LAS VEGAS — When Derrick Rose took a moment this week to reflect on his NBA career, he didn’t reminisce on his MVP season with the Chicago Bulls, his fierce playoff battles with LeBron James or even the gutting injuries that transformed him from a superstar into a sixth man. Instead, Rose, who retired in September at 35, harbored one unexpected regret: He waited too long to open up to – teammates about his passion for chess.
NBA players have long turned to card games and video games to pass the time during their grueling, travel-heavy seasons, but Rose stumbled into a new obsession after reading an article about chess’s potential mental health benefits. Like many novices, he studied opening sequences such as the Sicilian Defense and began playing regularly on a phone app. But Rose hesitated to recruit his fellow ballers: For reasons he can’t fully explain, he felt the cerebral game was out of place in the basketball space. Years after they played together for the Bulls in 2008, Rose discovered that longtime NBA forward Drew Gooden also enjoyed the Game of Kings.
