Derrick Rose eager to shine light on NBA’s secret obsession: Chess

LAS VEGAS — Standing before NBA peers and grandmasters, dozens of hoop heads and chess enthusiasts, Derrick Rose’s words passed through his throat like 30-pound dumbbells.

He addressed a crowd he wasn’t sure would show. Chesstival, a chess tournament he hosted last weekend at Wynn Las Vegas, was his passion project, his hopeful attempt at magnifying his secretive, longtime hobby. It made him nervous.

Rose never had to convince people to watch him play for the Chicago Bulls. His belonging needed no reassurance. He was a perpetually airborne, homegrown MVP. Rose, like his NBA peers, kept his newest obsession private during his playing days. So tight-lipped that it bordered on taboo.

Sunday was his step forward from secrecy. A long-awaited step toward growing the game.

“It’s (600) million people that play, but everybody say it so quietly,” Rose said about chess. “Now I’m tryna get them to yell about it, or put visibility or eyes on the game knowing that it’s been around for thousands of years.”

Rose was unaware of his chess-playing peers until his NBA career finished. On Sunday, he had lined them up across the stage, paired with world-renowned grandmasters. Rajon Rondo was once one of his fiercest rivals. Rose and Tony Snell shared a locker room for three seasons. Drew Gooden was one of Chicago’s veterans during Rose’s rookie year; yet they never spoke a word about the game they all secretly loved.

His vision was meant to play out at Madison Square Garden a couple years earlier. With patience, Rose’s ambition aligned with the Freestyle Chess Tour and the endeavors of its co-founders, Magnus Carlsen — the top-ranked player in the world — and Jan Henric Buettner.

Carlsen and other grandmasters such as Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana paired with both former and current NBAers for a night of live-streamed, single-elimination games with $25,000 on the table for their charity of choice. The experts lurked over the hoopers’ shoulders until they were forced to let go of their hands for the second competition, a round robin that consisted of five rounds in which a larger batch of NBA players competed against each other for more prize money.

For the length of the night, they followed the rules of Freestyle Chess, where games are played with pawns in their traditional places, but back row pieces are randomized.

Rose, an investor in the Freestyle Chess tour, already knew everyone on stage. He’d streamed Carlsen’s matches and watched the others on YouTube. He’d ripped from their games and been curious about their personalities. He told Carlsen he’d been dying to know if the dialogue between players during matches was genuine or if, “y’all out there BS-ing.”

He nodded as Carlsen, his eventual partner, pointed out theoretical attacks. Rose cheesed through his moves, half-jokingly urging the official to check his opponent’s changes.

For minutes, the remarks stopped. His eyes scanned the board as if his dribble were changing hands. His new hopstep is less explosive than calculated. Carlsen couldn’t save him from a first-round out; the room collectively groaned over the move that buried Rose.

“I had anxiety whenever I (played basketball),” Rose said. “I never have anxiety whenever I play chess. Losing is actually worse in chess than basketball. After you lose in chess, it makes you want to fight. In basketball, I never got that mad.

“Losing is the best thing in chess. You start to see how important just one move is. And that one move is a choice in life.”

His favorite maneuver in chess is the Sicilian defense, when he breaks away from the traditional route of mirroring his opponent’s first move. It encourages conflict sooner.

“I got jankiness to my game,” he said.

This obsession began in adulthood. Rose hoped for ways to sharpen his mind when he stumbled upon chess. He was soon fascinated by the rules, the defenses and the optionality.

“Me believing that once you get older, (when) you transcend, that you only got your memories,” Rose said. “And I want to make sure that when I am older, I’m fresh mentally.”

Rose can’t help but think of what chess might’ve meant to his early life. To the kid who struggled and rose from Englewood. His investment in the game is his hope of handing a new generation of kids the pieces he didn’t have then.

“That’s the goal, getting kids to critically think,” Rose said. “I said this prior — where I’m from, getting kids to think before they pull the trigger, before they do harm.

“I feel like the game can prevent it if you’re playing it at an earlier age. I’m not saying it’s the solution, but (you) gotta start somewhere. I feel like this can be a start.”

Rose expressed admiration for players who have put years into honing their craft but play to sustain an inadequate living. Those who’ve seen more moves than dollars.

“You got players dedicating their whole life to the sport,” Rose said. “Man, somebody gotta look out.”

Part of Rose’s concern lay in whether his investment would be mistaken for sudden interest. Rose, despite his fascination with Freestyle Chess, has no intentions of minimizing chess in its traditional form.

“We’re not trying to kill the sport or think about it in a crass way,” Rose said. “We’re adding to the sport. Traditional chess is always going to be there. Just like basketball is always going to be there, but you have an All-Star Game to bring people in.”

He looked on at the dimly lit rows of seats inside the carpeted ballroom of the Wynn, among them a frayed replica of his Bulls jersey. The jet black had faded to gray. The letters peeled. Loyalty is threaded into that red polyester. His paths meshed by the same thread.

His post-retirement time has been split between his construction business and a flower shop. But chess was there even during his hoop career. During his best and darkest days. For so long, he kept that fascination tucked away like the folded chessboard he carried during his final season.

Seeing the reception Sunday, the love from his colliding worlds, he moves and sounds as if he wished he’d proclaimed chess’s place in his sphere sooner.

Rose floated around the venue as players advanced through the tournament. In the hallway, he bumped into NBA champion and fellow Chicagoan Tony Allen. Allen noted that when he heard of Rose’s event, he needed to come see it for himself. Allen knew, like few others, that Rose had long planted these seeds. It was Rose who helped introduce Allen’s son to chess.

“It’s crazy,” Allen said. “(Rose) put the chessboard in front of my son.”

“Told you, bruh,” Rose nodded triumphantly.

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