Why should we care if Rose does not care? He is not the Bulls’ savior!

We are of a society that places so much value on the abilities of its top athletes that it’s no wonder more don’t turn out to be like Derrick Rose.

He’s the point guard for the Chicago Bulls who once again has turned up injured. It’s a knee problem, and he had surgery last month.

BUT AS THE Chicago Sun-Times reported, the ball player whom many believe the key to whether or not the Bulls will ever be a significant basketball team in coming seasons doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to recover.

While team officials say they’d like to think he will be healed in just over a month, Rose said he’s not about to rush himself to play again this season. “Whenever I feel well, that’s when I’ll step back on the court,” he told the newspaper.

On the one hand, I have no doubt that Rose thinks he’s being particularly honest in assessing his recovery. He’ll play when he plays, and not a moment sooner. Maybe he thinks he’s saving himself for future glory to be performed on the basketball court.

Maybe he envisions this as an isolated incident that will be long forgotten by that future date many years from now when he is inducted into the professional basketball Hall of Fame.

BESIDES, HE’S AN athlete, someone who is used to being coddled because he’s special. He’s Derrick Rose. His knee is more important than any body part of a mere mortal.

But let’s be honest.

Sports fans are willing to mollycoddle the athletes who on a certain level perform. In the case of Rose, this is the third time in seven seasons playing in the National Basketball Association that he has suffered a severe injury that disrupted his playing time significantly.

Learning that he doesn’t care enough to want to return to play makes him come across like some sort of wimp. I can’t help but wonder if the Rose legacy is now set in Chicago as some sort of flake who wasn’t tough enough to endure on the court.

IF THAT’S THE case, then the biggest joke in this commentary was that line five paragraphs ago that hinted Rose will become a basketball Hall of Famer. He could wind up as the most disappointing athlete to ever wear the jersey of a Chicago professional sports team.

He definitely has surpassed Eddy Curry as the most disappointing hometown boy who was drafted Number 1 and expected to lead the Chicago Bulls to championship success for years to come.

Perhaps Rose still mentally thinks he’s the Simeon Career Academy athlete who will be coddled because, in his mind, “I’m Derrick Rose.” The guy who once faced allegations that he had someone else take his SAT college entrance exams and had his high school boost his grades to keep him academically eligible to play ball.

Sadly for him, Rose probably won’t realize how much his attitude stinks until he has washed out with the Bulls. He may wind up latching on to another NBA team, like the one-time Thornwood High School star Curry did. He may even be better off away from the pressure of playing in Chicago.

BECAUSE THE EXPECTATIONS here are turning out to be something that Rose doesn’t seem capable of living up to. Unfortunately, the Bulls’ roster these days seems based around the idea that Derrick is the team leader.

Without him, there is little chance of the Bulls accomplishing much of anything resembling success. While those years of athletic glory in the 1990s drift further and further into our city’s memory.

To the point where the Luv-a-Bulls’ routines could wind up being the only thing worth checking out at the United Center these days.

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A lot of “*,” but no real punishment

When it comes to the concept of high school kids skipping directly to professional basketball, I have never been one of those people who got all worked up.

I do believe those young people would be better off going to college, being exposed to the academic atmosphere, and possibly even learning something in their courses.

BUT I AM realistic enough to know that some people have little to no interest in academia. Some aren’t cut out for it. There may very well be some young people who spend their every spare minute practicing their dribble and their jump shot – out of the delusion that they will be the one in the few who will be able to play in the National Basketball Association for a long enough time period that they will be able to stash away enough money that they never have to work a real job in their lives.

Probably the only reason many of these young people pay attention to colleges at all is because they know that the NBA uses NCAA Division 1 athletic programs as their minor leagues.

Playing a year or two in college ball is the key to catching the attention of NBA scouts. Otherwise, why bother. The last thing most of them have any interest in doing is playing for all four years of a college athletic career.

That clearly is the mentality behind Derrick Rose, the Chicago Bulls star who once was the big shot ballplayer of a nationally ranked high school team out of Simeon Career Academy – which published reports in the Chicago Sun-Times indicate had people who were willing to tamper with his high school transcripts to bolster his shot of getting into college.

AS IT TURNED out, Rose did one year at the University of Memphis, helping to lead the Tigers to a Final Four appearance before moving on to the NBA and the Bulls – where he may very well be the guy who someday leads Chicago to its seventh NBA title (and its first ever without Michael Jordan).

Officials are investigating whether Rose’s “D’s” were bolstered to “C’s,” and whether someone took the SAT college entrance examination for Rose, in order to improve his chances of being accepted to college.

After all, what good would Rose’s athletic ability be if he weren’t able to take it any higher than leading the South Side high school to state championships?

Admittedly, nothing has yet been proven. This is not a court of law, but Rose is entitled to the same “innocent until proven guilty” standard that everyone in this country is supposed to get when they are confronted with an allegation.

BUT THE SPORTS pundits already are speaking out about the punishment, which is really a joke.

The official record of Illinois High School Association basketball may very well be changed to say that Simeon’s state championship isn’t legitimate because of a player participating in inappropriate activity.

Memphis fans will continue to remember the stellar play that led their favorite collegiate team to a Final Four appearance in the NCAA tourney – even if some sort of asterisk will be put aside their record to indicate that something funky took place.

And somehow, I doubt the Bulls are going to care much – so long as Rose plays well on the court. If he doesn’t, he’ll get traded away, just like the last local high school star who was supposed to lead the Bulls to a championship – Eddy Curry.

A WHOLE LOT of asterisks will clutter up the athletic record books to create the impression that “justice” took place and that punishment was administered. Yet I don’t see it that way.

It’s like a whole lot of athletic record keepers were trained in the old Soviet Union, where negative aspects of history were written out of the books in revised editions. A whole lot of people at Simeon and Memphis will try to act as though Rose is somehow a non-person.

But they’re not about to do anything to get at the real problem, which is kids who probably don’t belong in an academic environment being used by universities so long as their athletic skills can help those athletic departments make a few bucks for their home colleges.

It goes back to the issue of whether kids directly from high school should be playing in the NBA. I say why not, and not just because there are the occasional high schoolers (and younger when one considers the rush of Dominican teenagers who get to play minor league baseball) who make it to the U.S. major leagues.

I’M NOT A professional basketball fan. What interest I have in the game goes to the college level, and I’d rather have that level of the game kept free of this kind of grade-altering (or even the appearance of it).

If it means that the level of ball played at the college level declines somewhat, I can still enjoy the game because my interest in it is in all that athletic “rah rah” spirit. I’d rather not have the ballplayers whose only interest in being on campus is to use the school as the equivalent of a year in the minor leagues before going on to the NBA.

And for those who might be concerned about what happens to Rose, I’m not overly worried about that part of this story. He got through, and he’s a professional.

Rose got the big payoff (unlike the kid who’s a second too slow and never advances beyond small-school basketball), and is now focusing on playing well enough without getting injured to have a lengthy (and wealthy) athletic career.

HE’S NOT GOING to suffer from this. Nobody else will either, in all likelihood.

That is what we should be outraged about.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Derrick Rose’s exceptional athletic abilities are hard to find, which is why someone (http://northcarolina.scout.com/2/493218.html) may have thought that a mere “D” was not worth derailing his potential for a life in professional basketball.

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.