make clear how detached much of basketball braintrust’s Rose storm is from the actual man, and from the emotional thread that still makes him so appealing to so many. Now a singular NBA pariah, unfathomably facing a summer in which he’ll have a hard time finding an eight-figure contract, Rose’s fall has never lost touch with his rugged individualist streak that could only be forged in the American nadir, in order to escape the American nadir.
The soul-inflating way Rose once furiously worked impossible scoring angles, borne from a fear and a following pride that most of us will never come close to knowing, was always going to break his fallible body, and it has repeatedly. What cannot be touched, whether NBA front offices give him money or not, is the inspiration he wrought from the nation’s most chaotic place. That, too, is detached from the perhaps bad human that he is. In a game of myths, Rose will continue to be discussed regardless of how he plays or behaves, because of how much fire he once set to our perceptions. Those who are especially upset with his alienation from team protocol and confusing behavior with the media—seen plenty of times before he went AWOL from the Knicks—are, with their expected snark and deference to regularity, holding onto norms that mean nothing to someone so familiar with the edges of mortality. Within the husk of Aspirational Derrick Rose, sapped of righteousness and likeability and world-class skill, is a product of a horrifying pressure cooker made by collective national action. Rose came out of this oven seemingly reversed from the ills it teaches; when he wasn’t, we turned on him instead of the unreal expectations that sports made him slave to, and the circumstances that hopeful tropes were supposed to save him from.
