He's No. 1

Rose, then a junior, slams the ball against Glenbrook North in the state quarterfinals at Carver Arena.
(Jon Sall/Sun-Times)

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In his lauded and candid speech on race in America last March, Barack Obama referenced the language of the great Southern novelist William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

Chicago high school basketball has never appeared so tumultuous and subject to rupture in light of class expansion, coaching changes, constant player movement and conference realignment. The past superimposed on the present is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is rather a cry for order, a semblance for some sanity and rigor.

Summoning the past is how we make sense of the present. A poet, world traveler and basketball coach, Rus Bradburd explained it beautifully during a conversation about a decade ago. Basketball is fundamentally a social nexus that brought people together. If the game was sustained and enlivened by arguments, this form of conversation bypassed personal differences or arguments.

“Somebody says, ‘I saw Isiah Thomas play in high school,’ and that automatically connects you to something larger and more specific,” he said.

Another legendary politician, Boston’s Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, famously observed that all politics is local. In Chicago, regardless of where events unfold, the game is localized. Kevin Garnett leading the Boston Celtics to their league record 17th professional championship is viewed, at least here, as a triumph and vindication for the Public League. Garnett constitutes an “import,” of sorts, having come here from South Carolina to play his senior year at Farragut.  The path that Garnett blazed originated here, and that makes him one of us.

This Thursday, Derrick Rose appears almost certain to be the top selection of the NBA draft, joining the select and audacious company of Westinghouse’s Mark Aguirre (1981) and Carver’s Cazzie Russell (1965). Last week former Carver coach Don Pittman made the same point that Von Steuben’s Vince Carter claimed in this space that by measure of force of personality, social presence and local pride, Rose is on a certain visceral level the basketball equivalent of Obama.

Next to boxing, basketball is the most tribal of sports because of the intensity of the experience and “direct contact,” if you will, between the spectator and participant. In person the game achieves an extraordinary intimacy. Watching on television the medium’s tendency toward the familiar and reassuring creates a bond. The game is predicated on emotion; those feelings give rise to a protectiveness that forms over those that are good enough to dominate or even master the game.

I certainly remember the first time I saw Thomas and Aguirre play—it was against each other, on television, during the memorable third Class AA quarterfinal that St. Joseph won 63-60 over Westinghouse en route to the school’s runner-up finish. Three years later, Aguirre and Thomas were the top two selections of the NBA draft. The fact they played professionally outside of Chicago never tempered the satisfaction what their success and visibility meant to the communities and neighborhoods that made them.  Aguirre and Thomas not only validated their own worth. The two consecrated the glories and majesty of the West Side, revealing a sharp alternative to the hopelessness and depravity that too often defined the community.

The rather astonishing, at least mathematically, action of the top selection of this year’s draft now in the possession of the Bulls is either evidence of a divine intervention or poetic justice. I have clear memories of the first time I saw Rose play. It was five years ago this spring at Crane High School. Rose’s Beasley Academy was playing against Fields for the grammar school city championship. At the time, Tim Flowers was actually the more bandied about name because he was so much more physically advanced than his peers.

In the first quarter, a Beasley point guard threw what I imagined was a poor pass that appeared to sail out of bounds. Except Rose ran down the right baseline and elevated.  By the time he caught the ball, his arm was three-quarters above the rim. Rose very delicately, but smoothly, controlled the pass and easily laid it in. A couple of weeks later, at Proviso West, I saw Rose, playing for the Ferrari club team, in the finals of a 14-under state AAU championship. Playing against a very good Full Package Athletics team, Rose was absolutely astonishing, controlling every facet of the game, scoring at will and he finished with 34 points.

It has been remarked many times the only person who ever held Michael Jordan below a 20-point average was Dean Smith. Likewise, the only coach that ever consistently beat Derrick Rose was arguably Bob Hambric. I hold tremendous respect for Hambric. Even though he could be very abrasive and contentious to deal with professionally, Hambric demonstrated a more personal and vulnerable side away from the game, a side I caught many years of covering the Pontiac Holiday tournament.

Hambric’s no-freshman policy in the vast majority of cases was the right response to incoming players that allowed a proper chance to get accustomed to high school.  Philosophically it was just, but, as practiced by Hambric, it was iron clad and never gave way to the occasional bending. Rose was too good not to have on that team, even with his inexperience. The move probably cost Simeon a state championship. As good as Simeon’s back-top-back state champions of Rose’s junior and senior year were, the last Hambric-coached team, the 2004 Wolverines that featured Sun-Times player of the year Calvin Brock, Brandon Alexander and Anthony Newell had better basketball players and more varied talent. 

That Simeon team lost to a very good Carbondale team in the 2004 Class AA quarterfinals in large measure because Simeon had difficulties with their press and did not have a bigger guard to defend against Justin Dentmon. His coach, Robert Smith, said the decision was not just Hambric’s and that Rose agreed and he preferred to play with his friends.

As Simeon freshman Rose toyed with the outmatched competition and he rarely played more than half of the game. The chance of watching gifted, even transcendent athletes in their formative stages has always been the great thrill of high school sports. Because relatively so few players are on the court at a given time, one great player holds the power to influence or change its outcome. That also describes the primal beauty of the game, the directness, the simplicity, or the one-on-one. 

At Memphis, Rose joined a program whose nucleus reached consecutive elite eights of the NCAA tournament. He immediately propelled them to the top, to one or two missed free throws from a national championship. It was evident from the moment he first strode on the court he was the team’s best and most dynamic player.

In 1995 by proving college was not necessary to become a professional player, Garnett instantly altered the high school, college and professional games. He became, like Curt Flood, an iconic player fixed in time. In Garnett’s case, his name was inextricably bound to the generation of players that from 1995 to 2006 entered the NBA directly from high school. Rose is now part of the next generation, the group mandated by the collective bargaining agreement to be at least one year removed from high school graduation to be eligible for the draft.

The fact that Rose’s career at Simeon lasted four times as long as his career at Memphis underlines both how mercenary the process has become and marks how much more central and defining is the high school experience. In his comments to reporters last week during his workout with the Bulls, Rose made clear that he had no trepidation about playing in his hometown. Even before the Bulls defied the odds to earn the right to draft him No. 1, Rose stated his preference of playing here to his advisors.

If the Bulls draft Rose, the symmetry is unavoidable. Four years ago, Rose was unveiled to a large audience for the first time at the United Center in leading Simeon’s freshman and sophomore team over Julian for the city title. With the exception of the Oak Hill game, Rose had probably his greatest individual game ever at the United Center, against Washington for the city title his junior year.

Rose stakes out a continuum from Simeon to the Bulls that transform him from the personal to the public. That’s something worth watching.