I dressed down for the occasion: Reebok baseball cap, short-sleeved gray shirt over a white tee, and jeans. I still had the hoop earrings, shades, nose studs, and lip ring. Like I told them, comeback or no comeback, “I’m gonna be Dennis Rodman.”
My comeback would give people a little reminder that Dennis Rodman was not only the proud poster boy for the stripper, biker, WrestleMania crowd, but one of the best professional basketball players of all time. I still can’t believe they left me off the list of the 50 greatest NBA players. I mean, John Stockton? Shit. Listen to my stats. Five championships (more than all but 11 other players), seven rebound titles (second only to Wilt), two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year, seven-time member of NBA defensive first team, and two-time NBA all-star. Telling you this shouldn’t be my job, but who else is going to do it?
Reality Check: You sit around waiting for somebody else to crown you king, you’ll end up a lady in waiting— waiting to take one up the ass.
After dozens of phone calls, months of wrangling, the good news had come in October of 2003. Darren called to say the Denver Nuggets were going to take me on. No long-term contract, no big NBA money—just ten grand a game—but my size-15 foot was in the door.
Not everybody was thrilled. A Denver reporter complained to ESPN about the increased workload. “Now you’re on Rodman watch,” he said. “Now you have to check the police blotter every morning when you wake up before you go to work.”
Whatever … I was psyched—not that the pending deal slowed down my partying. If anything, I cranked it up a notch, figuring what had worked for me during five championship seasons should keep on working with the Denver-fucking-Nuggets, not exactly the NBA elite.
While I was 42 at the time, I felt like I hadn’t lost a step—on the court or in the clubs. So on Sunday, October 19, I was partying at Josh Slocum’s (later “Rodman’s”), my restaurant in Newport Beach, California. It was like 3:30 in the morning, and I had been tossing back one Grey Goose and cranberry juice after another followed by shots of Jägermeister chased with Coors Light. (How’s that for product placement?) Now I had been doing this for like eight, nine, 10 hours—who’s counting?—when I got a wild hair up my ass. Let’s go to Vegas!
Soon the Dennis Rodman party mobile—a black Ford 350 XLT club cab pickup truck—pulled out of the Josh Slocum parking lot and headed east on highway 55. On board were driver Mike Diaz and a bodyguard in front, and me sprawled in back sucking down more Coors Light.
A couple of hours down the road; we made what was supposed to be a quick gas stop at this Mobil station just off the main drag in Barstow. Then I was recognized (it might have had something to do with my picture being plastered all over the hood of the truck). Anyway, I got to yapping with this guy and pulled a classic “Dennis,” giving him my shoes, a nice pair of white canvas Chuck Taylor All-Stars with red trim. Then I tried to make a deal for the station’s tow truck. I’m always doing stuff like that—take off my shirt and give it to somebody, buying this, buying that. Luckily the tow-truck deal fell through, and we were back on the road with my new favorite group, the country band Rascal Flatts, still blaring on the stereo, the same song playing over and over. Turned out the fucking thing had been stuck on repeat ever since we left Newport Beach. I was too drunk to care, and Mike and the bodyguard were afraid to do anything, having seen me in action when people bitched about me playing country music at my restaurant. It’s basically, “If you don’t like it, get out.” So Rascal Flatts it was, for like three straight hours.
We made it to Vegas around 7:00 a.m. and pulled into the far side of the empty parking lot at Treasures Gentleman’s Club and Restaurant—a brand-new, $30-million strip club open 24 hours a day. In the Las Vegas Sun, one of the owners described the place as “an upscale nightclub in an elegant, tasteful environment.”
Mike woke me up so I could get it together before we made our big entrance. I did what I could with my Levi shorts, oversized T-shirt with a Josh Slocum’s logo, knee-high basketball socks, and black rubber sandals—beachwear—just right for Treasures’ “elegant, tasteful environment.”
We drove around front to valet park. At first glance, the twin-towered joint, in what looks like sandstone, reminds you of a mosque or something, but there ain’t nothing for the religious faithful inside. Just tits and ass and a nice USDA choice 16-ounce “bone-in cowboy ribeye served with garlic mashed potatoes, sautéed vegetables, topped with spicy shoestring fried onions” if you decide to try out the “gourmet” restaurant.
When we walked in, the place was all but empty. No customers, no strippers, no bartenders or waitresses, just a couple of guys who seemed like they were really glad to see me. They stalled, giving us a quick tour of the place, as if I’d never been there before. I don’t know if “state of the art” is what you’d call it, but, as the man said, Treasures does offer a full range of gentlemen’s services: strippers, booze, and lap dances. Why a strip club? I’ll have to go along with Vegas writer Al Mancini, who allowed as how “bare breasts complement just about any leisure activity.”
They rounded up a bartender, a waitress, and a couple of strippers, and soon I was back to my steady diet of Grey Goose and cranberry juice, music blaring, girls stripping down to g-strings before getting very friendly with their poles. There might even have been a lap dance or two. After like an hour of this, the girls were bored; I was bored. So I swapped seven $100 bills for 700 ones and treated my new favorite strippers to a Dennis Rodman forte. I took the 700 ones, stepped up on stage with the girls and started throwing wads of cash up in the air creating what the Las Vegas Sun would call a “green shower.”The girls seemed to like it.
But even that wasn’t enough to hold my interest for long. On a normal night there were—what?—a couple dozen girls in the place, other customers all around raising hell. And here we sat: me, Mike, and the bodyguard, coming up on Sunday School time, with the waitress, two strippers, and a bartender who wanted to go home— seven of us all together—in this big, empty room that seats maybe 150 people. It was bleak. Time to move on. Next stop: Cheetah’s strip club.
As we were on the way out the door, this Treasures manager, bouncer, whatever, came walking in. “Hey, you’re Dennis Rodman,” he said. He laid his motorcycle helmet on the hostess counter, and that got us to talking bikes. He had just bought a new one for like $5,000. He was really proud of the thing; thought he got a good buy; wanted me to see it.
I have a thing for motorcycles. I got my first bike, a Kawasaki 1100, about 15 years ago and haven’t been without one since. I even posed on a Harley for the cover of my autobiography, Bad As I Wanna Be, but—seeing as how I was buck naked—nobody said much about the bike.
Anyway, I love motorcycles. So why not make this guy’s day? So just after 8:00 a.m., I led my little entourage of Mike, the bodyguard, the manager, and one of the strippers outside to look at the cycle. It was a red and black beauty with an attitude—a rocket with handlebars.
“You ride?” the owner asked.
“Yeah, I can ride,” I said.
“You all right to ride?”
“I’m good.”
Not.
Now, I had no helmet—the guy left his inside—no leathers, just the shorts, sandals, and T-shirt, but I hopped on anyway. As for the owner, well … “Dennis Rodman” is a hard guy to refuse.
So I started her up, did a few lazy figure-eights in this huge parking lot, nice and easy. Around about now was when I should’ve thanked the guy for his trouble, hopped off, and gone about my business. I didn’t do that. I had been awake for like 20 hours, been drinking steady for at least 12, had maybe a half-hour’s sleep, and haven’t had anything much to eat since I left Newport Beach. I was not a guy who should be operating heavy machinery. What’s more I was only days away from my last DUI (that one on water in my boat, Sexual Chocolate), and this was far from my first regrettable rendezvous with a motorcycle.
I ran into a tree the first time I ever got on a bike back in my college
days in Oklahoma and had suffered through four motorcycle accidents in all—including the one in 1995 when I separated a shoulder and missed 14 games with the Spurs. And even though I was only a few days away from realizing my dream of returning to the NBA, the booze and I decided that Dennis Rodman, the great one, was bulletproof.
So I was making these lazy figure-eights in the parking lot. At that speed, it was like reining in a horse that’s trying to take off on you. What’s Dennis Rodman know about horses? Well, I may have grown up on the streets of Dallas and made a name for myself in Chicago, but during my college days, I lived and worked on a farm in Bokchito, Oklahoma, where I rode a horse or two. The temptation is always to give the horse his head, ride that mother wherever he takes you.
Ya-fucking-hoo!
And since there’s no temptation (except drugs) that Dennis Rodman won’t give in to, not only would I give this bike her head, I would show her who was the fucking boss.
Wheelies, bro, wheelies.
The great Dennis Rodman wouldn’t just be cruising around, he’d be doin’ wheelies in the parking lot of the Treasures Gentlemen’s Club and Restaurant in Las-fucking-Vegas, Nevada. How cool is that?
So wheelies it would be on Sunday, October 19, around 8:35 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. I revved the engine and popped the clutch. Bye-bye. The thing got away from me. I veered into the curb on the left, crashed through a hedge, and the bike took off in the opposite direction headed straight for a light pole. The cops told the Las Vegas Sun I was going 70 miles per hour—that’s bullshit— claimed the thing threw me, then took off on its own. More bullshit. Wish it had. Actually, I was on the motherfucker all the way as the cycle rammed head on into the opposite curb, popped up in the air, and slammed into the light pole. The handlebars snapped off, the front end disintegrated, and the bike came down on my shins.
“When the motorcycle fell on him,” Mike Diaz said later, “it was like a bomb hit him. I thought he was dead. I honestly thought the man had gone head first into the pole. It had hit so hard, so quick, I thought he was dead.”
Later one television reporter said he saw the imprint of my knees in the bike’s gas tank. I can believe that. The motorcycle was totaled. As for me, it looked like I was going to be spending a little time in the body shop.
After the crash, Mike and the bodyguard ran over and hauled the bike off of me. I was lying on the pavement in a total daze, blood everywhere, but I still managed to say, “Don’t worry. It’s gonna be all right.”
The stripper ran up and was like, “Oh my God! Oh shit!” She was just all panicky. Panicky. Who could blame her? As Mike describes it, my right leg was “butterflied to the bone” from just below the kneecap to the middle of my shin. I thought it looked more like a split banana. Whatever. It was fucked up. The other shin, said Mike, “looked like it was just burnt up and like somebody took a razor blade and scraped all the skin off.”
“You need a doctor,” the bike owner said.
No shit. 911 time. Meanwhile somebody was yelling, “No cops! No cops!”
Yeah, right.
They wrapped my shins up in T-shirts to stop the bleeding, and in minutes, a fire truck, an ambulance, and a single cop on a motorcycle arrived. They hauled my sorry black ass to the University Medical Center. Mike, the bodyguard, and one of the strippers followed along in the truck. So did the cop toting my DUI. Of all the things I’ve done in Vegas, it was the first time ever the cops had shown up—first time ever.
And while I would swear I wasn’t drunk, and all my reps would back me up, shit, if they’d struck a match, my ass would’ve burst into flames. I admitted as much to Leno a month later. How drunk was I? I would call Darren and ask him to wire me another ten grand so I could keep partying when I got out of medical stir.
We got to the hospital and, as I was lying there all fucked up, hurting like hell—the booze starting to wear off—people began gathering around. It was like, “Hey, what’s going on, Dennis?”
Showtime.
People are taking pictures, asking for autographs, this and that. The “Dennis Rodman Total Entertainment Franchise” was now open for business from a gurney in a Las Vegas hospital.
When they finally got around to stitching me up—more than 70 stitches—the medical staff was amazed that I wouldn’t let them use Novocain. Not a big deal. For some reason, pain doesn’t really affect me as much as other people. I deal with it in the beginning, and then once my body gets adapted to it, I’m cool. So I was just sitting there casually talking to my assembled fans while they were sewing my “butterflied” shin back together.
Meanwhile, my driver, Mike Diaz, was fielding phone calls. “They wore my phone out,” he said. Agent Darren Prince was telling him to get my ass out of Vegas.
“He has a workout with the Denver Nuggets in two days,” Darren said. “I know Dennis. He can suck it up. He can play.”
Now, Mike, he didn’t want to be the one to tell Darren, “That ain’t happening.”
“You’ll have to talk to Dennis,” he said.
The second caller was Thaer Mustafa from Newport Beach. Thaer, a Palestinian-American, calls himself my “babysitter.” Actually, he’s my right-hand man in California and, after he declared a jihad on my ass for slipping out of town without telling him, he told Mike not to talk to the media.
“Do not tell anybody anything period, regardless of who they are, reporters, nothing,” said Thaer. “You know nothing. You saw nothing. You know nothing. You saw nothing.”
By the time Mike and the bodyguard got in to see me (at about three that afternoon), I was holding court with a dozen or so people who had gotten word that Dennis Rodman was in the house. There were firemen, nurses, doctors joking around, amazed I didn’t take any Novocain, laughing because I hadn’t been wearing any underwear, and when the nurses cut off my shorts, they got a little more—a lot more—than they bargained for.
This was not the first time I was the star attraction at a hospital. Any celebrity will attract that kind of staff attention, and that’s especially true if you have a condition that is the least bit interesting from a medical standpoint. Take a “broken dick.”
You get a broken dick by bending a rock solid hard-on at a right angle. The result is ruptured blood vessels and a big ole scary mess. Now this has happened to me three times, and it sounds bad, but it’s not all that serious, and it really doesn’t hurt that much. But bro, it looks bad. It looks really, really bad.
The first time I broke my dick was on the Fourth of July at this lake down along the Texas-Oklahoma border. I was doing what I do with my lady friend, we got crosswise, and suddenly my dick was spurting blood like a water hose. She was screaming, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Something’s happened! Something’s happened!” Everybody came running in to see what the ruckus was. Now I don’t embarrass easy, but hell. … The girlfriend was trying to shut it off, squeezing my dick with a towel. Meanwhile, the damn thing was swelling up like four, five, 10 times its normal size.
The last time I suffered from this ailment was in New York City, and I ended up with my dick in a sling in the emergency room of this huge hospital. They must have announced it on the public address system, because everybody—and I mean everybody—who worked in the damn place was dropping by to check out my “rare” condition. I, of course, was the life of the party, proud to share my very special, educational dick with all of these medical professionals—all in the interests of science, of course.
Time to say goodbye to my new best friends at the University Medical Center in Vegas. Since my Levi shorts and T-shirt were history, the nurses gave me these green medical scrubs to wear, the pants hitting me about mid-calf like Capri pants. Mike picked up a couple of prescriptions for pain and swelling, and I limped out of there. Soon, Mike, the bodyguard, the stripper and I were back in the truck, making our escape. Thaer was on Mike’s cell, still ranting, telling him, “You got Dennis in the truck, get him the hell out of Vegas right now.” Well Mike works for me, and I call the sho
ts, so Cheetah’s it was. Out of the hospital 20 minutes, and I was back in a strip club throwing down one Grey Goose and cranberry juice after another, still partying.
Most people after an accident, drunk or sober, would’ve just said, “Fuck it, let’s go home and relax.”
But without the daily routine of playing basketball—the endless round of practices, meetings, travel, games—I had been partying non-stop for a couple of years, and my body was on automatic pilot—automatic partying pilot—and it just wouldn’t stop. It just wouldn’t stop. It just kept feeding itself, saying, “We’re gonna keep on going. We’re gonna keep on going. We’re gonna keep on going.” And keep going we did. That’s me. I take it to the limit. I take it as far as I can take it.
So we were at Cheetah’s strip club, and all the girls wanted to do their thing. They’re thinking, “Dennis Rodman, king of the strip clubs, is in the house, and we know what he wants. Couch dances!” Not this time. You’d think they would’ve noticed something wasn’t quite right when I limped in dressed in hospital scrubs. Of course, it was dark in there. Maybe they thought the outfit was just another Dennis Rodman fashion statement. Whatever. Mike and the bodyguard did a good job of keeping them off me. They were like, “Don’t touch this man! He’s all fucked up.”
Meanwhile, this awesome stripper, who had been with us the whole time from inside Treasures through the motorcycle accident to the hospital and now to Cheetah’s, got up on stage and did her thing.
I think she really cared about me and wanted to make sure I was all right before she took off. She was what you might call “a stripper with a heart of gold.” Other nights it could go the other way. You could end up with your run-of-the-mill, star-fucking gold digger—you just never know. Any woman I meet, same basic questions. That’s what fame and money can do to you—and them. Not that I give a shit one way or the other. I think most people who meet me really like me. They think I’m a true motherfucker, honest, down to earth, and pleasant to be around. Others are just there for the ride. To them the money and fame are more attractive than I am, and when I realize that, it’s like “Fuck!” But whatever somebody’s motive is, I can roll with it.
I Should Be Dead By Now Page 2