Derrick Rose: The Legend of Basketball

Video: Derrick Rose Full Highlights.

“My mom would walk down the street and drag us home if she heard we were getting into trouble,” Rose later told Sports Illustrated. “Even the drug dealers, when they saw her coming, would stop dealing and tell her where we were.”

The Rose family was tight, and Derrick’s three brothers—Dwayne, Reggie and Allan—took on a fatherly role when it came to their youngest brother. By the eighth grade, Rose’s talent as a basketball player was readily apparent. The slick-moving point guard with exceptional court vision was a rising star in his home city, and to protect him from outside interests, his older siblings were constantly at his side. One or more would pick him up and drop him off at school. They also attended his practices and punished him if he stepped out of line.

In 2003, Rose enrolled at Chicago’s Simeon Academy and quickly catapulted to one of the country’s best high school players. His dominant career at the school resulted in numerous wins and awards. In his senior season, Rose, who by then was ranked the nation’s best high school point guard, averaged 25.2 points per game and guided Simeon to a 33-2 record and its second consecutive state title. That same year, the Chicago Tribune named the young player its 2007 “Illinois Mr. Basketball Player.”

College Career
Not surprisingly, college coaches salivated over the prospect of landing Derrick Rose on their roster. In the end, the point guard chose to enroll at the University of Memphis and play for its coach, John Calipari.

Rose wasted little time leaving his mark on the college game. In his lone year at Memphis, the point guard led the Tigers to 38 total wins—the most in NCAA history—and the 2008 national championship game, where the team lost to the Kansas Jayhawks in overtime.

Rose netted 18 points in the final game, cementing his status as one of college’s best players. Not longer after, he declared himself eligible for the NBA Draft, and in June 2008, his hometown Chicago Bulls selected the 19-year-old with the first pick in the draft.

But Rose’s time at Memphis was not free of blemishes. In 2009, the NCAA ordered the school to vacate its 2007-08 season and serve three years’ probation due to NCAA rules violations. While the NCAA report didn’t explicitly name Rose, he was the only player who fit the description of its findings. The report claimed that Rose had elected someone else take his SAT in order to meet academic eligibility requirements. Investigators also accused Memphis of paying $1,700 in free travel to Rose’s brother, Reggie.

NBA Career
In Rose’s first NBA season (2008-09), he averaged 16.8 points and 6.3 assists per game, earning Rookie of the Year honors and leading the Bulls back to the playoffs.

Over the next three seasons, the point guard molded himself into one of the game’s better all-around players. Following a stellar 2010-11 season that saw Rose average 25 points per game, the NBA named Rose its league MVP, making him the youngest player (at 22 years, 191 days old) to receive the honor.

In the strike-shortened 2011-12 season, Rose led the Bulls to the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. But in the first game of the post-season, Rose went down with a serious knee injury that forced him to miss the remainder of the playoffs as well as all of the 2012-13 season.

Personal Life
Rose, who lives in Chicago year-round, became a father for the first time on October 9, 2012, when his longtime girlfriend, Mieka Reese, gave birth to a son, Derrick Rose Jr.

http://www.biography.com/people/derrick-rose-21320005