Post by dex on Oct 17, 2014 11:03:56 GMT -5
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In father’s footsteps, Rose coming full circle
Bill Reynolds
PROVIDENCE — He never knew his father.
But Jalen Rose, who never met former Friar great Jimmy Walker, will be retracing his roots on the Providence College campus on Friday.
“I literally have goosebumps,” Rose said Thursday.
Rose, the former member of the “Fab Five” at the University of Michigan and NBA star who now is an analyst for ABC and ESPN, will be part of the symbolic start of this new Friar season that kicks off Friday evening in “Midnight Madness” in Alumni Hall. Somehow that’s only fitting. For Alumni Hall once was his father’s own field of dreams, back there in the mid-1960s when Walker was as good as any player in the country.
But it was more than that, too,
To see Walker was to have a sneak preview of the game’s future. l remember seeing it looking into Alumni Hall in late November, way back in 1963.
“You have to see this new kid Walker,” a former high school teammate, who was going to PC, told me.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because he does things you’ve never seen before,” he said.
Yeah right, I thought.
Then he got the ball and dribbled through his legs, something I had never seen before. Then he spun almost full circle, all the while keeping the ball in the same hand. Two things I had never before seen, and I had seen a lot of basketball.
So that’s what I told Jalen Rose on the phone Thursday after hearing he was coming to Providence College and this small college gym that houses so many old ghosts that are all a part of who Rose is, whether he knows it or not.
So why now?
Why did Rose agree to come see his father’s school, this man he never knew, this man whose name always has hovered over Rose, whether he wanted it to or not?
“It’s called maturity,” Rose said.
And the circle of life, too.
One is the fact that Mike Jackson, one of his old high school teammates, is an assistant with the Friars. Another is that he was once teammates on the Indiana Pacers with former Friar star Austin Croshere, who kept telling him he should see PC, see something that was a part of his history, whether he wanted to admit it or not. Still another is that Doris Burke, the former PC women’s great who is an NBA sideline reporter, essentially kept telling him the same thing.
Still, he had to come to grips with the idea that he had never seen his father, never mind having any kind of relationship with him.
“I made a vow when I was just a kid that one of the main things I wanted to accomplish in my life was that one day he’d know my name,” said Rose.
He was named after him for one thing, “Jalen” comprising of the first two letters of his father’s name (James), and three letters of his uncle’s name. But his childhood seems like something out a Dickens novel, something far away from the fame and riches of the NBA.
“We had no electricity, no hot water, no heat,” he once said in a magazine article, as his mother struggled to raise four kids as a single parent. “We’d wake up in the morning to wash with water heated on a hot plate. And we’d go to bed every night wearing skull caps, sweat shirts, and gloves.”
But from the time he became part of the “Fab Five” at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s he was known in the basketball world as “Jimmy Walker’s kid.” As if his father had become some ghost who hovered over his life, even if his mother rarely spoke about him.
I remember approaching Rose in the Michigan locker room in the Superdome at the 1993 Final Four. I said how I used to know his father, at least peripherally, had played against him several times. But it was apparent that day he had no interest in that, not then.
Their story was written about shortly afterward in Mitch Albom’s 1993 book “The Fab Five.”
“I didn’t handle the situation well,” Walker says in the book. “I remember Jeanne [Rose’s mother] being angry.”
In 2007 Rose went to Walker’s funeral service. According to ESPN The Magazine, “He remained seated, his head partially bowed, his emotions visibly scrambled.”
Later, he said that father and son had arranged to meet for the first time, but then Walker died of lung cancer, and Rose said, “I was hurt, saddened, and selfishly disappointed that we never had a chance to meet.”
That was seven years ago.
On Friday, Rose will be on the PC campus for the first time.
He will tour the campus Friday afternoon. He will walk down the hallway in Alumni Hall where the pictures of the storied past stare out. One is of his father holding a trophy over his head in Madison Square Garden, back when his future was all ahead of him. Rose will address this year’s Friars. He will be the headliner of “Midnight Madness,” the symbolic start of this new college basketball season.
“I’m glad I was able to make peace with my father,” said Jalen Rose. “I used to have a negative feel about him and now I don’t.
” And he will do it all in the same gym his father once turned into a personal shrine, the one where the echoes of all those past cheers still float around if you only listen hard enough, back when looking at Jimmy Walker was like looking at the game’s future.
breynold@providencejournal.com On Twitter @breynolds401
(401) 277-7340
In father’s footsteps, Rose coming full circle
Bill Reynolds
PROVIDENCE — He never knew his father.
But Jalen Rose, who never met former Friar great Jimmy Walker, will be retracing his roots on the Providence College campus on Friday.
“I literally have goosebumps,” Rose said Thursday.
Rose, the former member of the “Fab Five” at the University of Michigan and NBA star who now is an analyst for ABC and ESPN, will be part of the symbolic start of this new Friar season that kicks off Friday evening in “Midnight Madness” in Alumni Hall. Somehow that’s only fitting. For Alumni Hall once was his father’s own field of dreams, back there in the mid-1960s when Walker was as good as any player in the country.
But it was more than that, too,
To see Walker was to have a sneak preview of the game’s future. l remember seeing it looking into Alumni Hall in late November, way back in 1963.
“You have to see this new kid Walker,” a former high school teammate, who was going to PC, told me.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because he does things you’ve never seen before,” he said.
Yeah right, I thought.
Then he got the ball and dribbled through his legs, something I had never seen before. Then he spun almost full circle, all the while keeping the ball in the same hand. Two things I had never before seen, and I had seen a lot of basketball.
So that’s what I told Jalen Rose on the phone Thursday after hearing he was coming to Providence College and this small college gym that houses so many old ghosts that are all a part of who Rose is, whether he knows it or not.
So why now?
Why did Rose agree to come see his father’s school, this man he never knew, this man whose name always has hovered over Rose, whether he wanted it to or not?
“It’s called maturity,” Rose said.
And the circle of life, too.
One is the fact that Mike Jackson, one of his old high school teammates, is an assistant with the Friars. Another is that he was once teammates on the Indiana Pacers with former Friar star Austin Croshere, who kept telling him he should see PC, see something that was a part of his history, whether he wanted to admit it or not. Still another is that Doris Burke, the former PC women’s great who is an NBA sideline reporter, essentially kept telling him the same thing.
Still, he had to come to grips with the idea that he had never seen his father, never mind having any kind of relationship with him.
“I made a vow when I was just a kid that one of the main things I wanted to accomplish in my life was that one day he’d know my name,” said Rose.
He was named after him for one thing, “Jalen” comprising of the first two letters of his father’s name (James), and three letters of his uncle’s name. But his childhood seems like something out a Dickens novel, something far away from the fame and riches of the NBA.
“We had no electricity, no hot water, no heat,” he once said in a magazine article, as his mother struggled to raise four kids as a single parent. “We’d wake up in the morning to wash with water heated on a hot plate. And we’d go to bed every night wearing skull caps, sweat shirts, and gloves.”
But from the time he became part of the “Fab Five” at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s he was known in the basketball world as “Jimmy Walker’s kid.” As if his father had become some ghost who hovered over his life, even if his mother rarely spoke about him.
I remember approaching Rose in the Michigan locker room in the Superdome at the 1993 Final Four. I said how I used to know his father, at least peripherally, had played against him several times. But it was apparent that day he had no interest in that, not then.
Their story was written about shortly afterward in Mitch Albom’s 1993 book “The Fab Five.”
“I didn’t handle the situation well,” Walker says in the book. “I remember Jeanne [Rose’s mother] being angry.”
In 2007 Rose went to Walker’s funeral service. According to ESPN The Magazine, “He remained seated, his head partially bowed, his emotions visibly scrambled.”
Later, he said that father and son had arranged to meet for the first time, but then Walker died of lung cancer, and Rose said, “I was hurt, saddened, and selfishly disappointed that we never had a chance to meet.”
That was seven years ago.
On Friday, Rose will be on the PC campus for the first time.
He will tour the campus Friday afternoon. He will walk down the hallway in Alumni Hall where the pictures of the storied past stare out. One is of his father holding a trophy over his head in Madison Square Garden, back when his future was all ahead of him. Rose will address this year’s Friars. He will be the headliner of “Midnight Madness,” the symbolic start of this new college basketball season.
“I’m glad I was able to make peace with my father,” said Jalen Rose. “I used to have a negative feel about him and now I don’t.
” And he will do it all in the same gym his father once turned into a personal shrine, the one where the echoes of all those past cheers still float around if you only listen hard enough, back when looking at Jimmy Walker was like looking at the game’s future.
breynold@providencejournal.com On Twitter @breynolds401
(401) 277-7340
