One oft-injured former athlete has some advice for current oft-injured Chicago Bulls superstar Derrick Rose: Leave the game.
For a year; then come back.
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Larry Brown Sports reported that current ESPN basketball analyst and former NBA player Bill Walton talked about Rose's injury during the UCLA-Washington basketball telecast earlier this week, giving the player a different perspective about what to do next.
Rose will undergo surgery to repair torn meniscus in his right knee; that was the same injury that claimed his 2013 season.
"Derrick's going to have to find a new way," Larry Brown Sports quoted Walton as saying. "But he's so young. Take a year off. Go to Hawaii, become a yogi master and just come back and then start up again."
Walton had a 10-year NBA career (there were three other full seasons that he missed with a foot injury), but he played in 80 games only once, in 1985-86 when he was the Sixth Man of the Year on the championship Boston Celtics team. His highest total among the other nine seasons was 67 games with the Los Angeles Clippers in 1984-85.
"I'm the most injured person in the history of sports," said Walton. "I missed more than nine and a half full seasons of a 14-year NBA career, a career that was ruined by structural, congenital defects."
And he had to realize how to find other outlets to cope with his inability to play basketball for long stretches.
"It destroys your life. It devastates everything about you, Larry Brown Sports reported Walton as saying. "So what you have to learn is that in a world of challenges, you have to do what you can. You figure it out and then you go out and you get the job done. You have to change on a constant basis. That's the way life is."
Rose had tried to come back slowly, even drawing the ire of sports fans when he tried to explain his mindset in November.
"I'm thinking about long term. I'm thinking about after I'm done with basketball," he said, according to ESPN.com. "Having graduations to go to, having meetings to go to, I don't want to be in my meetings all sore or be at my son's graduation all sore just because of something I did in the past. [I'm] just learning and being smart."
And that didn't work, making Walton's idea a little less far-fetched.
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