Derrick Rose Almost Died As A Youth After Drinking Cup of Bleach

Derrick Rose has had quite the journey as an NBA player. But even the drastic ups and downs of his career struggle to live up to Rose’s life story, a true rags-to-riches tale after growing up on the south side of Chicago. Rose is releasing a book detailing his remarkable journey from Chicago to the Bulls, his ACL injuries, and everything that occurred afterwards.

The Chicago Tribune got an early copy of the book, slated to come out in September, and wrote an article with some nuggets of information. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, including tidbits about the infamous Jimmy Butler practice, but one that stands out in particular concerns Rose’s brush with death as a kid. He apparently drank an entire cup of bleach, thinking it was water.

Now, kids are generally pretty dumb, and all around the country children probably do dangerously stupid things like this all the time. But an entire cup of bleach? My goodness. A sip, maybe a gulp, I’d get it. I struggle to understand how Rose got through an entire cup without, at any point, thinking to himself, “Hmm. This tastes odd.” This wasn’t Rose’s only example of a close encounter with death or serious injury; at the age of 12, he and a friend thought it would be fun to throw lit cigarettes at the gas tank of an abandoned truck. That’s more in line with a classic dumb kid thing to do, though. Tossing back a whole cup of bleach, on the other hand?

The fact that he survived is extremely impressive, and proves he must have a mighty constitution to withstand it. We’re all glad he did, too, as he’s one of the more inspiring stories of coming back from injury after injury, even after defying the odds to be there in the first place. I look forward to reading his book and learning how he even got his hands on a cup of bleach.