by Jalen Rose
I wasn’t supertall yet in those days, but I was tall enough, and from the start I was one of the better players in the neighborhood. But other things got in the way of my game. Most of all, my behavior. I got into trouble so often as a kid that my mom kept moving me from school to school, trying to find one that fit. In fourth and fifth grades, I ended up living with my Aunt Jackie, my grandma’s sister, at her house on the east side, at 6 Mile and Fleming, so I could go to a new school where I might behave better. Aunt Jackie was a teacher, and the school was near her house. Then, in sixth grade, I moved back home, and my mom sent me to St. Cecilia’s, which was known not just for being a good school, but also as the basketball mecca of Detroit.
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WITH ALL due respect to Mike Ilitch, the owner of the Detroit Red Wings, one of the most successful teams in all of sports over the last quarter century, Detroit is not Hockeytown. It’s a hoops town. From streetball to high school hoops to college teams to the Pistons, basketball is the city’s real number one sport. And for a long time, a man named Sam Washington at St. Cecilia’s was at the center of the sport in town.
Sam was not only the head of athletics at the school, he also ran programs at all different levels of play, from Pro-Am leagues all the way down to youth teams. A former sports star back in the day, he started his reign in the late ’60s, at the height of racial tensions in Detroit, as a way to do something for young people in the community. And he got things done by being a friend to everyone. For example, I once heard that in the early days of the program, he asked his friend Dave Bing, a star on the Pistons, to bring his team down to play at the gym, to bring more attention to what he was building. Then, not long after, when Bing was holding out for money in a new contract and getting fined five hundred dollars a day, he told his friend Sam he couldn’t help him pay for a new gym floor. So Sam went to the Pistons, asked them what they were doing with the money they were collecting from Dave, and got his new floor a few months later.
As a kid, I knew Sam was the large man who’d sit by the door of the gym in his collared shirt and dress pants, working as athletic director and security chief all in one. Kids’ parents would drop them off at the gym and not have to worry for a while because “Sam had them.” And no matter what kind of kid you were, you wanted to play at St. Cecilia’s because of everyone else who played there: George Gervin; Earvin “Magic” Johnson; and Magic’s predecessor as the greatest point guard to ever come out of Michigan, Curtis “C.J.” Jones.
Even before my mom sent me to the school, I was a “Ceciliaville” kid—that’s what they called the day camp there. When camp was done for the day, I’d stay at the gym and hang around the court while older guys played in high school games or Pro-Am games. I watched guys with names basketball fans would recognize—Derrick Coleman, Steve Smith, Mark Macon, Doug Smith, among others. I’d get rebounds for them while they warmed up, make runs to the store down the block for food or a drink, anything I could do to get closer to the players. I loved being around the gym, and being around basketball.
But even for Sam Washington, it wasn’t easy to get an eleven- or twelve-year-old fool like me to focus on really getting any better at the game.
—
I NEVER thought of myself as a bad kid, even if I did get into my fair share of trouble when I was little. I always did okay in school, though I was one of those kids who would finish my work real fast and then mess around in class. There were also plenty of fights, some of which got me suspended, and one of which ended with me breaking my finger on my adversary’s head. That certainly wasn’t good for my basketball prospects and was just one of many times I lost my spot on the team at St. Cecilia’s. Most of the others, my mom took me off the team, usually when I got caught stealing, something that I got pretty good at. Not big-ticket items, but little things like candy bars, juice, baseball cards, and whatnot. If my mom found out about it, Sam would hear about it, too, because Sam heard about everything.
He would say, “I’m not calling you Jalen. I’m calling you Rose. You’re going to have to earn it for me to call you by your first name.” It was like I was a criminal and all that was missing was my inmate number. Not that I cared that much. Basketball was fun, but by this time, chasing girls and going to parties seemed even more fun.
Then one day, when I was in about sixth grade, old Sam Washington comes lumbering toward me after a practice, and he says, “Rose, I want to show you something. Let’s go downstairs.”
And I’m thinking, We’re going downstairs—this dude’s about to kill me or something. You didn’t go downstairs to his office too often, and really only if you were in trouble. So we walk into this little room beneath the gym, and Sam pulls out one of those real old-school film projectors. The few other times I’d seen it, I had assumed it no longer worked. But there’s Sam, blowing on it, dusting it off, and loading it with one of those big reels of film, all as I sit there watching, having no idea what he’s doing. He finally gets it turned on, and up comes this black-and-white basketball footage of this one player. Jump shots, three-pointers, spin moves—this guy had it all. We sat there watching the clips for a few minutes, and then Sam spoke up.
“Do you know who this guy is?”
“No, sir,” I replied.
“That’s your father.”
I looked over at him, snapping to attention.
“His name is Jimmy Walker. He used to play upstairs here when he played for the Pistons,” he continued. “Made a few All-Star teams. Great college player, too.”
I stayed silent, looking back and forth between the screen and Sam.
“If you stop fooling around and start taking this stuff seriously, you could go somewhere, Rose. But you’re just wasting it now.”
He turned off the projector, and we walked back upstairs. For the first time in my life, I knew who my father was. I can’t say I was sad, I can’t say I was happy, I can’t even really say I was numb from the shock. Honestly, I was thinking just one thing.
I was going to the NBA.
2. How I Learned What It Really Takes to Become a Hustler
Every school I went to growing up in Detroit—elementary, middle, and high school—is now closed. You could have guessed that. You’ve read all the articles and seen the pictures of my city. You know about the hard times it’s gone through, and how long the road to recovery is going to be, so it makes sense that the schools I went to twenty and thirty years ago wouldn’t be there anymore.
But what you might not think about is what that means for the people still living in Detroit. Kids, in particular. Because if there aren’t any good schools, everything dominoes from there. It’s incredibly difficult for teachers to do their jobs in struggling schools, and almost impossible for kids to become quality students. And if you’re not a quality student, there’s almost no way to get into college, get a good job, and lead a decent life. If a kid living in Detroit today found out his father was an NBA player, and decided that he, too, was going to be an NBA player, I don’t think he’d have even the slim shot I did of getting there. More important, if a kid today decided he wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher, or start a business, he’s not going to have much of a shot at those things without a thriving school. In my day, the odds were already low. Unfortunately, they’re almost nonexistent now.
This is why I founded JRLA, the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy—a tuition-free public charter high school in the same 48235 zip code I grew up in. More on that later. But for the moment, this is what you need to know: If I were growing up now, not twenty or thirty years ago, I assure you things would have turned out differently for me. In today’s climate, I probably wouldn’t have gone to Michigan, I likely wouldn’t have lasted more than a year in college, and I certainly wouldn’t be a member of the Fab Five.
Fact is, I’m not even sure I’d make it through high school.
—
LIKE A lot of families on the west side of Detroit, we moved around when I was a kid. In second grade, w
e moved to a house on Rosa Parks Boulevard. Then, when I was twelve, we moved to a house on Puritan and Appoline that Uncle Len owned. That was where we were when my brothers started moving out on their own, giving me finally a room and walls I could decorate myself. I plastered one wall with Sports Illustrated covers full of athletes, another with Source or Word Up! covers full of rappers, and a third open wall with pictures of Jet beauties of the week. It made sense: the three things I was interested in as a teenager were sports, hip-hop, and girls. It just took a little while for the order of priorities to shake out the way it was supposed to.
Yes, my mindset may have changed that afternoon in the basement of St. Cecilia’s with Sam Washington, but I can’t claim to you that I dribbled a ball home that day or woke up the next morning at 6:00 a.m. to shoot baskets. I was a kid who liked to mess around, and that wasn’t going to change overnight. I had already grown up way too quickly, thanks to my older brothers and the neighborhood I lived in. In grammar school, I remember thinking that the little feathers on a weed clip I found in my brothers’ stuff were stylish. I actually walked around with a clip on my shirt one day, not knowing what it was. Too bad the teachers did. (I also loved the Rick James song “Mary Jane.” Again, no idea what he was singing about.)
In class, I would throw paper airplanes and spitballs at my friends, anything to mess around. I’d pass notes to the girls, asking, “Do you like me?” with three boxes to check: “Yes, “No,” or “Maybe.” Hey, it was the quickest way to get an answer. I was also the one in the middle of all the trouble as we started to drink alcohol at eleven and twelve years old; started to smoke pot not long after that (and learn what a weed clip was); and started fooling around with girls (playing games like 7-11 and Hide and Go Get It). When some of my friends started stealing Cherokees, Topazes, Escorts, I’d go for the joyrides, put a towel over the ignition, drive around the hood, park it somewhere. It was a pretty normal life for a young kid in northwest Detroit.
Think of it this way: Imagine a kid today trying to avoid social media—Facebook, Twitter, texting. It’d be almost impossible. For us, drugs, violence, and crime engulfed us the same way. They were everywhere, and so was the desire to have things that were cool. Starter jackets. Cazal sunglasses. Levi’s. Jingle Boots, Max Juliens, Nanny Goats. Fila suits. High-top Guccis. The list goes on. The hunger to be cool was endless. And I was walking a fine line—physically, mentally, and emotionally—between worlds. But it never got any worse for me. I never did any hard drugs or pills, never sold drugs, never committed any violent crimes, and never ended up in the YBIs—the Young Boys, Inc., an infamous Detroit gang led by Butch Jones.
The truth of why I didn’t, like the truth of why any kid from the hood somehow avoids getting into anything worse, is complicated, and probably has a little to do with luck. Maybe the story that usually comes out in this kind of book is “I owe it all to my mom or my grandma or my uncle for steering me straight.” But when were they going to have time to do that if, like I told you, they were working all the time?
As I look back, there were two main ingredients that pulled me through. First, I could see the criminals living the high life and making money off drugs, but I could also see the effects of that life. I watched people I knew transform from normal to crackheads. That was scary. There ain’t nothing good about being a crackhead. Finding that out was a real reason not to smoke crack—a lot more convincing than “Just Say No.” And in my era, that lifestyle in the hood was contained. If you didn’t want any problems with drugs, if you weren’t robbing, stealing, or killing, that crew left you alone. No one tried to force you in.
Second, of course, was basketball.
It took a few years from that day in Sam’s office for my focus to tighten in on basketball exclusively. I played football, but I didn’t like getting hit. (Just being honest.) I tried baseball for a while, too, but I didn’t love it. Ironically, the most important reason my basketball game actually improved was thanks to a game you probably haven’t heard of: Jaw Season. It was pretty simple: On the playground we’d look for kids whose mouths were open, tap them on the jaw, and see what happened. Well, a lot of fights happened, enough to eventually get me kicked out of St. Cecilia’s after seventh grade.
That benefited my basketball game, because the next year I found myself at the school in my neighborhood, Precious Blood, where the team wasn’t anywhere near as good as St. Cecilia’s. But that meant if we had forty points in the game, I scored thirty.
Suddenly I wasn’t just a little better than other kids when we shot half-dead balls at the basket pinned to a telephone pole in the street. These were real games, with real teams, and referees, and I dominated. And dominating was so fun it motivated me not to get kicked off the team every other week for being a knucklehead. Playing at Precious Blood gave me a taste of what it felt like to be a star, to feel different, to feel part of a special club.
Around that time, I also joined a local Amateur Athletic League team run by a coach named Curtis Hervey. I’d been invited to play on the team the previous year, but my mom wasn’t going to drive me all the way to practice when I was acting out. That year I behaved well enough to convince her to take me to AAU.
But I still had to work a few other things out.
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LEARNING HOW to compete is a huge part of becoming a good basketball player. The AAU team Curtis Hervey called “the Superfriends” was great before I got there. My first season we had strong players and won almost every game on our schedule. I didn’t play too much. The turning point came at one of our championship games, in Saginaw, which is a hundred miles north of Detroit.
My brother Kevin had just come home from the army a few days before the game, so he was able to drive me up to Saginaw and watch me play. We won, but I played maybe like five minutes, total. A few in the second quarter, a few more in mop-up duty. Still, I was celebrating with the team on the court after our victory, as happy as everyone else, because this win meant we got to go to nationals. Afterwards, I went over to my brother, expecting congratulations. Instead, he cussed me out.
“Man, don’t ever have me drive all the way up here to watch you sit on your ass! It’s good that you won, but you did nothing!!”
It was the opposite of what you’re supposed to teach kids in basketball—to support the team, cheer on your teammates, accept your role. But it also showed why a lot of traditional sports advice is wrong. No one content riding the pine and giving the best high fives is going to improve. If my basketball career was going to go anywhere, I needed to hear that message. It was one thing to walk around knowing my father was a pro and believing that was my destiny. It was another to put in the work to make it.
That summer I started playing every single day and working hard in a new way. Playing in every pickup I could at the park and the YMCA—all day, every day. The AAU game my brother watched was in June, and August was the national tournament. In those two months, I went from sitting the bench to getting real minutes to making the All-American team when we went to St. Louis for the tournament.
Now I was ready for high school basketball in Detroit.
—
WHEN I was growing up and going into my teenage years, the Pistons were on the rise thanks to Isiah Thomas and the Bad Boys, and Michigan was one of the top-ranked teams in the country. But the heart of hoops in Detroit then, and for generations before that, was high school basketball. The stars in the city were local celebrities to us, hailing from high schools like Cooley, Southwestern, Mackenzie, Pershing, and River Rouge. I mentioned Derrick Coleman and Steve Smith. Plus B.J. Armstrong, and going back further, George Gervin, who played at Martin Luther King. Even guys from places nearby in Michigan, like Glen Rice and, of course, Magic Johnson, were huge stars to us. That’s the history we heard about on the playgrounds, at St. Cecilia’s, and at practice with the Superfriends. We wanted to become a part of it.
Back then, the city had an open-enrollment system, which meant you could go to any sch
ool in the city as long as you were willing to ride the bus to get there for the bell. If you were an athlete, you tried to go to the schools with the best teams, the best coaches, and the best resources. For me, the decision on where to go was never a question. I knew exactly where I wanted to go.
High school teams used to sell out the gym at places like the University of Detroit and the Michigan State Fairgrounds Coliseum. And in eighth grade, I went to a game at the fairgrounds and watched a team play that mesmerized me. I remember all these people in the crowd wearing these clean white hats, with the team’s logo in cursive on the front. “Southwestern,” the hats read. And the star player nobody could take their eyes off was Anderson Hunt. You simply could not take the ball up on him. He’d get down into his defensive stance, and it was like trying to get the ball past a tiger or something. I’ll never forget watching him in a sequence just before halftime. He drained two threes back-to-back, and then, as the clock ticked down and the point guard from the other team was bringing it up, Hunt stole the ball, went straight to the hoop, dunked it at the buzzer, and ran straight into the locker room without breaking stride.
Anderson Hunt was headed off to UNLV to win a national title with Jerry Tarkanian. But all I cared about was figuring out a way to go to Southwestern High School and play for the coach there, the legendary Perry Watson.
—
NO MATTER what else I tell you, one thing you can’t forget about Perry Watson is that he was a child of the ’60s in Detroit. He was a member of the class of 1968 at Southwestern High, which puts him at the epicenter of the Civil Rights movement and the racial tensions that surrounded it. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated two months before Perry graduated. The year before, as a high school junior, he lived through the 12th Street riot, when forty-three people died, more than a thousand were injured, and more than two thousand buildings were destroyed.
