Greg Rose: “The Silent Assassin” 

Greg Rose: The Silent Assasin Behind Thornridge’s Historic State Championship Run

Written by Scott Lynn, author of THORNRIDGE: The Perfect Season in Black and White and SPORTS IDOLS’ IDOLS: First Heroes of Our Heroes.

On an undefeated 1971-72 state championship team that featured three first-team All-State seniors, it might have been easy to overlook junior forward Greg Rose. However, his teammates understood how critical Rose was to the success of the (Dolton) Thornridge HS team, which many consider to be one of – if not the – best in Illinois high school basketball history.

Rose, a quiet kid while attending Thornridge, talked only to his closest friends. His quiet demeanor off the court was also evident on the basketball floor. Even during a game, he rarely spoke.

“That was just his personality,” Mike Bonczyk, the Falcons’ All-State point guard, told me for my book, THORNRIDGE: The Perfect Season in Black and White.  “Rose was a silent assassin. He went out and played and never said a word.”

Bonczyk emphasized that Rose was pivotal to the success of the team that went 33-0, after going 31-1 while winning the final single class Illinois championship the previous year.

“There was not a matchup for Greg Rose,” said Bonczyk. “Greg was six-four. He knew how to get to the offensive glass. If I got the ball in the middle on the break, I knew Greg was going to be in a {fastbreak} lane. You could match up with me and you can match up with (Quinn) Buckner, but the X-Factor was Greg Rose. He was awfully good.”

Another starter on the 1971-72 championship team, Ernie Dunn, agreed, “I personally think (Rose) was the most talented out of our whole group as far as athletic ability; the ability to just stop on a dime and do anything he wanted to. He was just unbelievable.”

In December of 1971, Letterman magazine honored Buckner, the Illinois Player of the Year, as the nation’s top high school athlete. After all, the 6-3, 200-pounder was an All-American in both basketball and football.  However, IBCA Hall of Fame coach Ron Ferguson, who guided the Falcons to the consecutive state titles in 1971 and 1972, thought Rose was just as instrumental to the team’s success as Buckner or the Falcons’ All-State center Boyd Batts.

“Oh yeah, he could jump higher than any of them,” Ferguson told me for the book. “Rose could jump out of the gym, and he was quicker than the devil.”

While Rose excelled on defense, serving as the point man on the Falcons’ devastating 1-2-1-1 full court press, he preferred the offensive end of the court. A volume shooter, Rose averaged fifteen field goal tries per game. But he was efficient, leading the 1971-72 Falcons with a team best field goal percentage of 55%, even though many of his attempts came from a distance that today would be a 3-point shot.

Rose averaged 18.1 PPG, third best behind Buckner (22.7 PPG) and Batts (19.1 PPG), who got most of their points in the paint. Rose was arguably the best long-distance shooter on the team. He could tickle the twine from deep, regularly contributing beautiful string music from the perimeter.

These days, Rose is still providing beautiful music to his fans. He has been a successful R&B singer in the mold of Teddy Pendergrass, performing mostly in the Los Angeles area. He says the surge of adrenalin he gets from performing on stage is identical to the rush he got while draining 20-foot jumpers in the state championship games he played for Thornridge in the early 1970s.

From “silent assassin” to talented music maker, Greg Rose is, and always has been, a smooth operator, on and off the court. Don’t let him sneak up on you.

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