by Derrick Rose
That’s also what I love about my family. They’re not into the things I’m into. I’m into materialistic things even though I don’t look like it a lot. I can’t help that. My family ain’t into none of that. I’m into clothes. I want the $150 shirt, but not them. That’s why I love just being around them, because when you’re around that NBA circus all the time, you can get caught in that matrix and think that’s how life really is.
I am into fashion even though I don’t wear the clothes a lot. I’m a hoarder. I get a collection, like a brand collection, but I just keep it. So like, get it and wear it, but then keep it for years, just look at it. Then I love when I wear those old clothes years later and another dude who is into fashion will be like, “Damn, you kept that that long?” I love when people notice that.
I love my stuff to be basic, too. My stuff don’t say Gucci on the back. I want my stuff to be kind of hidden. My style? I love the laid-back look, but I can be flashy sometimes. I don’t dress like Russell Westbrook, but I’ll wear a simple outfit where the shoes will be loud. I let the shoes do all the talking. Shoes will be bright or match with the shirt. Or the shirt will be loud and the bottom will be quiet. Simple jeans, simple shoes, but the shirt is talking. Outfits like that. It’s how I show my personality. Quiet, but not really. Also depends how I feel, how the day is going. Happy, bright, loud, spending time with my kids. If it’s dark, what’s the point of putting on certain clothes? I’ve got suits. Just got nine new suits. I wear my suits to my bank meetings.
Clothes are the only thing I really like to spend on. NBA guys have money. I know guys who would spend $150,000 on a watch and a chain. I might spend that, but more like on the trip I took in summer 2018 with my family, about a dozen of us to New York for a J. Cole concert. I love seeing that talent—it’s empowering and inspiring for me, shows the hours he put into his craft. Have to respect that. But also when I do something for myself with the money, it’s more like that, the experience everybody gets. That makes me feel good. We can all talk about this later on down the line and reminisce, like we’ve done with other concerts we went to. We had a blast at the concerts. We enjoy it. It’s priceless times—you can’t buy that.
There’s nothing wrong with buying the watch or chain. Don’t get me wrong. Everybody’s got they own poison. I’d rather keep that money than spend it if I’m an average Joe. I’ve saved a lot. Worked hard enough, so I can do it sometimes. I don’t really have extravagances, other than the clothes. I do have a collection with Adidas with a brand. Later on down the line I want to put out a brand with women’s clothes, like Stella McCartney. Most of the people I go with overseas to China are women. But I can’t love fashion over hoopin’ right now. Hoopin’ is number one now. I’ve gotta give it my all because of my kids.
* * *
I never wanted to embarrass my mom, so I hated it when a picture came out from Memphis when I was with the Bulls, that I was flashing a Gangster Disciples gang sign. I wasn’t actually making a gang sign, but that’s the way it looked.
I love kids and believe it’s the youth who drive the world. I want to be on the right side of that, one of the models. They’re gonna see bullshit. They notice it right away. They’re gonna tell you the truth. And my thing is always to lead by example. Which is why the gang sign thing was all wrong, but really, that wasn’t what it was about.
I was doing that to say, “Hey, we’re number one in Memphis.” Me throwing up that sign was me saying, “Hey, Pooh is ballin’ in Memphis.” Like, we’re in Memphis, all the way from Chicago, number one. Be proud from Chicago. That’s all. But it was totally the wrong way to do it.
It hurts if you’re trying to lead by example. I learned a big lesson. But it’s a lesson to them, too: don’t go in that direction. They can see that I’m not perfect and they see somebody who’s trying to do his best, but he can make a mistake. But don’t make a big one. I always regretted that.
Anything I got caught up in that wasn’t the right thing, I regretted. Even with me having the attitude I did in Chicago when I was being criticized so much in the media. The whole way I handled that situation, I should have been the bigger person, but I was too young at the time.
Was it fair? Doesn’t matter. You have to handle it the right way. I didn’t. The hate is easy to see. Like when I came back with Cleveland and Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley and all them on TNT tried to say I was done, that my career was over and I should just leave. You could see the hate. But I keep hoopin’ because people are gonna hate. Kids are going to have that stuff happen to them, where there’s jealousy and hate, and I want to be someone who sets an example.
Then with all of them it was, “Hold up, D-Rose had a hell of a playoff series in 2018.” “Hold up, D-Rose is putting up numbers in ’19.” Now what the fuck are they talking about? Are you thinking about basketball? Or is it personal? Everyone needs to learn to deal with that stuff.
* * *
So, no, I didn’t stay long in college, but I definitely learned there. Memphis was a great time. Had a great season, great teammates, Cal. But mostly, I was so proud of myself, the way I handled my responsibilities being on my own for the first time. I had to get through that semester and I did the work, got the grades. Not in any trouble, on time, always where I was supposed to be. Going to class, dedicating myself to the sport. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it showed a lot for me. I was in the gym a lot. That kind of saved me from acting out or being in the crowds where you got in trouble.
There were a couple of bar fights before I got there with the players, teammates—it’s a Southern place. Cal put out a statement; Twitter barely existed at that time. He came out on the news saying to email him if you saw anyone from his team out. Said to MySpace him if they saw us in the club or whatever. Most guys would go out in Mississippi, anyway, across the river, if they went out. He was on us all the time to be right.
For me, it was the three Gs: Girls, Gym, Games. That’s how I stayed away from it. I never was a guy being out, anyway. Which is what later made it so weird to be attacked like I was in the media. The thing that hurt was being around my family and hearing people slander my name. My family knows who I am. They know I’m not aggressive. And to just hear somebody kill you like that. It hurt ’em. No one thinks about that part. Probably why that anger and that aggression came back when I was in Chicago. It didn’t feel right because I felt like I had to defend not only myself, but my family.
Back at Memphis, it was such a special time, a special season. We started out 26–0 and were number one. Small place and no one expected it and we’re dominating. Big games, too. We went to New York and beat my guy O.J. Mayo in overtime. What I remember is the way we were rolling. Every game we played it felt like we were unbeatable and we felt like Cal was controlling the team perfect.
Cal’s got ways of motivating, and one was he knew that all of us loved money. So he’d be yelling, “Ka-ching! Ka-ching!” as we’re going through games. Talking about the draft, the lottery. I believe that had we lost a game in the tournament before we went to the championship, I wouldn’t have been the first pick in the draft. I think Michael Beasley would have been number one. When we got to the tournament, though, Cal turned it up for me.
He called me into his room before the tournament started. We’re talking about how I feel, having a regular conversation, when out of nowhere he was like, “Kid, you know we’re gonna want you to play the way you normally play or we won’t have a chance.”
What he meant was, play the way I played in AAU. Cal rarely came to my high school games. He recruited me because of what he saw in AAU. When he went to my high school games, he was like, “What the fuck is this? You’re not playing point guard. You don’t got the ball in your hands. We’re changing that.”
It was shocking for me to hear him say it because it’s the only time he talked about me taking over the team or something like that. Normally, he had conversations wi
th Chris Douglas-Roberts, because Chris was older. He’d depend on him because he was here before me. To hear him say that, yeah, I had to act like I was ready for it and take responsibility. I was surprised. But I delivered and it worked out.
Cal was great to play for. Still keeps up with me. He also motivated you by throwing out a little bit of history sometimes. I liked that. He’d always throw out stories about old players and how hard they worked, how much they appreciated the game. Also, he was always making the team feel like it was us against everyone else. He was huge on that. No matter what was going on the whole year, we felt like we were fighting everybody. We were number one throughout the season and that was the reason why. They had to recognize us. Maybe they didn’t want to, but we’d make ’em. That was another thing that drove us from this school no one ever talked about. But I knew how good the team was. I saw it firsthand. I didn’t care about what people said. I practiced with them. I saw them up close. This is similar to the teams I normally played with, like in Chicago, too, not a bunch of big names.
We lost that one game before the tournament against Tennessee in overtime. Honestly, we just never thought we’d lose the way it was going that season. We were up most of the first half. It was a surprise. We thought we were gonna win every game we played. They just played a perfect game that night. Playing so much basketball, some nights it will be like that. Just one of them nights.
Then there was the championship game, losing to Kansas. That was probably my biggest disappointment in basketball. When people ask me, that’s the game I say that about. It was me missing a free throw that cost us. Putting my hand up. It was on me.
When I was younger, I won all those championships and it seemed like my teams were always gonna win. You think it’s gonna continue in college. Then you make it all the way to the dance and it’s like, “I’m about to do this, too.” Going into that game I was like, “Yeah, going to do my thing, we got this.” We’re up, I make a three, but they change it to a two when I had that run going late, scoring 14 of 16 Memphis points.
We’re up and it looks like we’ve got it. Chris goes up there and misses free throws. I go up there, miss a free throw, too, and fucking Mario Chalmers hit that three-point shot. Even before that, Sherron Collins, Chicago guy from Crane, hit a big shot and I felt then, “Alright, we get to overtime and we should be fine.” But by that time, we let the game slip and it was over. I played all 45 minutes.
I just remember walking off the floor and the fireworks were burning me on the way out. Being so mad. Anybody that touched me, I felt like I was gonna fight ’em. People cheering. There was a lot going on and I was confused, emotionally distraught. But Cal, I remember him afterward telling us, “Man, I thank you guys for everything y’all did. We made it to the championship, which nobody thought we were gonna make it to. We had the number one spot until we lost to Tennessee.”
We weren’t a good free throw shooting team, but we always said we’d make the big ones when we had to, like Shaq always said. He didn’t most of the time, we didn’t that time. Taught me, at least, the importance of free throws. It’s something I saw with Magic Johnson, also. Check his free throws and how much better he got. Shooting 90 percent by his last season. It became something for me to go right away and practice. Right after that loss. So I never shot free throws again as low as I did in college. Was up to like 86, 87 percent after my injuries, getting better just about every season.
I missed one free throw in that game, so the truth is if I had hit the free throw, I probably wouldn’t have worked on improving that part of my game. I was telling Cal about the game and I was like, “My bad, my bad.”
He was like, “Go through the tape, Derrick. We could have lost this game through this play, that play.” I appreciated him saying that. But it was on me. It was tough because I had never been on a team like that where we were that close, super close, like in high school. They were kind of older guys, but for me to come in there and click like that made it like a family. I loved that, making it feel like home.
And the crazy thing was I was about to do something I never thought I would—go back to Chicago to play for my hometown team.
7
I was never thinking about playing for the Bulls. I really wasn’t a fan of any team growing up. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad for them, and they were always making the playoffs, but I was just thinking about my games. I wasn’t watching them. Watched the league, you know, just to see who I have to ball against. Then the Bulls missed the playoffs in 2008 and got like a 1 or 2 percent chance of winning the lottery, so I’m not thinking much about playing back home.
Then they get the first pick.
But I wasn’t really thinking about being number one. For a long time at Memphis I’d been thinking maybe it would take me two years to get to the league. Then the tournament and everything happened. They were telling me the Bulls wanted a guy who could score better, which I figured meant Michael Beasley. You heard they didn’t want guys from Chicago, like it was too much pressure to play at home. Someone said that’s why they didn’t take Michael Finley years earlier, and he became an All-Star.
Pat Riley and the Heat had the number two pick and I knew Riley liked me. So I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. With D-Wade, they could use a point guard. Nobody in my family would have felt bad if I would have gone to Miami. To me it was the same: Chicago? Miami? Win-win. That’s how I felt. Win because I’m playing at home or win because I’m playing in Miami with D-Wade.
The Bulls had Kirk Hinrich. I heard they weren’t sure right up until before the draft.
And then I was thinking, “Don’t pick me.”
You know how you’re in New York right before the draft and they call you and let you know they’re gonna draft you? You gotta act surprised that night, but come on. They’re saying I was going number one or whatever, but the night before I remember eating in New York with my agent, BJ Armstrong. BJ hands me the phone. I’m talking to Gar Forman and the others and they start bringing up my brother’s past. “Your brother, he was locked up for this, that, whatever.”
I know teams do all this research, but I didn’t understand, because it’s like, “Are you drafting me or my brother?” My brother didn’t have anything to do with what I do on the court. I just remember getting up and getting out of there—mad. At the table mad and then I’m outside and everybody’s confused like, “Derrick, what’s going on?”
I’m telling BJ to tell them, “Don’t pick me then, I’m going to Miami. If they’re worried about what’s going on with my brother’s life, that’s something I didn’t know nothing about. I don’t go into my brother’s file. I don’t know about that.” I love my brother. I don’t care about that.
Then they picked me.
It hurt, but it was all behind me once they drafted me.
* * *
I wasn’t worried about playing in Chicago, even if some people said there’s a lot of distractions. I never hung around with that many people. The people I hang around with are the same people I’ve been hanging around with since sixth grade. That’s why I say it all goes through my friends, and the people I always kept close to me are the people I know I can trust, the people still with me. When they were talkin’ shit about me in the media it would trickle down to them, so that was really the hard part for me.
My biggest thing being in Chicago was me not having the freedom to do what I wanted, the boundaries that popped up. I can’t go places and just be normal, do normal things. When I look back, I also think one problem with playing in Chicago was I wasted too much energy. Playing in my hometown, there was no way around it. When you step outside, you got people looking at you crazy. It’s either they’re looking at you crazy or with excitement. It became a circus, but outside of that I could have dealt with it.
There was one big thing about playing in Chicago, and I thought that was going to lead to a championship. I never stopped beli
eving that. What did it take MJ? Seven years, he was chasing. I was always chasing. Going back, I knew that was gonna push me to play great basketball. That’s how I took it. Playing in Chicago, being judged all the time on everything, being compared to Michael, that would push me, push us. Me being judged against the greats who came before, that’s the way it always was for me, and we were always winning, so it was good. It was a continuation of the pressure. It never got to me.
Well, until the end.
It was only at the end—that last year with the Bulls—I felt the city was changing on me. You’re in the game and you hear chatter that you normally don’t hear. You’re not trying to listen, but it’s a murmur like, “Hold up, what did you say? ‘Pass the ball?’ What do you mean?” They’re yelling stuff at you from the stands. Now you’re the target. It wasn’t that I wasn’t producing, but we had plenty of holes with that team.
We had a brand-new team that final year, a new coach in Fred Hoiberg. Jo and Mike Dunleavy hurt, and both miss half the season. Jimmy gets hurt. We both play about the same amount of games. Pau Gasol gets hurt. Miss the playoffs. “It’s on me? What do you mean, on me?” But that was the wrong way to take it.
Normally I’m good at handling those things, but that last year I felt it change. Articles dropping in the morning paper, where a fan who goes to the game to get drunk with his friends reads it, and he’s like, “Oh, he’s not doing well. That’s why the motherfucker’s terrible, he’s not doing work.” Gets four beers in him. “Yeah, that’s why your ass don’t work, motherfucker!”
That’s what was going on. I’m hearing that, looking at the people like, “Come on, you’re not even here to be a fan. You’re just here to fuckin’ troll people.” And even if they are drunk or whatever, it hurts. I was sensitive. That’s the last thing I wanted to be, sensitive about it, but knowing how much I gave, it did hurt. Nobody understands how much you dedicate yourself.