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"\n\n  See the Slideshow\n\n  Watch the Video \n\n Derrick Rose, the reigning NBA MVP, lives on the eighty-fourth floor of the Trump building in Chicago, one of the tallest buildings in the country, right up near the roof, with wall-length windows overlooking the city he rules, the only city he has ever known. The view is disorienting and all-encompassing, sort of like he's living on an observation deck of the Willis Tower, which happens to be right over there, one of the only points above us in the mess of verticals downtown.\n\n Rose also has a home in Northbrook, by the Bulls' training complex, but he says he has that place mostly for convenience, so he doesn't have to drive back into the city after practice. Someday he'd like to have a house, \"my real house,\" where he'll \"have kids and just live in my spot.\" But he can't do that now, not even close. This condo, the one he just moved into about a month ago\u2014it is almost entirely unfurnished; two of his bedrooms have no sheets on the beds and are filled with stacks of unopened bos\u2014this is his escape for now. Eighty-four stories up in the sky, secured away.\n\n \"I like living here,\" he says. \"They just try to make you comfortable. The people here, they are mostly from out of town; they don't know who I am. That's why I picked this place.\" (It's easy to understand why one would enjoy working in this building, too. When Rose orders two bottled waters for us during our chat, he hands the bellhop two $50 bills.) Presidents talk about how the White House begins to feel like a prison. Rose speaks the same way about the town that adores him. \"It gets on my nerves that I just can't go out,\" he says. \"It's just boundaries now. People are like, 'You can't go here, you can't go there, you got to let that person know where you're going.' It's just weird. I'm never alone. Ever.\"\n\n The afternoon I visit his condo is a rare one for Rose during this truncated, lockout-compressed NBA schedule: a day off. Last night he played his first game in almost two weeks, and in the locker room post-buzzer, everyone desperately wanted to pick his brain. Rose had missed the last five Bulls outings with back spasms, but he certainly didn't look to be too agonized, scoring twenty-three points and notching six assists in a breezy 90&amp;amp;#x2013;79 victory over the Atlanta Hawks. In one memorable sequence, he sidewinded himself through several Hawks defenders, pulled the ball above his head, absorbed contact, and then spun it just so, kissing the backboard and splashing through. He fell hard to the floor, popped up, and sunk the free throw. The back was feeling better.\n\n Postgame, there were probably three dozen media members laser-focused on Rose's locker, from WGN to the Chicago Tribune to someone whose credentials seemed to say \"MARS.\" Before too long the crowd grew even more robust, at least five people deep in a semicircle around Rose's chair. With the mess of Fourth Estaters spreading farther and farther out to the middle of the room, the odds I'd hear a word Rose said were approaching zero. I strained, I jumped, I peered, but nothing.\n\n 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.\n\n 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. Off to the side, reserve point guard John Lucas III, the unfortunate soul saddled with the locker next to Rose's, politely nudged his way through the morass and dropped his towel.\n\n In his condo, I ask Rose why he blew off the media the night before. He sighs and forces a wan smile. He has been expecting this question, if not necessarily so soon. \"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.\" He pauses and takes a sip of water. His eyes go somewhere beyond my left ear. \"There were so many of them. I hope they'll forget about it.\"\n\n A little later, Rose shifts to thinking about the twenty-four hours he has entirely to himself. \"This is gonna be the best day,\" he says, smiling widely. \"Some friends may come over. I might get on the phone. That's it. It makes me superhappy to have this whole day to myself, to be a little selfish, to eat whatever I want, to not have anyone asking me to do things. When you get a chance to have a day like today, you have to take advantage of it.\" But after I leave, he plans to exploit this rare opportunity by going nowhere.\n\n 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\u2014the 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\u2014it strikes me as unbearably sad.\n\n It's another reason his one salvation is on a basketball court, where he can focus on winning and nothing else. (\"He came packaged like that,\" his agent, BJ Armstrong, says. \"That box was already packaged. That is who he is.\") But even that's becoming a problem. Because the thing that Derrick Rose likes to do more than anything else in the world\u2014winning basketball games\u2014is making it more and more dicult 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.\"\n\n\n\n Rose has gone from wide-eyed freshman at the University of Memphis to one of the most recognizable athletes in the world in the span of about four years. Only Jeremy Lin, who made a comparable journey in approximately ten days, can possibly eclipse that sort of rise to megafame, and even he's older than Rose. Last season, at 22, Rose became the youngest ever NBA MVP; he has played in three All-Star games in his first four seasons; he is the signature star and unquestioned leader of one of the best teams in the NBA.\n\n And he is doing all this in the city where he was born, where he sprouted his first mustache, a place he has really only ever left for away games. Chicago has a proud, historic basketball tradition, from Isiah Thomas to Dwyane Wade to George Mikan. But none of those guys ever played for the Bulls. And none of them, not even Wade, are nearly as electrifying. Derrick Rose is as much a Chicago hero today as Barack Obama.\n\n When you watch a Chicago Bulls game, your eyes immediately smash-cut to Rose, no matter what else is going on, no matter where the ball is. It's as if he's glowing. Rose has an extra, automatic step, a palpable pep that often creates the illusion that he has tiny pogo sticks in his shoes. (One suspects Adidas, which just signed Rose to a \"lifetime\" contract reportedly worth more than $200 million, would like it if I claimed that he does.) Rose can pass and shoot and rebound (despite standing \"just\" six-feet-three), but Derrick Rose is Derrick Rose because of the way he drives the lane.\n\n Simply put, Rose does things in midair leaps to the basket that break physical laws of accepted human behavior. To watch those moves in real time is to not do them justice. Rose's brilliance is such that slow motion is required to understand what, exactly, is going on up there\u2014the same way you need to change frame rate to comprehend fully how a gun fires a bullet or a hummingbird flaps its wings. Rose seems able to control every muscle of his body while in midair: He's able to move past, over, and sometimes under defenders, almost always drawing contact. And he still finishes the play; Rose spins the ball on layups as if he's bowling on ice. My favorite ever was a dunk over then Knick Danilo Gallinari last season in which Rose appeared to speed up three-quarters of the way to the rim; it looked like someone dropped him from the rafters. His ability to finish is such a leap in basketball evolution that it feels like a mutation.\n\n \"When we used to play in the park,\" he says, \"there were no fouls, so that's why I shoot the crazy shots I do. Because I knew I was gonna get fouled, but I still got to make the shot.\"\n\n Rose grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in the Englewood neighborhood, one of the most notoriously dangerous communities in the country. (In 1991, when Rose was 2 years old, Englewood suffered ninety-nine murders. It's also the childhood home of Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew were murdered there in 2008.) Rose is the youngest of four brothers raised by a single mother. His talent was apparent at once and, by a family in challenging circumstances, nurtured and harbored as if it were the only hope on earth. \"The people who are there for me have always been there for me,\" he says.\n\n The stories of how Rose's family\u2014his mother, Brenda, and his three brothers, Dwayne, Reggie, and Allan\u2014protected him and one another are part of the Rose Legend at this point. How drug dealers were often more afraid of Brenda than any rival gangs, how the three brothers made certain Derrick was never left alone with untoward outside influences, how they created their own AAU team for Derrick so they'd be able to monitor all his comings and goings. The family heavily influenced his choice of both high school and college, protecting Rose against hardship and failure to such a degree that it's suspected someone else took his SATs. (Based on this charge, the University of Memphis vacated all its wins in Rose's one season with the team.) You can make a strong argument that Rose has been under protection since the moment he picked up a basketball.\n\n \"I was the best kid in my neighborhood at a young age,\" he says. \"My whole life. I was always the one everyone was talking about. I've never really wanted the attention, but it has always been there.\"\n\n The way the story is generally told, this attention and shelter is what saved Derrick from suffering the same sad fate as many Chicago basketball prospects\u2014from Ben Wilson (a top-tier high school recruit who was shot and killed in 1984) to Ronnie Fields (the Chicago Public League legend who suffered a serious car accident, lost his shot at a scholarship, and never made the NBA) to Jereme Richmond (the former Illinois forward who pleaded guilty to unlawful use of a weapon just this year). And yet for better or worse, Rose has essentially been walled off from the rest of the planet his entire life. He has always been the person around whom pieces have revolved, but he has never been the one actively commanding those pieces to move. It has turned him into a quiet person, the one guy in any room who's always listening. This has brought its own advantages.\n\n \"I have said his greatest asset, his greatest quality, is that he is a phenomenal, phenomenal listener,\" BJ Armstrong says. Armstrong, who played on three of those Jordan championship teams, is now one of Rose's closest mentors. \"He listens. He is able to take information, decipher what is important, decipher what is not important, and gets to the crux, right to the heart of what is going on right there.\"\n\n Rose calls this going into stealth mode. \"I was always the kid who didn't say too much, and people didn't think I knew that much,\" he says. \"But I always knew everything that was going on in the room and always knew my surroundings.\"\n\n I suggest that this is the sort of skill that might benefit someone who plays his particular position. \"Oh, for sure. Paying attention to detail, that's part of being a point guard.\"\n\n Rose is in charge when he's on the basketball court, but not in the way Michael Jordan, or even Magic Johnson, was. Jordan was the alpha dog who willed his teammates into submission; Magic was the host of a perpetual party everyone desperately wanted to be invited to. Rose's game is that of the covert observer, the assessor, the one who sits back, takes stock of the situation, finds the holes to attack, and then pounces. His game is aggressive, but only in a reactive fashion; he waits for you to show him your hand. Every game he is reading the defense the way you might survey strangers at a party.\n\n \"I can read people very well just from watching the things you do, just by how people talk,\" he says. \"I'm quiet, so I'll sit here and not say anything and watch you for a couple of minutes, and I can tell what you're about.\" I ask the question I think anyone would in this situation. \"I'm not a dick, am I?\"\n\n Rose smiles. \"Oh no. Trust me: I'm very good at reading people.\"\n\n This actually makes me feel better.\n\n\n\n The people of Chicago love Derrick Rose like he is family. I mean that in a literal sense. They have watched him grow up.\n\n A new feature on the Bulls JumboTron repeatedly flashes the word Pooh\u2014Rose's nickname as a kid. It is part Rose highlight video, part yearbook montage. Natalie Cole's \"This Will Be\" plays in the background as we see Rose transform from local high school standout to NBA MVP. The team also plays a sequence of videos that show a history of Bulls greats before transitioning to the current stars. This allows the not-so-subtle jump to be made from Michael Jordan to Derrick Rose on a nightly basis, especially when one of Rose's highlights shows him pulling off a signature layup and the camera pans to Jordan, who's sitting courtside. Michael Jordan was never of Chicago\u2014his goal was to be more of a global superstar\u2014but the city loved how he essentially became Chicago's public face nonetheless. With Rose, though, it's different. With Rose, you sense that the city, like everyone else in his life, feels obliged to protect him.\n\n 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.\"\n\n One Chicago icon for whom Rose does genuflect? President Obama. The famously Bulls-crazy POTUS has an open dialogue with Rose. \"I know that if I really wanted him to come out and support an event I'm going to in Chicago,\" Rose says, \"I know it could probably get done.\"\n\n Last year, the president asked Rose to introduce him at a fund-raising event. Rose sweated it in a way he's never sweated a game. \"That was my first time ever speaking to that type of crowd,\" he says. \"I was so nervous and scared. Just a two- or three-minute thing, but, like, thousands of people were there. I was nervous as hell...but I got it done, and it helped me being more vocal, too, by doing that.\" One difference between Rose and other athletes who have palled around with the prez is that Rose has known him since back when. \"I remember when he wasn't our president, when I was a kid, when he'd just be walking down the street, a state senator. He was just always there. I didn't appreciate it then. I was in high school and just wanted to see rappers.\"\n\n Anytime his Englewood days come up, we return to the matter of Rose's inner circle. He has an actual physical number of people he says he trusts most\u2014ten. \"There's seven of us,\" he says of himself and his oldest friends, plus his brothers and his mom. That's it. \"Longest I've known one of my friends is third grade. Most recent, seven years. They tell me the truth. They're not yes-men.\"\n\n And even though the story of where he's from is part of his lore, he estimates it's been the better part of a year since he's been in the old neighborhood. \"I just remember being there my rookie year, going back and being parked outside my friend's house,\" he says. \"All of a sudden everybody within a couple of blocks just came to where I was. It was crazy. I appreciated it. I felt good. But you're not the same person, and that's what you've got to realize.\"\n\n The problem now is that he's not just a child of Englewood\u2014the 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.\"\n\n\n\n This year, the playoffs, particularly in the Eastern Conference, come down to two teams: the Chicago Bulls and the Miami Heat. They claim two of the NBA's best records, three of the league's most marketable superstars, and, most notably, an inflamed recent history: Last year, the Heat blasted Rose's Bulls in the Eastern Conference finals, the most crushing loss of Rose's nascent career. It's clear he's still not over it and that it has driven him every minute since.\n\n It's all about Bulls vs. Heat, and this'll probably be the case for the next four or five years. Both teams are young, hypertalented, and standing firmly in each other's way. Rose says he wants to win multiple championships with the Bulls. Of course, those Miami guys are thinking the same thing. \"They're a team that we're not going to be able to go around,\" Rose says. \"For us to win, we're going to have to go through them every year.\"\n\n In January, the Bulls traveled to Miami to play their highest-profile game of the season, a precursor to the series everyone knows is destined. It was also the kind of game the NBA lives to market: superstar vs. superstar. Even better, it was Phenom Who Does It the Right Way (Rose) vs. the Black Hat of the NBA (LeBron). (This is also known as the game in which LeBron, forever looking for public-relations scores, famously rode his bike to the arena.) 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.\"\n\n From the opening tip, AmericanAirlines Arena was ablaze. \"You could just tell at the beginning that this was going to be an exciting, playoff-atmosphere game,\" Rose says later. \"The players were into it, the coaches were into it, and the buzz of the game was crazy. That's why I love playing the sport.\"\n\n Rose picked up two fouls early and was forced to sit, while the first quarter was highlighted by an alley-oop in which LeBron literally jumped over poor John Lucas III\u2014who I'm starting to realize is a bit of an unwitting foil in this story. Rose eventually returned and took control, driving, twisting, doing those reckless-but-not-really contortions at the rim that not even LeBron (who has five inches and at least sixty pounds on Rose) can contest.\n\n It is worth noting, by the way, that Heat fans demonstratively prefer Dwyane Wade to LeBron James. James may be the best player in the league by the numbers, but he's not first (and maybe not even second) in his own fans' hearts. Fans can always tell, really.\n\n With six minutes left, Bulls trailing, an audible murmur came up from the crowd when, in a defensive switch, LeBron moved over to guard Rose. I straightened up in my own seat...\n\n And then both players managed to stink up the joint. Rose missed a couple of key foul shots, and then LeBron missed two free throws of his own. Just before time expired, Bulls down two, Rose missed a heavily guarded turnaround jumper to finish off the anticlimactic comedy of errors.\n\n After the game, LeBron signed on to Twitter to tell the world, \"Man what a game! So fun and blessed to be apart of it! C'mon #6 make your d*mn free-throws!! Bulls are a great team!! Dog fight every time!\" (Rose isn't on Twitter. \"One of my friends, he's on there because of girls,\" he says. \"But I don't got Twitter.\")\n\n The contrast with LeBron is one everyone loves to make, and Rose doesn't mind it himself. But Rose is as beloved now as LeBron was before The Decision. Does he worry that someday he might get LeBron'd himself?\n\n \"I won't ever put myself in a bad position so that people can say bad things about me,\" he says. \"I make smart decisions, and my friends and my family, they are all there for the right reason. I'm very mature for 23 years old, and I know that whatever I do can hurt someone.\"\n\n The day before the Miami game, I talked with Rose in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. It was the first time I met him, and he was obviously exhausted from a late-arriving flight and the endless travel of this year's NBA season. It was more an introduction than an interview, but we chatted for twenty minutes anyway. Various Bulls walked past us in the lobby, heading out for a night on the town. I asked Rose if he'd be joining them later.\n\n \"Oh God, no,\" he said. \"I absolutely cannot wait until I get up to that room.\" This got me thinking: When was the last time that Rose\u2014a man who lives with two friends in his condo, who is constantly being told where he needs to be and when\u2014was actually alone in a room? He paused and frowned. \"I really don't know. Right now, I guess. As soon as I head up.\" I ended our conversation there. It seemed like the least I could do.\n\n As I walked out onto the street, I ran into a group of about fifteen people who hadn't been there when I'd walked in. While Rose and I had been talking, the gaggle of fans had run up to the window to snap camera pics and wave and scream. I'd been facing Rose and had no idea they'd been there.\n\n 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.\"\n\n The next time I see Rose, in Philadelphia three days later, I ask if he'd caught a glimpse of the crowd. \"Oh, I saw them,\" he says, shaking his head. Waving and snorting, right over my shoulder, was the antagonist that makes him sometimes wonder whether basketball is worth it, the reason he's afraid to leave his home; he'd been facing them the whole time. And yet he hadn't let on in the slightest. He'd bottled up the anxiety and stared, stone-faced, right back.\n\n Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York magazine."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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