Here's a GQ interview with the humble MVP, Derrick Rose.
http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/20120 ... q-may-2012
Parts of the interview:
Just then, a Bulls rep burst into the room. "He's not coming, you guys," he said. "He already left." The media horde did this collective shoulder sag and, like the ripple from a drop of water, dispersed randomly in all directions from Rose's locker. They'd been packed in so tightly in anticipation of his appearance that I'd had no idea he was not, in fact, at his locker. Derrick Rose is surrounded even when he isn't there.
Nick Friedell, the Bulls beat reporter for ESPN Chicago, walked toward me and looked as though he'd seen some mythical creature, maybe a chupacabra. "He has almost never done that since I started working this beat," he said. "I'm stunned." Friedell joined some of his regular colleagues, and the conversation turned to how Michael Jordan never pulled this, how he always made an appearance no matter what.
I ask Rose why he blew off the media the night before..."It was just too much," he says. "I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't deal with it. There were so many people. I saw them there from the other room. And when I thought about having to go in there, I just couldn't work my way up to it."
As the star of a top team in a league that markets individuals more than any other sport in America (a league that has long had a reputation of harboring the hardest-partying athletes in America), Rose bristles at the thought of going out. In one way, this is refreshing. He just wants to do his own thing. But the more I think about it—the more I hear Rose talk about how little he enjoys interacting with strangers, how desperately he misses being able to walk around unnoticed, how mournful he gets when the topic of "attention" is breached, how obviously uncomfortable he is even in basic social situations outside his immediate circle—it strikes me as unbearably sad.
Because the thing that Derrick Rose likes to do more than anything else in the world—winning basketball games—is making it more and more di∞cult to avoid the thing he dislikes more than anything in the world. "Don't get me wrong. I don't take anything for granted," he says. "But it seems like the better I play, the more attention I get. And I can't get away from it. You play great, you get attention. But I hate attention. It is weird. I'm in a bind. The more you win, the more they come."
Unlike every other basketball player I've ever spoken to, Rose does not shy from comparisons to Jordan. "I've run into him a couple of times, but we don't have a relationship," he says. "His titles drive me. I'm not scared of him; if anything, it makes me work harder when I do train."
The problem now is that he's not just a child of Englewood—the sentiment extends to the greater city, as well. "Sometimes it's too much. Chicago..." He pauses. He is careful to say this just right. "Chicago isn't used to stardom. Back when Michael was here, everyone was used to actors and singers and people being at the games. But there's been a drought since then, and even celebrities, they'll stop here to film a movie and then pop right back out. They don't know how to act toward celebrity. So I always have someone with me. I can have a hat on, glasses on, whatever. People still notice me. If I go outside without a hat on, I feel like I'm naked." Rose can have the entire world, as long as he doesn't leave his home. "This life doesn't fit my personality."
LeBron doesn't yet seem to comprehend why the sports world has turned on him, but Rose, who says he doesn't really know LeBron, understands the tale as a cautionary one. He grasps that it was The Decision alone that created LeBron's new reality. "It happened overnight with him, and it was sad to see somebody go through that," he says. "It would hurt anyone to see your hometown turn on you like that. I don't know how I would have dealt with it. He is obviously playing great still...but everybody's different."
One of the fans, who actually asked for my autograph (brief proximity to celebrity being what it is on the open market), was surprisingly pissy about his "interaction" with Rose. "I dunno, he looked like kind of an asshole," Jon said. (He said his name was Jon. That's all I got.) "We stood there for fifteen minutes trying to get his attention, and he didn't even look at us. Guys like that never remember the fans."
I didn't know B.J. Armstrong is Rose's agent.