Memphis’ Rose is new Kidd on block

Maybe, just maybe, there is a way to get Memphis point guard Derrick Rose off his game.

The sight of a needle.

“I’m terrified of needles,” Rose said.

The freshman standout -- a virtual lock to be an NBA lottery pick in June -- sat out almost eight minutes of the Tigers’ victory over Michigan State in an NCAA South Regional semifinal last week, resisting stitches after he was cut above his right eye.

“I thought they were stitching him, and I was mad at the doctors,” Memphis Coach John Calipari said. “How can it take you that long to stitch him? Go tell them to hurry.”

Scared and upset, Rose kept resisting until doctors finally glued the wound closed instead, and he returned to the game.

“That shows you,” Calipari said. “He’s just a young kid.”

Funny Calipari should mention the word kid. NBA point guard Jason Kidd is the player Rose is most often compared to.

UCLA Coach Ben Howland, whose team plays Memphis in a Final Four semifinal Saturday in San Antonio, sees a resemblance between the broad-shouldered 6-foot-3, 205-pound Rose -- an impressive rebounder -- and Kidd, a 6-4, 210-pound NBA All-Star.

Rod Strickland, a former NBA point guard who is on Calipari’s staff as director of student-athlete development, sees it too.

“He’s a triple-double waiting to happen,” Strickland said after watching Rose’s 21-point, nine-assist, six-rebound performance against Texas in the regional final.

Not if there are any syringes around.

“If I would have got stitches, they would have had to stick a needle right above my eye,” Rose said. “I was pouting and stormed out of the locker room. I was mad.”

Rose’s needle phobia might stem from a childhood bicycle accident, although for some reason it hasn’t prevented him from getting tattoos. But rest assured, Calipari said, it is real.

“When I tell you terrified, I mean, like if there’s something that scares you where your heart races,” he said. “Like snakes, or a spider or mice, whatever fear you have, that’s his. Sweat pours from him. He’s deathly afraid of needles.”

A stomach virus this season nearly undid Rose.

“He threw up, so now he’s dehydrated,” Calipari said. “If they give him the medicine through the IV, you’re good in 24 hours.

“He’s laying on the table. He’s tight. He’s sweating. His veins are small because he’s dehydrated. So they go to do it, and the first one, they miss. Now he’s like, ‘No!’

“So I’ve got to come off the practice floor, and I’ve got to talk to him. . . . And I’m holding his hand. He’s saying, ‘Coach, I can’t do it!’ Tears coming down. So I start pinching his arm, telling him, this is what it’s going to feel like.

“I’m rubbing his arm. I’m holding his hand. Finally they get it in, and 24 hours later, he’s fine.”

It’s clear that like some of the other freshmen who have starred this season, Rose is part man, part teenager.

Somebody asked him about the rest of the freshmen.

“It doesn’t matter what grade you’re in,” Rose said. “If you can ball, you can ball.”

Texas Coach Rick Barnes left impressed after the South Regional final.

“He gets going to the rim, and you know, we felt early that we wanted to take charges, but he’s so evasive,” Barnes said. “I could tell by looking at our players’ faces when I said that, like, ‘I’m sure that looks like we can, but he was just kind of slippery.’ He just slips around and comes at you so hard, and then he just comes in around the rim and can elevate.

“And I tell you, last week when I saw him up close . . . I was impressed with his size. . . . He was the player I was impressed with, just physically.”

Calipari likes Rose’s manner, as well, and he attributes that in part to a protective family. Rose grew up on the South Side of Chicago and graduated from Simeon Career Academy -- the same school as Ben Wilson, rated the top high school player in the nation when he was shot to death in 1984.

When others began to see Rose’s basketball ability, his mother, Brenda, who raised four boys on her own, asked his three older brothers to watch over him.

“The kid’s almost got a little bit of naivete, because they shielded him,” Calipari said. “If that dude walked where he wasn’t supposed to. . . .

“The families that have done that have kept all the scoundrels away, the hanger-ons, the ‘I’m for you as long as I’m gettin’ mine too,’ those people. They just seem to keep them all away.”

Rose’s brother Reggie became his AAU coach, and one very influential outsider was allowed into the fold: William Wesley, the ubiquitous figure who is known in NBA and college basketball circles as “Worldwide Wes.”

Rose chose Memphis and made a splashy debut, with 17 points, six rebounds and five assists in his first game, against Tennessee Martin.

But his games weren’t always head-turners. In an overtime win over USC at Madison Square Garden in December, he had nine points, 10 rebounds and four assists in a game that didn’t become the showdown between Rose and USC’s O.J. Mayo many expected.

“Tim Floyd threw a triangle and two at us and we died, and we didn’t know what to do,” Calipari said. “But he just willed us to win. He had a steal, a block, an assist and did whatever. It wasn’t like he said, ‘I’m going to score 30 points.’ He said, ‘I’m going to do all of the other things to help us win the game.’ And that’s what he did.”

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robyn.norwood@latimes.com