I learned a long time ago that worrying about that shit—trying to judge people—can cut into a man’s party time. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if a particular person uses you or not. If it won’t be this person, it’ll be that person. If it won’t be that person, it’ll be this person. Go down the line. But whatever happens, by my way of thinking, you can’t let that kind of cynical bullshit rule your life. You should always leave the door open.
Reality Check: Trust first, and ask questions later.
After a couple of hours at Cheetah’s, the booze had really kicked in, and I was ready to move on; so we took off for the Hard Rock, got a couple of rooms. The stripper said her goodbyes, and Mike and the bodyguard thought they were done for the night. Wrong. Next stop: the circular bar above the Hard Rock casino where I bought rounds of drinks for everybody. People were cracking up just looking at me. I could hardly walk; I was still in those funky green hospital scrubs, and I was still partying. Mike kept saying, “How do you do this? How do you do this?” I was just used to it. It was normal for me. It was what I did. By now it’s about 11:00 p.m., and I decided I wanted to go to the strip club across the street—that’s the last thing I remember.
By then, I had been partying for almost 48 hours straight—a good showing, but well short of my record of three days. I had wrapped up that binge by passing out in the Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Vegas. Another proud moment.
When I began to sober up the next day, I realized that I was fucked in a million different ways. First, not even Dennis Rodman could play ball anytime soon with the mangled shins and bangedup knees. Second, the Vegas slogan, “What happens here stays here,” was not working for me. If you’re “Dennis Rodman,” what happens here or anywhere, ends up on the AP wire, in every fucking newspaper, and on every television station at home and abroad—including Denver, home of the Nuggets.
Reality Check:If you’re famous, you’re news 24/7, especially when the news is bad.
As if the regular media weren’t bad enough, it just so happened that this was during the time ESPN was taping the reality show Rodman on the Rebound.The idea was to document my comeback to the NBA (what a joke that turned out to be). My close friend and agent Darren Prince calls up the sons-of-bitches at ESPN and gets them to fly to Vegas and get some video of me at the lowest point of my life. It wasn’t pretty. He later told me he hoped that when I saw the tape it would shock me into sobriety. I later told him that— fucked-up shins or not—he was lucky his skinny white ass had been in West Orange, New Jersey.
Since I was a kid, I have always prided myself on being disciplined in the things that really matter—in the weight room, on the court (forget the refs), in how I play the game—defense, rebounding. Off court was my business; but suddenly things had changed.
My partying had made a liar out of Darren. For months, he had been telling every NBA general manager who would listen that Dennis Rodman had cleaned up his act. Based on that half-truth, he had the Denver deal lined up. And if that had gone south, he had the ear of Phil Jackson, who was then coaching L.A. for the first time. But now I was too hot to handle. Two years of Darren’s work, and my comeback, were down the drain. So I was thinking maybe I ought to cut down a bit, and I promised Thaer I would do just that, as soon as I got past the Radio Music Awards.
After the motorcycle accident, Darren was so worried about my partying he called in the cavalry, my former bodyguard, Wendell “Big Will” Williams, a six-foot-four-inch, 400-pound black man. When Wendell talks, people, including Dennis Rodman, tend to listen. Wendell was coming out of bodyguard retirement to make sure I did what I was supposed to do when I was supposed to do it. He started out strong at the Radio Music Awards in Las Vegas. It was exactly a week after the Treasures motorcycle crash.
Despite my usual protests—“I don’t want to do this. This is bullshit. It’s not gonna help my career”—that afternoon Wendell managed to get me, sober no less, to this series of round-robin interviews with every fucking radio station in America.
“So tell me about Madonna, Dennis?”
“What’s Michael Jordan really like, Dennis?”
“Where’s your dress, Dennis?”
This went on for hours before the actual awards show that night, and Wendell wouldn’t let me drink. Afterwards it was like I’d just run a marathon, and I went out by the pool to relax with a cool one while he went upstairs to shower. When Wendell got back down, I was wasted. This was all new to him. In the three years since he’d worked with me, I’d started spending much more time with my friend Herr Jägermeister, and this was his first time to see Dennis Rodman, daytime drunk.
So I went through the “I don’t want to go to any awards ceremony,” “It’s bullshit,” “It’s not gonna help my career,” routine, and he reminded me that they were paying me good money to be there. Money I’d already spent. So he dragged me into the auditorium.
I don’t remember much of this, but Wendell says I was like some wino on skid row. He was holding me up, I was ranting, but my speech was so slurred nobody could understand what the fuck I was saying. The producers of the show got wind I was drunk, cancelled my award presentation, and even denied me a backstage pass. I went backstage anyway, falling-down drunk. A couple of years before, stars like Al Pacino and Meryl Streep were coming up to me, seeking me out, and now B-level celebrity hacks were turning their backs, avoiding me. I saw Puff Daddy giving an interview and started pinching him on the ass. He blew me off, and his crew was like, “Get him the fuck away from us!” Wendell pulled me aside. Then security showed up and drug my ass out of there—no backstage pass. “Fuck this place!” I shouted to Wendell. “Fuck this! Let’s go. Let’s go.” So where were we going? A strip club. Where else?
After the Radio Music Awards, everybody was on my ass. Darren was on my ass. Wendell was on my ass. Thaer was on my ass. Even my wife, Michelle, was on my ass. After the motorcycle accident and my skid-row drunk performance at the Radio Music Awards, ESPN sat Michelle down for an interview.
“I’m done. I’m ready for a divorce,” she told the interviewer.
This from a woman who has “Mrs. Rodman” tattooed just above her butt in letters about an inch high.
“He doesn’t care about himself; he doesn’t care about his kids; he doesn’t care about me. He has no respect for himself.”
It got worse.
“Not only am I gone, and his kids are gone, but his career is gone. He pretty much has lost everything.”
She still wasn’t done.
“He doesn’t want the last thing to be said about him was that he was some drunk has-been. He definitely doesn’t want that.”
So by the end of October 2003, I was royally fucked. The wife and family were gone, Darren, Will, and Thaer had one foot out the door, and my NBA dream was over. Hell, even the “Dennis Rodman” entertainment franchise was in danger.
Reality Check: After almost a decade of steady partying, I wasn’t having the party—the party was having me and having me good.
There was some good news.
Whenever I go through something traumatic like the Treasures motorcycle accident, something so emotionally and physically draining, I have like an out-of-body experience. And shortly after the accident, I found myself sitting there, taking a look across the room at what remained of Dennis Rodman, and I was left wondering: “How exactly did this happen? How did I get here? Is there any way out?”
CHAPTER TWO
THE ACCIDENTAL CELEBRITY
It was 1998 in Chicago, my third year with the Bulls, and I was white hot. I was the second most famous player in the NBA, right behind a guy named Michael Jordan. I was getting dozens of phone calls a day from charities, promoters, producers—everyone wanting a piece of my ass. I had an agent, bodyguards, and hangerson. I had a Ferrari, a garage full of motorcycles, and even a rock star tour bus to ferry my partying friends and me from club to club after hours. I don’t even know how much money I was making—millions—and I was spending it as fast a
s—sometimes faster than—I made it.
Feel like going to Vegas? Rent a private jet. Want a new car? How ’bout a Bentley? Girlfriend want a new wardrobe? Jewelry? Boob job? No fucking problem. I had it all and then some.
Ever heard that phrase “wretched excess”?
I was living it.
Meanwhile I was getting more famous by the day. Shit, Barbara Walters, Barbara-fucking-Walters, had come begging my ass for an interview. How did this happen? How did this skinny ex-janitor from nowhere become the hottest thing on the planet? It all started in a parking lot in Detroit.
For those of you who came in late, early one morning back in the spring of 1993, after I’d been with the Detroit Pistons for seven years, I ended up sitting in my pickup truck in this concrete wasteland that was the parking lot of Detroit’s basketball stadium, the Palace of Auburn Hills. I had a rifle in my lap, and I was trying to decide whether I should blow my brains out.
There was a lot on my mind. Coach Chuck Daly, who had been like a father to me, was gone, shoved aside; the world championship Detroit team was being taken apart piece by piece; and my daughter, Alexis, was living a couple of thousand miles away in California. My ex-wife, from a marriage that lasted exactly 82 days, had decided she didn’t want me in their lives. While I’d fulfilled most of my dreams in the NBA—won a couple of championships, a series of rebounding and defensive honors—I was suffering from a severe case of “is-that-all-there-is?” syndrome. Somehow, it wasn’t enough, and what was worse, the real Dennis Rodman had been lost while I struggled to become an NBA poster boy. I decided that was going to change and put the rifle down. From then on, I was going to do what I wanted, when I wanted. “Dennis,” the geek from the Oak Cliff projects in Dallas, was dead, and “Dennis Rodman” was born. Not that I knew what that meant. Not then. I fell asleep in the parking lot. Come daylight, the cops arrived, hauled me off to see a shrink, who pronounced me sane, and the media did what the media does.
I asked Detroit for a trade, ended up in San Antonio, and even before the season began, the new “Dennis Rodman” reared his lovely head. The occasion was the preseason opening of the brand new Alamodome. I showed up with blond hair to a cheering crowd. It was the Spurs’ first clue that there was something seriously wrong with Dennis Rodman. Bottom line for the front-office suits: the motherfucker is crazy.
I loved it.
While I was a bit of a celebrity in Detroit, I was never the star on-court or off. “Isiah Thomas” was the name above the title, and I didn’t even get top billing as the baddest of the bad boys. That honor went to center Bill “you-best-have-major-medical” Laimbeer, a white guy who left opponents like Scottie Pippen wondering if driving to the basket was worth the risk of ending their career. But, like it or not, in San Antonio my ever-changing hair color attracted a ton of attention from the public and the NBA, and I would end up center stage, sharing the limelight with teammate David Robinson, the Naval Academy graduate with the “Mr. Clean” image.
I also got my first tattoo in San Antonio, and the NBA didn’t approve of that, either. I don’t even know how many tattoos I have now, maybe 100, up and down my arms, legs, back, chest, and neck, covering about three-quarters of my body. The “tats” pretty much tell my life story beginning with the first—a picture of my daughter Alexis on my left forearm—running through a tribute to my current wife Michelle on the right side of my neck.
The hair and tattoos were a huge issue then, but now they’re no big deal, thanks to a trailblazing Dennis Rodman. Like I told The New York Times, “Even all the boring white guys got tattoos now,” not to mention all those pretty little middle-class girls with flowers etched on their pretty little white asses.
Over the years, even the NBA has developed a sense of humor about my hair, and on its web site, under the heading “Dennis Rodman,” they actually report the Spurs 1993-94 won-loss record based on my hair color (Blond was the clear winner at 35-14). As for tattoos, a book called In the Paint: Tattoos of the NBA, reports more than two-thirds of the league is “tatted out.” Rasheed Wallace of Detroit has a fine collection. Hair? Anything goes. Ben Wallace, also of Detroit, alternates between this wild-ass fro (he says he hasn’t had a haircut in five years) and corn rows, which now are seen all over the league. I think Allen Iverson got that one going.
Back in the day, my hair and tattoos not only pissed off the NBA establishment, they were the first little steps toward moving the name of Dennis Rodman out of the cultish world of professional basketball and into the consciousness of mainstream America. Not that I cared. I wasn’t looking for fame. I was just being “Dennis.”
That first year with the Spurs, I would get a taste of national— hell, international—celebrity when I dated Madonna for like six months. If you believed the media accounts, that was more about Madonna than me—just another “boy toy” was the way it played out. But it was a whole lot more than that. Madonna wanted to have my babies.
Here’s how far it went. One time I was in Las Vegas at the craps table doing my thing, and I got this frantic, “Somebody died!” kind of phone call from New York City. I picked up the phone, and Madonna was like, “I’m ovulating! I’m ovulating! Get your ass up here!”
So I left my chips on the table, on the table, flew five hours to New York, and did my thing. We got done, and she was standing on her head trying to get the full benefit, just like any girl trying to get pregnant. I flew back to Vegas and picked up my game where I left off.
Crazy shit.
Madonna had first called the Spurs’ office out of the blue wanting to get hold of me. This was in 1993. I was, like, “Whatever.” I knew who she was and everything, but I didn’t like her music—too bubblegum—didn’t like her videos, didn’t like anything about her— her media image anyway. And I didn’t know what the hell this white megastar wanted from me.
Turned out the real Madonna was a cool individual. She had her shit together. And she wasn’t just in it for stud services. She wanted to get married—at least I think she did. She organized this intervention along with six female friends—the “Madonna Mafia” I called them. So Madonna was sitting right in the middle of this bunch, and she nodded at me and asked, “So you think I should marry this guy? He looks like a keeper.”
I felt like I was on trial. I didn’t even look at the fools. I mean nobody was asking me if I wanted to get married. Turned out the Madonna Mafia was cool with the idea, but I blew them off. I wasn’t in love with her. And anyway, if I had married Madonna, my career would have come second. Madonna was like a fucking industry. She was General Motors.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had gone through with it. Can you imagine? You’ve got the bad girl and the bad, bad boy. We would have been the hottest Hollywood couple of all time—the Hollywood couple everyone wanted to see and hear about. Paparazzi heaven. Every day it would have been like:
“What are they doing now?”
“What’s going on?”
“Who’s zoomin’ who?”
All that shit.
Madonna and Dennis, Dennis and Madonna, MaDennis, Denonna, one scandal after another. Dennis is over here doing this, and Madonna’s over there doing that, and they collide in the middle. Shit, we would have made Brad and Jen and what’s-her-face Jolie look like punks.
Maybe the strangest thing about my time with Madonna was when I realized she wasn’t any bigger than I was—on the street at least. When we would walk somewhere, maybe go to Rodeo Drive in L.A., it was as if she were with me. I wasn’t with her, okay? It was more like, “Dennis Rodman!” Then, “Oh, Madonna, whatever.” It was always like that. She was old news to the paparazzi. I was the new kid on the block.
One Detroit teammate would claim all my marketing success was a result of ideas I’d picked up while hanging around with Madonna. (Trust me, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about marketing.)
Actually, I started dying my hair about six months before I ever met the woman. The reaction
to the hair thing would eventually lead some people to start calling me a marketing genius. That’s cool. But at the time, it had nothing to do with marketing.
So what was it about?
There are all kinds of amateur shrinks out there making up stuff about Dennis Rodman. One guy accused me of acting out as a way of getting a fix on how valuable I was as a player. The more shit management put up with, his theory went, the more it boosted my ego. He was like, “Think the Spurs’ management would have let some sub do the rainbow hair? Son-of-a-bitch would have been gone by nightfall.” So maybe the guy was right, but that shit’s way too deep for me.
So how do I explain it? A couple of ways. First off, ever spent any time in San Antonio? As a black man? I was bored shitless. Secondly, everything I did in San Antonio was part of creating a new, free Dennis Rodman, the total makeover I had promised myself in that parking lot in Detroit. So one day, just because I felt like it, I got the hair dyed blond. The rest is marketing history—that simple, that complicated.
Reality Check: Sometimes even a blind hog finds an acorn.
During my two years in San Antonio, management and David Robinson were determined to tame—to save—Dennis Rodman. But I didn’t cooperate. Figuring “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I kept on dying my hair, painting my fingernails, getting tattoos, hanging out with weirdoes, fine-tuning the new me. So it didn’t work out for them.
Thank God.
My first year with the Spurs, I won the league rebounding title for the third year in a row and made the NBA All-Defensive second team. Thanks to my play, David Robinson was free to concentrate on offense, and he led the NBA in scoring with almost 30 points per game. The next year, I again won the rebounding title, the Spurs had the best regular-season record in the league (62-20), and Robinson was named league MVP.
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