Rose in full bloom delights the city of Chicago

LOCKERROOM: The Bulls' mercurial young point guard is driving the team, and his home town, back towards the promised land

ANYBODY WITH a fondness for American sports will have noticed how occasionally in the major cities the success of one local franchise will prompt good times in the franchise for completely different sports.

The best recent example is Boston where the Red Sox ended decades of cursed starvation, the Patriots and Tom Brady yomped to gridiron success and the Celtics revived their wonderful hoop rivalry with the LA Lakers. Being a Bostonian must have been the next best thing to being a Dub when the hurlers and footballers top their leagues.

The next city to benefit from the knock on effect might be Chicago. One of the greatest and most beautiful of the world’s places to live. Following on the slightly surprising Stanley Cup win for the local Blackhawks last year, the town’s beloved Bulls are showing signs of life again.

A week of so ago at the United Centre on the fringes of town, the Bulls got together some famous faces to mark the 20th anniversary of the franchises first NBA title. HE showed up. He being Michael Jordan, for whom that victory was the first move away from the Bulls being Michael Jordan plus supporting cast. The rest of his side learned to play with him (even though they always struggled without him) and as a group they went on to secure five more titles before 1998, the sequence coming as two streaks of three-in-a-row.

That dynasty passed into history. In US sports, surprisingly, rebuilding isn’t just a case of opening the chequebook and casting come-hither looks at superstars. The wage structures and the draft system democratise the game. By the early part of the new century the Bulls had gone two years without so much as putting three games in a row together. In the year 2000, with the good days already digested and forgotten, the Chicago public waited patiently as the Bulls went after what they hoped would be two of four available stars: Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady and Eddie Jones. One by one they found excuses to go elsewhere. Chicago was left feeling bruised.

Now with a Chicagoan hoopster in the White House and a new mayor in town, the Bulls are looking good, sitting second in their division, fractionally behind the Boston Celtics. What has added to the pleasure of the city, however, has been the fact the revival has been led by a local hero. Derrick Rose was born in the city and reared in the city and has the slightly-tainted past which Chicagoans find it easy to understand and to forgive.

Rose is a point guard who has improved year on year since the Bulls took him as first choice in the draft of 2008. To get first choice in the draft you have to be in the basement of the game’s ranking system. That’s where the Bulls were at the time and the speed of their rise since then is testimony to what they have wrung out of their young star already.

Rose, like Jordan, isn’t especially tall and he leads the Bulls with a radically different mindset. Tex Winter, an old backroom coach at the Bulls, used to chide Jordan with the words, “There’s no I in team, Michael”, to which Jordan would habitually reply, “Yep, but there is in win”. Rose on the other hand has had to be tutored in selfishness. He went to school locally in Simeon High and having been recruited early to college passed incessantly in the team’s games in order to highlight the abilities of his comrades and offer them an escape from the world he would be leaving behind.

He went on to the University of Memphis where his abilities led the team to the best winning season in college hoops history and to the final four where they were beaten in the final, just their second defeat in 40 games.

He deferred to players senior to him and seldom bothered buffing his own stats. Still, he showed enough to be able to quit college after his freshman year and go as first pick in the draft.

The Bulls found what every other side had found. Rose didn’t take games by the scruff of the neck. He played without ego or selfishness. He brought them back to the promised land of play-offs basketball in each of his first two seasons. They urged him to be more selfish.

This season he has paid heed.

Chicago is a tough town to be a prodigy in. Expectation is as tangible as bad weather in the lives of young players. Every kid who shows some ability is reminded of what a graveyard the city has been for young talents. Literally and figuratively. A kid called Ben Wilson once had the hopes of the city on his shoulders back in the 1980s. He was shot and killed in school one day before he even reached the NBA. As the Jordan era was winding down, the city turned it’s hungry eyes to a kid called Ronnie Fields who was following Kevin Garnett (lost to other franchises) through school at Farragut High. Fields got no protection, listened to everybody and mismanaged himself into oblivion. The kids in the classic 1990s documentary Hoop Dreams? Chicagoans.

Derrick Rose, from Englewood on the city’s south side, dodged all those bullets and pitfalls. He is the youngest of four brothers and as such was protected obsessively. He was shielded from every sort of bad influence, his movements were monitored, his friends checked out, his schoolwork checked.

The kid had a mobile phone but only to play games on. All calls came through his brothers’ phones. All calls were screened. It sounds obsessive but in the neighbourhoods of Chicago a young phenomenal basketball player is seen as a meal ticket not just for his family, but for any hustler and bandit who can latch on hard before the money starts pouring in.

In the end, after being recruited by most of the big American colleges, Rose went to Memphis and gave them that incredible season. The following year, however, that piece of history began to unravel. An investigation into the SAT scores (players need a minimum number of points in the American equivalent of the leaving certificate in order to become eligible for college and scholarships) of Rose and three other players showed discrepancies. It appeared that Rose was so well looked after in school that somebody else sat the SATs for him. The University of Memphis saw it’s record season expunged from the books but by then Rose had jumped to the NBA and, in the process, come home to Chicago. There he has learned to be hard and selfish on the court and is dragging the Bulls back towards the glory days. In that sports mad city, no lasting taint attaches itself to the star point guard who will deliver a return to paradise. The Bulls are back. The hero is local. The future is bright. His past is another country. Getting through school without being shot or pimped into obscurity is enough for now.

Only in America.