I almost didn’t write about Derrick Rose tonight.

I don’t have to, after all. No editor is asking me to do it. No one is paying me to do it. I’d rather not do it. And here’s why.

I don’t know Derrick Rose.

What I do know, I like. I had to chase the 20-year-old Chicago Bulls rookie guard for over a month to interview him for an in-depth feature story this past winter for the Tribune, but I never blamed him for the runaround.  There were always plans he did not know about and demands he seemingly could not control, and he always seemed sincerely sorry each time the interview would get postponed at the last minute.  Read more...

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Sorry. You go away for seven weeks and the first day back is exhausting. Even if the first day back only lasts for about two hours.  And I don’t even know if “back” is the right word. But I am going to start writing for ESPNChicago.com, I did venture into the White Sox clubhouse today with an actual working credential and I did experience once again the singular wonder of listening to Sox manager Ozzie Guillen up close and in person.

I never realized how much I missed that.  Read more...

Yes, I am still browsing through the same issue of Sports Illustrated.  Sorry, but it has to wait until my People Magazine is completely consumed first and that can easily take a good 10, 12 minutes.

So I’m reading and I laugh — that sarcastic, self-righteous laugh — because I see a story about a 16-year-old baseball player from Las Vegas.

I am not laughing that self-righteous laugh because Sports Illustrated and Tom Verducci, a gifted writer l once worked with for one day on the staff of Today newspaper, chose to write the story on the fabulously gifted Bryce Harper.  Read more...

Great story in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated about college football players who discover after their playing careers are over, that they are seriously overweight.

Most people would go right to the cover story on the Stanley Cup. Or the NBA Finals. Or even the feature on the 16-year-old baseball player they’re calling “Baseball’s LeBron” (more on that tomorrow). Me, I go right to the story about the fat kids.

I’m not being insensitive calling them “fat kids.” As one of them, Jeff Kendall, a 300-pound-plus lineman from the University of Oregon, said in the article: “All of a sudden you go from being a fat kid living the dream to, well, just fat.”  Read more...

Why do I get the feeling that if I jumped in front of a speeding train to rescue a group of orphans, at the press conference awarding me my medal for bravery, someone would ask me how it felt spending my career around naked men in lockerrooms?

Everyone wants to know about the naked men.

For a while, I thought maybe it had finally become a non-issue. I would speak to school groups and the kids had moved onto more mature topics like, “How much money do you make?”  Read more...