Rose loves chess as much as basketball.
Back in the olden days, like the 80s and 90s, chess was synonymous with nerds.
You would never catch an athlete with a chess board or near the chess club because athletes were supposed to be these cool, athletic guys who only cared about their muscles and how fast they ran.
But the times have changed. Chess is now an acceptable activity that many top athletes use to relax or hone their strategic thinking.
And one of those players is Derrick Rose.
His best competitors on the Memphis Grizzlies were Steven Adams, Marcus Smart and Santi Aldama.
“You gotta try to think ahead,” says Aldama. “And it’s frustrating when you make the wrong move. It’s good for the mind.”
However, Rose and his teammates didn’t just play chess to pass time on long airplane rides -they also played it to improve their I.Q.; they played it to improve their thinking on the hardwood as the two games share common concepts such as “chunking and pattern recognition.”
Additionally, chess is a great game for teaching young people about decisions and consequences -something that Rose was brought on to the young Grizzlies to do.
RZA, founder of the rap group The Wu-Tang Clan, told the New York Times that “chess thinking” is similar to everyday thinking.
“The way you have to think in chess is good for everyday thinking, really,” he said, “especially for brothers in the urban community who never take that second look, never take that second thought.”
Chess has slowly taken over the locker rooms and team planes, and will only continue as more and more players seek to develop their strategic minds.
As RZA says in his book, The Wu-Tang Manual, “[chess is] a game of war; it’s about battle.”
And basketball games are really just individual battles in a season-long war. Thus, the importance of chess.
