Basketball fans the world over got a cool, heartening surprise on Wednesday when adidas Basketball dropped a video — presumably the first in a series — depicting All-Star Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose feverishly working out to rehabilitate his surgically repaired right knee , which he injured during the opening game of the Bulls’ 2011-12 postseason run .
But the workout footage wasn’t the only Rose video to hit the Web on Wednesday. CSNChicago.com’s Aggrey Sam released the first part of “an exclusive, wide-ranging interview” with Rose, conducted last month in Los Angeles, in which the 2010-11 NBA Most Valuable Player talks openly and in some depth about the anterior cruciate ligament tear that ended his season and will keep him on the shelf well into the upcoming campaign.
This one’s a little less heartwarming, due in large part to Rose’s detailed recollection of the injury and its aftermath, which is fairly bracing. From Sam:
“I remember it,” he recalled. “I remember everything. I remember jumping in the air and coming back down, and just that popping sound. I felt it actually tear when I laid all the way out and it just let go.
“I didn’t have that much pain after that. In the beginning I did, but I didn’t want to yell or anything. When that happened, all I could think about was people just talking. You could hear the whole arena, people just whispering all around — one of the things, like ‘Not again. Come on, man. First game back. We had the win’ — and I was just hoping [it was] nothing serious,” Rose continued. “Then, we got to the hospital, got in the MRI machine, the whole time praying.
“Dr. [Brian] Cole, the Bulls doctor [who also performed the subsequent surgery], came up to me and told me it was torn. I couldn’t believe it. That’s the closest thing to death, the closest to death I’ve got to right there, where it just seemed like the wind and everything was taken out [of me].”
Aug 162012