Bulls fans place faith in 19-year-old

Have we forgotten the Eddy Curry experience already?

Those of us Chicagoans who get excited over the Chicago Bulls and professional basketball (I prefer the college game myself) are once again willing to believe that a kid barely out of high school will be the Chosen One who leads this city to championship-level teams in the National Basketball Association.

WHY ELSE WOULD so many be so eager to celebrate the fact that the Bulls used the top draft pick in the nation Thursday to choose Derrick Rose, the one-time Simeon Career Academy star who played one year of college ball at Memphis – before deciding he’d rather be a part of the NBA than a university student.

Of course, that is one more year of college than Curry had when he decided to bypass DePaul University and go straight from Thornwood High School in suburban South Holland (where he nearly led a team to an Illinois state championship) to the Bulls, where he had a couple of non-descript seasons before being traded to the New York Knicks.

Curry became a better ballplayer once he no longer had the pressure of being the hometown hero who would lead the Bulls to the exalted levels that Michael Jordan took the franchise back in the 1990s. It would be a shame if Rose winds up regretting that he did not go to Miami.

Rose could easily turn out to be another guy who can’t possibly live up to the pressure that is going to be put on him by Chicago sports fans who seem to forget that the Jordan years were a historic aberration and that the Bulls throughout their existence have been a mediocre-to-terrible basketball franchise.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Derrick Rose gets to return to Chicago after one year of college (http://www.nba.com/draft2008/board.html) in Tennessee. Here’s a quickie summary of what Rose (http://www.highschoolelite.com/2007/rose.html) was worth when he played high school ball in the Chicago Public League.