Derrick Rose has three older brothers and no father. By the time he was in 7th grade, growing up in the drug- and gang-infested Englewood neighborhood on Chicago's south side, he could dunk. And the word about his prodigious talent was getting out.

Rose's brothers -- Dwayne, Reggie and Allan -- banded together to become that father figure. One of them almost always took him to school or picked him up. Attended his practices.

"When we were looking at high schools for Derrick," Dwayne told Sports Illustrated last fall, "we looked at how many gang areas he'd have to go through to get to school."

The Rose brothers decided on Simeon Career Academy, which is poignant. The school's gym is named after Ben Wilson, a former student who was rated the No. 1 prep basketball player in the nation entering his senior season. However, on Nov. 20, 1984, Wilson, who was by every account a straight arrow and well-liked student, was shot and killed on the eve of his first basketball game. The motive was purely jealousy.

At Simeon the tradition is that the team's best player wears Wilson's No. 25, which fit snugly on Rose. He led Simeon to back-to-back state titles, the first time a Chicago Public League school had ever done so. And when it came time for Rose, whose brothers prohibited him from speaking to the media (or most any other adult not in their family), to announce his college, he held a joint-press conference that included two teammates who were signing with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"They deserve a press conference, too," said Rose.

Derrick Rose has five tattoos. He also had a 3.2 GPA in high school and a trio of older siblings (his mom, Brenda, oversaw his non-basketball development) who relished being their brother's keeper.

Joey Dorsey's father, Richard Griffin, parted ways with his mother, Charlene Dorsey, when he was still in the womb. Griffin and Dorsey occasionally saw one another for the first two years of Dorsey's life. Then, for 11 years, Griffin disappeared.

When Dorsey was 13, Charlene contacted one of his uncles and inquired as to whether Richard Griffin would like to meet his son. She was told that he would rather not.

"You can imagine what that did to my son," Charlene told the Memphis Commercial Appeal. "It crushed him. It crushed him."

In November of 2005, early in Dorsey's sophomore season at Memphis, Griffin contacted Charlene. He now lived on Long Island and was keeping track of his son's basketball exploits. Griffin asked Charlene if he might attend the preseason NIT at Madison Square Garden and see Dorsey for the first time since he was an infant. Memphis officials made the ticket arrangements ... and then Griffin failed to show.

No one in Joey Dorsey's family ever graduated from high school. By summer's end, if he keeps it real, Dorsey will graduate from college.

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