Got to Give the People What They Want

by Jalen Rose

  I take pride in being socially and politically conscious. It all comes from the examples I had growing up. Uncle Paramore and Uncle Len, for starters. On top of the direct influence they had on keeping me straight, there was plenty else they did that made a mark. They suffered at their jobs, not getting promoted or getting the role they wanted because they were black, but they didn’t just take it. They found ways to make it better for the next guy. Uncle P. became a foreman at the Ford plant, and everyone who worked at that factory with him has a story about how Paramore helped someone out, stood up for someone, or saved someone’s job. Perry Watson continued that example, and so did Ed Martin.

  These people cared about where they came from, which is why for me starting a school made sense. There is no better way to try and help who’s coming up next in your community. We’re not just trying to sneak a few kids into college by raising their test scores. It’s called the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy for a reason—our goal is to train leaders for the next generation. Enter a learner, exit a leader—that’s our motto. And there’s a specialized curriculum and specialized training just for that. It all starts with the idea that there’s no cutting corners. There’s a rigorous college prep program and a continued focus on going to college. To accomplish all this, the kids are in school for eleven months a year, from 7:30 a.m. until after 4:00 p.m. Hiring teachers to work that long costs more money—and you need to find the best teachers for the jobs. We only have one sports team, too—you can guess the sport. And Curtis Hervey, my old AAU coach, runs our basketball program. So I know that team’s in good hands.

  Just like the kids, JRLA has got pretty much everything going against it. A lot of our kids don’t have Internet at home, and their parents don’t have e-mail addresses. We keep the kids off the streets until 4:00, but often their parents can’t pick them up until 5:30 or 6:30 because they can’t get off work. They aren’t ignoring their kids. They have no choice. Also, almost none of our ninth graders arrive reading and doing math at grade level. But that’s the age we decided to tackle—the age where you can lock kids in for college, which will lock them into all kinds of opportunities. We try to do everything we can to get these kids into college.

  If we were a school outside of the city, we’d get twice as much money per kid than we do. We get $7,700 per kid per year, as of right now—and just outside the city, they get more than $12,000. Plus, there are bigger charter networks in Detroit that are better funded and bigger causes—the University of Michigan, hospitals, whatever—that draw far more attention when people decide to open their checkbooks. Places like that routinely get six- and seven-figure gifts. For us, a five-figure gift is a huge deal.

  We’ve been fortunate to have some huge benefactors. Tom Gores—owner of the Pistons and founder of Platinum Equity—and his wife, Holly, have been huge. Chrysler Jeep stepped up, which was significant, considering my mom’s job there all those years ago. The Lear Corporation. And there have been NBA players and coaches and franchises who have contributed, Hall of Famers like my mentor Dave Bing, and Isiah and Lynn Thomas. Kobe even let me out of that hex from the Finals all those years ago and donated shoes to all the kids in the school. There are dozens of others who’ve stepped up as well, for the most basic things—carpet, paint, pens, pencils, paper, you name it.

  The goal for the school is to turn ourselves from a number sixteen seed to a midmajor. We probably won’t be the biggest powerhouse in the bracket, but we want to be a school that people know is going to be there, battle hard, and have the resources to do so.

  We’ll get there. Because I’m not going to accept anything else.

  —

  I FOUNDED a school because I determined it was the best way to help kids in my hometown in a significant, meaningful way. But I also think a lot about different struggles that young people from less fortunate backgrounds face all over the country. I joke on my podcast about champagning and campaigning and the gangsta life, but it’s important to confront the realities of what these kids from the inner cities are up against.

  Why do kids join gangs? The number one reason: They can’t move away from them. In my day, gangsters left nongangsters alone. Now, if you live in South Central Los Angeles, you probably don’t have the means to move anywhere else. So the gang is your block, and eventually you have to join them or get treated like the enemy. You have no option. Most people who live that lifestyle are not doing so because they want to; they have to.

  Being trapped in that environment shapes everything about you. Including how you present yourself. If you walk around with your pants low, showing your underwear, that influences how you will be viewed. When I did that, I sometimes used to think that my appearance made me tough. Like I was rough-and-tumble. Now I realize that all it means was that I had my pants down. “Saggin’ ” spelled backwards is not a way of life to aspire to.

  If you have a tattoo on your neck or your face, it will be noticed at a job interview. Regardless of what is right or wrong, beyond the sports world, the music world, and the entertainment world, people in power in corporate America have no interest in the hip-hop lifestyle or look. Studies say 65 percent of communication is nonverbal. Your wardrobe, your hygiene, and your presentation are a huge part of how you are perceived. And being a minority in everything puts you in a position where you sometimes need to conform to be accepted.

  Those are just facts. Facts surrounding a serious uphill climb for less fortunate people in our country, many of whom are black. It ain’t easy. But that’s never been a good excuse.

  —

  YOU CAN’T go back in time. Mistakes are what shape you, missteps are what you learn from, and misfires are what make you focus harder the next time. But there’s definitely one regret, one failure, that still haunts me almost every morning I get up, and almost every night when I go to sleep. It’s really the biggest reason that back in 2007, when I sat there at Jimmy Walker’s funeral, I was full of fear. It has nothing to do with basketball, and nothing to do with my job today.

  It’s that my kids live thousands of miles away from me, in another city, and that means I can’t be the dad that I want to be for them.

  Really, it haunts me to write that, because my own history is part of an epidemic in the NBA, in sports, and in African American culture. I came from the seed of a man who had, they say, thirteen kids by eleven women. I played with some teammates who had almost as many. I was in the middle of the lifestyle that fosters this kind of behavior, and this kind of consequence. But the idea that “lifestyle” forces players to father kids all over the place is a bunch of bull.

  Believe me, in my years in the NBA, I was familiar with the math that the late, great Wilt Chamberlain did to get the numbers he came up with. They were more accurate than you think. But in all my travels, in all the cities, I never made one mistake. I told you as a rookie, I used to have to go on jimmy hat runs for the vets? Well, I was always smart enough to pick up Magnums for myself as well, and I helped keep the good people at Trojan in business, and then some, throughout my career. It’s total bull when you hear a guy say that a girl tricked him, or took advantage of him. Everyone—and certainly every NBA player—knows exactly what’s up, and where and when everything is going to finish. Which means it’s the player’s fault when a pregnancy happens by accident, and a child comes into the world who isn’t going to grow up with a father around.

  I tried to do everything I could to avoid that scenario. But the fact is that two things I never wanted—to have kids and not be married, and to live in another city than my kids do—are my reality. My older daughter was born right after we went to the Finals in Indiana—just as I was preparing to settle there for the long term with my long-term girlfriend. I bought a big house for us and our family. But then things went south between us, and we broke up. Since we weren’t married, when my girlfriend took our daughter with her out of town, the law left me no options. And so less than a year after my daughter was born, I had exactly what I didn’t want: a child
living hundreds of miles away from me.

  When I got traded anyway, I decided never to buy another house in another city I played in ever again. Several years later, during a brief reconciliation with my ex, we had another daughter. That’s left me with the best two blessings in my life living as sisters with their mom. I parachute in monthly (definitely not enough during the season, and still not enough in the off-season) to go to games and concerts, to carpool, and to participate in other school events as they grow up way too quickly. I try to make it as normal as possible. It’s not the kind of father I want to be, but I do know that I do everything I can to be as good of a dad as I can under the circumstances. Still, all in all, it sucks to be an out-of-town dad.

  It’s interesting to have debates about this issue with people who don’t come from places where absentee dads are common. When the topic of pro athletes having kids out of wedlock and out of one-night stands comes up, they make the point that a player who has tens of millions of dollars in the bank can support a kid, no problem. Well, I’d like to remind you that I’m evidence that it’s not always no problem. If not for men like Sam Washington and Perry Watson, I’d just be a tall black guy now living in Detroit insisting to everyone that I could have been a star. Fathers who aren’t with mothers disappear. And their checks disappear as well. Yeah, it’s a little different now in a world with the Internet and social media, but when a kid grows up, the first thing he or she realizes is when a parent doesn’t want them. That’s damaging, no matter if the money is there or not.

  I’ve tried to do as much as I could with my own imperfect predicament. It’s not always easy to coparent with someone you are not married to, but together, we do our best to work through it. My ex is a great mom, and ultimately, my most important goal is that my daughters have a better life than I did, and they get in a position to fulfill all their hopes and dreams. They live in a gated community, they go to an amazing private school, and they are going to have a great shot at a successful life doing whatever they want to do. I hope my girls know that even though their mom and I aren’t married, I will always do the right thing. And that includes supporting their brother. You see, the mother of my daughters already had a son when we met. And, go figure, the boy’s father was a professional athlete from Michigan who’d disappeared from the picture after the two of them broke up. If you’re a sports fan of a certain age, you’ll remember him—former NFL wide receiver Andre Rison. I normally don’t call people out like this, but in this situation, I have no hesitations, if only to shine a spotlight on what his son has done with his life. He is now in his early twenties, and after going to Holy Cross on a full scholarship, he got a graduate degree in economics at Imperial College London, and still works there. Though I was not there at his birth, I have considered him my son since the day I met him, and began supporting him. He’s a member of my family.

  Like Mos Def said, though, I ain’t no perfect man. Sixteen days a few summers ago definitely reminded me of that, and then some.

  —

  ASIDE FROM the crack house incident, and I guess the time in Beverly Hills when my car got shot at, if you googled me, you wouldn’t find anything negative. At least until a snowy night in Detroit in 2011—when I almost blew everything I’d built.

  The moral of the story is pretty simple: don’t drink and drive. That may sound simple and obvious, but read the sentence again—don’t drink and drive. That doesn’t mean don’t drive when you’re drunk—it means, if you’ve had one drink, don’t get behind the wheel of a car. It’s dumb—and also outdated. Driving after you’ve been drinking is like still having a SkyPager. You now have a plethora of choices. Wherever I am, I’m a car service’s best friend.

  But on that night, right around when the Fab Five documentary was coming out, I was driving home after a night out. On the icy road, a few miles from my house, I pulled out of a light, skidded across the road, and ended up in a ditch on the side of the road. A second later, a guy taps on my window to check on me. I was okay, but—as fate would have it—he was an undercover cop, and a minute later, there were sirens everywhere. Again, I didn’t feel drunk, but as I’d soon be reminded, that didn’t matter. The Breathalyzer said I was over the limit, and that meant there wasn’t going to be any fighting it.

  A few weeks later, I found out the judge who was hearing my case felt that, no matter who you are, if you drink and drive, you do time. Which led to me serving sixteen days in jail that summer (a twenty-day sentence…I got four days off for good behavior). And, look—since fortunately nobody got hurt or killed—that was a pretty light punishment for something so dumb.

  ESPN was great—they supported me, they listened to my side of it, and they didn’t fire me. And for two weeks in county jail, I did the only thing I could think to do: make the best of it. I got one of those jobs they give you, cleaning out cells and distributing food. I got to know some of the people serving time. Hopefully, hanging out with someone who they recognized, who like them had been humbled a bit, was good for them.

  Then, in a twist of fate I cannot explain, a familiar face was brought in to be my cellmate for the last few days of my sentence: Jimmy King. He’d fallen behind on his child support payments and had to do a short sentence. My old teammate—my brother—alongside me, there for each other at a tough moment for each of us.

  A reminder that none of us is perfect.

  A reminder that you’re going to mess up a few times here and there.

  And then you go back to the task of winning the game of life.

  —

  PAYING ATTENTION to trends has always been important to me. New acts in hip-hop. New styles in fashion. New stars coming up the ranks in basketball. That’s what I was doing a few years ago when I saw that Grantland was going to be the next big thing in sports media. I had been following Bill Simmons and reading his columns for a long time, and my ears perked up when he was able to get ESPN to give him his own website, Grantland.com.

  I enjoyed what I was doing—studio analysis on the NBA and occasionally college basketball—but I wanted to be doing more. Appreciate your position, but plan your promotion. I wanted to be talking about other sports. I wanted to contribute to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. But I wasn’t getting much traction on those fronts.

  Grantland was something different. And it was being established in Los Angeles, literally a ten-minute drive from where I live. So I monitored it a bit, got a sense of what was going on, and then, at the ESPY Awards that summer, made sure I was at the party where Bill was going to be, and I went up to him and talked to him—the first time we’d really met. I told him what a big fan I was, not just of his writing, but also his work on his podcast. And then I told him I wanted to pitch him ideas for his new site. I think if you asked him today, he’d admit that he gave me a look that said, Really? You want to pitch me ideas about the site? But I was serious, and I got his e-mail address, and I e-mailed him the very next day.

  When we got together a few weeks later, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: a podcast that would be like an old-school radio show, back-and-forth talking about sports, music, culture, anything and everything that was in the news. But I also knew I needed a partner. I had my eye on exactly the man I wanted: Bill’s producer and friend David Jacoby, who had been appearing on Bill’s podcast for years. Bill was a little skeptical, saying that Jacoby was busy and had his hands full with the launch of the site, but the two of us could talk about it and figure out if it was possible.

  Of course it was possible.

  Now our podcast gets hundreds of thousands of hits on iTunes and YouTube, and we’ve also expanded it with the NBA video pods I do with Bill before and during the season, which mesh well with my work on NBA Countdown and other shows on ESPN that I’m involved in. It all goes back to what I started with back in Detroit all those years ago: I’m competitive and want to be the best. And while TNT still gets a lot of the plaudits (and sure, they deserve them), those guys aren’t nearly as involved on as many platforms an
d as many forums as we are. And that’s not just the future—it’s the present. It could well be how you came to this book—after hearing or watching one of our podcasts. They’ve become my favorite thing to do in my media career. Yes, the network is the bigger audience, but the podcasts allow me to be myself in every way possible. And I feel like the audience recognizes that.

  It’s very simple—you’ve got to give the people what they want.

  —

  WHENEVER I see Steph Curry, I joke with him about the same thing. At some point within the next few seasons, he’s going to pass the 12,000-point mark, and a few weeks after that, he’s going to pass the only NBA record I hold. Well, I share it. Most points scored by a father and son in league history (with each player having at least 10,000 points—sorry, Kobe and Jellybean Bryant). I had 13,220, and Jimmy Walker had 11,655. (And don’t forget—Jimmy played before the three-point line was instituted.) Steph and his father, Dell Curry, already have passed the 20,000 mark, and obviously Steph is coming on strong. I know it’s just a footnote to everyone else, but for me, it’s a symbol of what I accomplished—and kind of the perfect summation of my feelings for my father. I wanted to be like him, but did so in spite of him. I always wanted him to know my name, and I was able to get our names connected in the best place possible: the record book. Today, I root for Providence, his alma mater. An old friend of mine, Mike Jackson, who I played against in eighth grade, is an assistant coach there.

  There are other small legacies I hold on to in basketball. Being one of the few six-foot-eight point guards to come through the league—an elite club that includes Magic Johnson, Steve Smith, and Penny Hardaway. I may not have been able to copy Steve’s hesitation dribble and keep that move alive—but I did emulate him by getting from Detroit to the league. And we root for big point guards like Shaun Livingston who are playing today. There’s also the legion of left-handed number 5s who’ve played in the NBA: Lamar Odom, Cuttino Mobley, Josh Smith—and a handful of others in college ball.