I Should Be Dead By Now

by Dennis Rodman

  But by the end of that second year, I was in a pitched battle with the Spurs’ management, self-appointed den mothers Gregg Popovich, then the general manager, and head coach Bob Hill. It was especially bad with Popovich. We fought, cussed each other out, and just couldn’t get along. So San Antonio decided they’d had enough of the blond one—something about “distractions.” (Management had seemed particularly pissed when Madonna had shown up at games—at least when they weren’t kissing her ass.) So in one of the most lopsided trades in the history of professional sports, they swapped me to Chicago for Will Perdue, a journeyman, seven-foot center out of Vanderbilt best known for, well … nothing … nothing at all.

  Not that the trade came easy.

  When I became available, many teams seemed interested. Now the way the business works, teams have many options, and they keep them all open until they have a deal put together. So it’s like a guy dating four or five girls at once, telling them all, “You’re the one. We’re gonna get married soon as I get a few details ironed out.”

  By the time Chicago came calling, I had already been jilted by a couple of likely suitors. So when my agent and I met Phil Jackson at the home of Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, you might say I displayed a bit of an attitude when Phil finally got around to popping the question.

  “Dennis, we’ve decided we want to make a trade for you,” Phil said. “Would you like to play here?”

  “I don’t give a fuck if I play here or not,” I said.

  And that’s how I started the most incredible three years of my life. On court, I would be hooking up with the un-retired Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen to win three consecutive NBA championships, while off-court I would become the toast of Chicago.

  While all this was going on with San Antonio and Chicago, I had been working on my autobiography with San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Tim Keown. Entitled Bad As I Wanna Be, the book hit bookshelves in the spring of 1997, and that changed everything. The transformation began in Chicago with a simple book signing that turned into a media event.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BOOK SMARTS

  Chicago, Saturday, May 4, 1996. It was the morning of my first book signing for Bad As I Wanna Be, and I wanted to do something different. So a few of my gay, transvestite friends brought over some clothes and accessories, and we got creative.

  It was like, “Okay, here we go, put this on, put that on. That looks good. Wear that. Let’s check that out.” This cross-dresser named Jo Jo dyed my hair, and Mimi Marks, one of Chicago’s best known female impersonators, came up with the idea of putting me in full make-up. I’m like, “Okay, whatever.”

  I trusted Mimi to make me up not only because he made his living as a female impersonator, but because he actually lived his life as a woman. And he was hot—the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe. So when it came to putting make-up on a man, Mimi was the best.

  Mimi, like Jo Jo, was not somebody I hired to trick me out for the book signing. They were friends. In Chicago, I was always hanging around with a “different” collection of people—gay guys, drag queens, and ex-cons hiding behind aliases—pretty much a bunch of “lowlifes.” I loved them.

  Then, as now, Mimi was a legend in Chicago. He was such a skilled female impersonator he fooled most guys—not just on stage, but up close. Back in the day, whenever I had out-of-town guests, I would take them to the Baton Club, where Mimi worked. Mimi would come over, and I’d say, “Hey, check out this girl.” Nine times out of 10, somebody would end up hitting on him. Mimi would just play along. But after a while, if the guy was getting a little too close, I was like, “Oh shit! Hold on, bro, she’s not really a she—it’s a guy.” That’s how good Mimi was. People have asked me if Mimi was the best female impersonator of the bunch. Mimi was the best of many bunches. Who better to make me look presentable?

  So Mimi slathered on the make-up while I tried on a fuchsia feather boa. After a couple of hours, the makeover was complete, and another friend said, “Hey, why don’t you cruise down to the bookstore on my Harley?” Cool. So I threw the feather boa over my shoulders, hopped on the cycle, and set off for the book signing in something borrowed, something fuchsia.

  I drove to the store (wrong way down a one-way street, of course) and was greeted by a thousand or so people, assorted media, and cops on horses. People started jumping out of their cars, running around, saying, “Oh my God!” While I wasn’t in drag (somebody reported I was wearing a skirt), my get-up did show I was in touch with my feminine side. I had on full make-up with silver eye shadow and lipstick that matched my silver hair, nails, tank top, and motorcycle boots. I rounded out the ensemble with long, dangly earrings, tight black leather pants, and the fuchsia boa.

  The media went ape shit, and I would make the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times, “The Rebounder Wore Rouge”; and the Sunday Chicago Tribune, “Eccentric Bull Transcends Even Jordan’s Popularity.” I had been in Chicago less than a year, and I was topping Michael Jordan. I would even become a landmark.

  Here’s how that happened.

  Me, Michael Jordan, and a Cubs player by the name of Ryne Sandberg had a deal with this men’s clothing store, and they painted a huge mural of the three of us on the side of a building just off the freeway near downtown. I was in the middle wearing this suit with no sleeves, arms folded. Every time I would change the color of my hair in real life, they would change the color of my hair on the mural using these big plywood cutouts shaped like my fro. After a while, this got to be such a huge thing that, in the mornings, when the radio stations were doing traffic reports, they would say shit like, “Well, from O’Hare to Dennis, it’s 15 minutes,” or “From Dennis to downtown, it’s five.”

  The mural became a tourist attraction, people pulling over to the side of this busy highway to take pictures. Eventually it got to be such a traffic hazard that the Illinois Depart of Transportation made them paint over it. Unreal. I still don’t know what it was. I think people just embraced me because they saw I wasn’t afraid to do anything; that I just didn’t give a shit.

  The clothes, the make-up, the dressing in women’s clothing weren’t new things I dreamed up for the Chicago book signing. This was part of my life and had been for a few years. Most people don’t know that in San Antonio I wasn’t just spending time with hairdressers during daytime hours. I was going to gay bars, wearing women’s clothes to clubs all the time—women’s tops, women’s this, women’s that—doing all these weird things I wanted to do. I freed my mind. The gay community embraced me. They didn’t look at me and freak out. They were like, “Okay, great! Wow! He had the balls to do that, being an athlete, being a macho man or whatever. He has that soft feminine side.” They knew I wasn’t gay—knew that it was just Dennis being “Dennis.”

  Not that anybody heard about it. San Antonio wasn’t Chicago or New York. There weren’t inquiring reporters lurking on every street corner. So the media was a day late and a dollar short. But the truth is, I put together the new Dennis Rodman in San Antonio, took him on the road to Chicago, and then, most famously, to New York. Still none of it was part of any big marketing plan. I simply liked to wear a bit of women’s clothing in public. That was it.

  End of story.

  I’ve never had a problem with gays and lesbians. If somebody comes up to me and says, “I’m gay,” I don’t give a rat’s ass. We’re all the same emotionally. I’m always asking guys who turn their nose up at gays, “Aren’t you curious? Haven’t you ever thought about being with a man?” And it’s like, “No way, dude! Never! That shit’s disgusting.” Then I say, “How do you know it’s disgusting if you haven’t thought about it?”

  Reality Check: Love is love.

  If I had discovered I was gay when I started fooling around with that gender-bending shit, I wouldn’t have waited to come out of the closet. I would’ve said straight out, “I’m gay—live with it.” What were they going to do, throw me out of the NBA? If you’re good, you’re good. If you can play, you can play.
That’s the way it seems to work in women’s sports.

  Many girls who play tennis and golf are gay. Many girls who play basketball and softball are gay. People aren’t surprised when women athletes are lesbians. It’s the stereotype—you know: the butch, athletic woman. The stereotype for men is just the opposite. For men, the athlete is supposed to be a macho guy, not some sissy. All that’s bullshit. There are a lot of lipstick lesbians and macho gays out there, not to mention sissy heteros. But while your average sports fan is basically saying “Whatever,” to lesbian athletes, they don’t have that same indifference toward gay males on the playing field.

  I’m different. In my case, I honestly believe it really wouldn’t have mattered if I were gay. I was so bizarre to begin with; I think people would have left me alone. Half of them thought I was gay anyway. Anybody else, I don’t know. Now if it had been me who was HIV positive instead of Magic Johnson, it would have been a different story.

  Back then everybody thought any sign of AIDS was a death sentence, and the NBA circled around Magic, stood by him, just as they should have. There were questions, of course.

  “Is he gay?”

  “Has he been with men?”

  But Magic was so macho, was so loved, that for many people he was living proof that AIDS was not a gay disease, that straight people could get it, too. If it had been me that tested HIV positive, they would have kicked my ass out of the league in a heartbeat—made an example of me.

  “See, that’s where that kind of lifestyle can lead.”

  “The wages of sin are death.”

  “It ain’t freedom, it’s license.”

  Bullshit like that.

  It’s the kind of thing that happens when a very large, high-profile, black male athlete shows up in midtown Manhattan decked out in a wedding dress.

  A couple of months after the 1995-96 season ended (the Bulls won the championship over the Seattle Supersonics in six games while I won a fifth straight rebounding title), I went on Letterman and Howard Stern to announce I was going to be married. I didn’t say exactly whom I was marrying, but a rumor started making the rounds that it would be Stacy Yarborough—this New York stripper I’d been dating. Whatever. I invited the media to come by my book signing at Barnes and Noble in New York City to find out.

  I first got the idea of marrying myself while I was in Europe filming my first movie, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Double Team. Why? Who the fuck knows? I played around with the idea for a while, and then I thought, “I’m doing this New York book signing anyway, why not combine the two?” After that, the idea just kept growing and growing, and it was out of control by the time I made it to New York in late August of 1996.

  I flew in a $3,000-per-hour make-up artist from London and bought an expensive dress (I wasn’t writing the checks, so I don’t remember what it cost, but the New York Post reported it was $10,000).When I was done with my outfit, there was no doubt. This time I was definitely in drag—as “in drag” as you can get—wearing, as the The New York Times put it, “a lacy white wedding dress,” with “a veil over [my] neatly coiffed, bright orange hair.” Actually, it was a wig, and I’d call the color “strawberry blond.” As for the dress, it was sleeveless—my shoulders are one of my best features—with a band collar and matching long white gloves. The Times didn’t mention that I was carrying an armload of white lilies.

  Pretty fancy.

  On the way down in the elevator, headed for the horse-drawn carriage and eight beautiful groomswomen I’d hired for the occasion, I ran across Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, the first outsider to see the outfit. I knew Tyler because we used to hang out when I came back east. He looked me up and down.

  “Dennis?” he said in a very low voice.

  “Steven,” I said, matching his tone.

  “You go, man,” he said. “I’ll be watching.”

  Outside, I managed to get both me and the dress through the door of the tour bus, which was to take me over to the horse and carriage. Last chance to back down. Everything I had done in public up to then—the rainbow hair and tattoos in San Antonio, the full make-up and boa in Chicago—was what one might call “outlandish” or “eccentric.” But this was something else all together. This cross-dressing, female-impersonating jag wasn’t just more fun and games. It was a bold leap into homo-world, “Run-for-your-life-queers!” shit, and there was no turning back once I crossed that line. There was a reason no active, male professional athlete in any major sport had ever come out of the closet. So this was risky, and it could go either way.

  Fuck it.

  I stepped into the horse-drawn carriage and, with eight beautiful women in tuxedos walking alongside, took off down Fifth Avenue. At first, people were curious, but not all that excited. Then I got out of the carriage about five blocks away from the book store and started walking, barefoot no less. Fifth Avenue is a street bordered by high rises and, at street level, it looks like a concrete ravine. I remember hearing a clamor, looking up at the sheer gray walls, and seeing dozens of people opening windows, looking out. Then people began congregating around me, checking out what they thought was a very tall black woman in a wedding gown, and instead of going about their business, they started walking along with me, trying to figure out what I was doing. It was like, “What the fuck is that?”

  Then they started to put it together. “That must be the girl Rodman is marrying.”

  So they kept on following the big ugly black girl just to see what would happen. Soon there were hundreds of people clogging the street. Chaos. I hadn’t expected that. I mean this was New York; they’d seen it all. I was like, “Goddamn!” Not even the police escort could control the crowd that came out to greet the “bride,” and it got so crazy the cops shut down the street.

  The cops shut down Fifth Avenue for Dennis Rodman. By the time I got to the Barnes and Noble bookstore at Rockefeller Center, there were media everywhere, must have been 200 reporters and photographers going nuts.

  I signed books until I chipped a nail. The media ended up treating it more like a freak show than the end of civilization as we know it. So … I got away with it. What had started out as a joke, ended up a slam dunk. I had made it in “if-you-can-make-it-there, you-can-make-it-anywhere” New York City, and I did it by just being myself.

  Bad As I Wanna Be would make a home for itself on The New York Times bestseller list for 20 weeks and end up selling over a million copies. At the time, you may not have known anything about basketball, but if you weren’t living in a cave, if you were alive, love him or hate him, you had heard of Dennis Rodman. That fame was the cost I had to pay for fulfilling the dream that began in that parking lot in Detroit.

  That last year in San Antonio, first year in Chicago, I had transformed myself into this beautiful individual. Free. Unafraid. At the same time, accidentally, thanks to the media, I became more than just a basketball player. Now I was more like a rock star. Some of the media called me an “outlaw,” like it was Dennis Rodman against the world. It was never like that. It had always been “me against me.” The old, conservative Dennis versus the new, free Dennis.

  Before San Antonio, I had no energy to get up and go to work, to go play basketball. I had to find some reason to get up in the morning, to keep me motivated. That something came in going to the gay clubs, meeting new people, letting myself go wherever my imagination took me. And I did it for me, not as part of some marketing plan meant to make me famous. That was a happy—or maybe unhappy—accident.

  On the happy side, fame means I’ll be remembered not only for being a hell of a basketball player, but, more importantly, as a guy who did something that only a handful of people have done. I freed people up to do, say, feel, and dress the way they want.

  Fuck the consequences.

  That’s the happy side. You can be a positive influence; you can change people’s lives. And who wouldn’t like being treated like a rock star everywhere they went? But there’s a lot of bad shit, too. I can’t scratch my ass without drawing
a crowd. And while fame will get me a table at the restaurant ahead of you, it also gets me an audience for every bite I chew. I can’t live a normal life.

  Then there’s the trust thing. After you get burned a few times, you figure everyone you meet is asking, “What’s in it for me?” At its worst, you do so much to insulate yourself from the public, from real people, that you have no normal human contact at all. There’s just your yes-boys, your “Go-get-me-this!” people, who are so afraid to say “no” to you, to speak their minds—afraid you’ll say, “Fuck you! Get out of my life!” There’s no real relationship. There’s just ass-kissing and more ass-kissing.

  As for real relationships, of all the so-called “friends” I’ve had over the course of the last 20 years, 99 percent of them have fucked me over—abused my power, sold stories to the tabloids, stolen from me.

  Here’s just one story:

  I was in Atlantic City gambling, shooting craps, girls hanging all over me, and, while I may have been drunk, I wasn’t fooling around. The house had advanced me $25,000 in $500 and $1,000 chips. Came my turn to roll, I was so drunk I had to hold onto the table to keep from falling down and I was bouncing the dice off people’s heads, chests, stomachs, even onto the floor. Everybody was laughing, having a good time. It was like, “Isn’t that Dennis a fun guy?”

  Suddenly, I stopped.

  “I’m missing a $1,000 chip,” I said.

  People from the casino started scrambling, crawling under the craps table, and looking all around on the floor, even asking me to go through my pockets. They couldn’t find anything and decided I must have miscounted. No way. As my then-bodyguard, George Triantafillo, will tell you, when I’m gambling, drunk or not, I know exactly what is going on, every nickel on the table—what belongs to me, what belongs to the house, what the odds are on every roll. Sometimes I think I should have been a bookie.