It's rare for a player to have a father who was the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft. Unofficially, there are only eight second-generation NBA players who can say that their dads were the top draftees of their class. Among the eight, former Indiana Pacers star Jalen Rose stands out, but for the wrong reason.
Rose is the only baller on the list whose family name is different from his father's. He is also the only player among the eight who did not have his pops by his side in his NBA journey. Worse, Jalen never even got the chance to meet his old man in person.
Not many know his story because, as he admitted, he chose not to talk about it while he was still playing in the NBA.
"I never talked about my father. I never talked about the turbulence in my childhood. And so to be the guy whose father was the No. 1 overall pick of the 1967 NBA Draft and never meet him, I used to walk around with his basketball card," said Rose during his appearance on the Tamron Hall Show recently.
It wasn't until he was in middle school when Jalen learned that his father was Jimmy Walker , the 1967 NCAA scoring champion from Providence who was taken first overall in that year's NBA Draft by the Detroit Pistons . He played a total of nine seasons for three teams in the association and was a two-time NBA All-Star who scored a total of 11,655 career points.
But while Jimmy was a prolific scorer on the basketball court, he was equally productive off it. During the interview, Rose said that Walker fathered 13 children from 11 different women. He was one of them.
Walker met Jalen's mother, Jeanne, at a West Detroit night spot late in his basketball career. He was married at that time but did not tell her. They hooked up and Jeanne became pregnant with Jalen. But shortly after she gave birth, he literally disappeared from their lives.
"A year after Jalen was born, I told Jimmy, 'If you don't give me a dime, at least be a father to your son.' He couldn't even do that," said Jeanne, who worked as a keypunch clerk for Chrysler.
Jeanne rarely talked about Jimmy to Jalen because, in her words, "What was there to say?" Meanwhile, little Jalen heard stories about his dad being a basketball player. But he did not know at what level and how good he was. When he finally knew, he bought a Jimmy Walker basketball card and kept it in his pocket for several reasons.
"I use it for inspiration and motivation. But I also used it for spite, to be honest. He wore 24 in high school; I wore 42. I sure did because I was like, 'He's going to know my name one day and I'm going to be somebody one day and I'm going to make him regret not being in my life' type of thing, so I had that energy," added Jalen.
Likewise, Jimmy did not know that the son he had abandoned in Detroit was a very good basketball player. And it wasn't until Jalen was 15 that he knew his kid was a prep star. Soon, Walker was watching Rose on TV as one of the fabled "Fab Five." During March Madness, he wrote his mobile phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to Detroit Free Press writer Mitch Albom and asked Albom to give it to his son, along with a handwritten letter.
Albom gave it to Jalen while the Wolverines were in the Final Four. But Rose did not open the letter until seven years later, when he was already in the NBA. He said he wanted to be ready for anything before reading it. He also got the number and gave Walker a call. They finally talked and talked several times, but later fell apart. Jalen claims they planned to meet in July 2007, but Jimmy passed away on July 2nd after a bout with lung cancer.
