That’s the kind of stuff that happens when everybody is fucked up all the time. Crazy shit. I was lucky to walk away from that one unscathed and, like Lieutenant Long said, without getting in trouble and messing up my life. I mean, what if the librarian stabs me, gets stabbed herself, kills one of my friends? Life can turn on a dime.
In early 2000, I was not just having trouble with the law in Newport Beach. It was more widespread than that. I had seven lawsuits pending in Las Vegas alone and three more in Los Angeles. In Vegas, four of the incidents happened at the Hilton Hotel, two on the same hell-raising night, April 19, 1998. In the first, I was said to have “sexually assaulted” this “adult entertainer” by “grabbing her breast and shaking it,” according to court records quoted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In the second, I was accused of getting way too friendly with a Hilton cocktail waitress.
“He came up behind me with a bear hug and picked me up,” the waitress told the Review-Journal.That caused her to spill the tray of drinks she was carrying. While picking her up, I was said to have placed my “hands on the sides of both her breasts.”
As for the five other Vegas suits: two more women claimed I grabbed their breasts, and a third said I attacked her after she tried to take my picture in the lobby of the MGM Grand. Then there was the cashier at Caesar’s Palace who claimed I “pushed-punched him,” and a craps dealer at The Mirage who accused me of rubbing my dice on his bald head and privates for luck.
In L.A., two of the three lawsuits resulted from a single stay at the Argyle Hotel in October of 1998. In the first, according to court records, I was accused of “jamming a hundred-dollar bill and [my] hand down the front of [a cocktail waitress’s] blouse.” The second, according to the Associated Press, involved some kind of “sexual assault” on a woman who came to my hotel room expecting a party and found me alone. In the third L.A. lawsuit, also according to AP, I was accused of chest-butting this 23-year-old guy at the Fat Burger.
While these three incidents and all but one of the seven in Vegas had happened two, sometimes even three years before, they were still keeping my lawyers busy in 2000 sorting out who did what, when. Was I guilty? With a few exceptions, who knows? Since I was usually drunk, I simply didn’t remember. That made it hard to come up with any kind of defense. It was their word against whomever we could round up who was sober on the night in question. Meanwhile the meter was running.
So I ended up reaching “confidential” settlements for most of the lawsuits, meaning I cut a large check that opposing lawyers couldn’t talk about other than to say their client was “very pleased,” “very happy” as the Las Vegas Review-Journal phrased it for a couple of cases. I made the whole thing worse one night when I decided to get cute on the Tonight Show.
“Me and my accountant decided we’re gonna have, like, a $50,000 rule,” I told Jay Leno.
And he was like, “What’s that?”
“That’s when basically if I screw up with a girl or they think I’m screwin’ up, then rather than going to court, I’ll just give ’em $50,000,” I said.
Bad move. I figure that one cost me about $200,000. Even so, it was not a bad idea. Just one I shouldn’t have been announcing on national television. It’s almost always better to settle. I learned that lesson from a cheerleader.
In 1995, this NBA cheerleader I had slept with here and there for several years sued me for infecting her with herpes. Wanted me to pay her a million and a half dollars. There was just one little problem. I don’t have herpes. End of story, right? Wrong. I did win the first round. My lawyers managed to convince the jury the case had nothing to do with herpes (or money, for that matter) and had everything to do with a woman being scorned. In her mind there had been some kind of serious relationship going on. Not. So the jury sided with me. Her lawyers appealed, arguing in court documents that “evidence of her prior sexual history, employment as a nude dancer, and breast augmentation surgery should have been excluded under Rule 412,” whatever the fuck that is. It took several years, but I finally walked away with a victory, if you’d call it that. Legal fees for my “win” added up to about a quarter of a million dollars.
When dealing with lawsuits, it’s hard to sort out the people who have good reason to be pissed at Dennis Rodman from the leeches who are just looking for a paycheck. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Unless they really, really, really piss me off, I just cut their ass a check and get on with my life.
I’m not going to say how much I’ve pissed away on lawsuits over the years, but let’s just say if I’d thrown that money into the stock market, my early retirement prospects would be greatly improved. Just another price to pay for partying, partying, partying, booze, booze, and more booze.
When I first moved to Newport Beach, I thought one of the great things about having a permanent home, living in one place, would be the opportunity to make real friends, people who would always be around. It didn’t work out that way. The good and bad news about me is I don’t discriminate. Everybody’s welcome: rich, poor; gay, straight; scumbag and model citizen. And when the big neon “Open” sign hissed on at Club 4809, that could make for an interesting collection of folk.
“The hardest thing about working with Dennis Rodman is not working with Dennis Rodman. It’s dealing with the entourage,” my bodyguard,Wendell, told a reporter. “Dennis himself is laid back. It’s dealing with the knuckleheads that he had chosen at that time to surround himself with.”
Looking back, I can see there were several categories of people always in generous supply on a given night in Newport Beach:
“Drunks,” who were happy to start drinking with me at ten in the morning and stay steady at it until dawn the next day or the day after, for that matter;
“Hangers-on,” whose job was to get drunk with me, laugh at my jokes, and sleep with as many women as possible, while making sure I paid for everything;
“Strays,” who would hop on the Dennis Rodman party train on a given night of carousing and ride it for all it was worth;
“Sluts,” who you know about.
“I can’t tell you, man, how many times we came in the house at five, six o’clock in the morning, totally wasted, me having to carry him upstairs,” Wendell told a reporter. “We have to stop at the Fat Burger and get a Fat Burger, him and his buddies, knocked out, with food all over them. Just food all over the place, just totally fucking wasted.”
Then there were the women.
“The lifestyle he was living, that’s an empty life, man,” Wendell continued. “I walk in his bedroom and literally have to pick some chick up and take her home, who he didn’t even know. And she didn’t even know him. But then when he woke up, he’d be alone again.”
Somebody once asked me, “How did partying affect your personal life in those days?”
I replied, “Bro, partying was my personal life.”
And what was personal would soon start spilling over into my professional life.
Now I admit there were times when I was playing ball when partying would get in the way: I’d be hung over at practice or go missing, this, that. But in those days there was never any question about what came first. But after I moved to Newport Beach, the work-party balance flip-flopped. It was like, “We now interrupt this party for work,” and not even Magic Johnson could change that.
CHAPTER TEN
MAGIC MOMENTS
Magic Johnson first tried to save my ass in 2002. He and his agent cooked up this idea for a charity event in the Hamptons, the playground of rich New Yorkers. They knew I had thrown a party or two up there, and so the agent called, and I agreed to co-host a celebrity basketball tournament. While we were talking, I told the agent that I was toying with the idea of returning to the NBA. He later mentioned it to Magic, and Magic said he’d like to help. That was huge. Magic’s got a lot of credibility with GMs all over the league, and they knew, as the agent said, “He’s not gonna go to bat for a guy he doesn’t truly believe in.” So the agent says to
Magic, “Let’s go down to Newport Beach and surprise Dennis with the news.”
So they called ahead to my handler in Newport Beach and said they were coming at such and such a time, make sure Dennis is at Josh Slocum’s. Whatever you do, don’t let him leave. This was when I was binge drinking, and you just never knew. So the two of them showed up unannounced. I’d had a couple of cocktails, of course, and that made me even happier to see Magic. I was like, “Holy shit! Holy shit! Magic Johnson is here.”
Magic and I hugged on each other, did a bit of catching up, and then got down to business. Magic said he could help me get on with the Knicks. He was like, “I’ve got a lot of pull there. If you start working out, coming up to UCLA two, three times a week, we can make this happen. But you have to cool it on the partying. The body’s not gonna respond at 40 like it did at 30.”
“No problem,” I said.
Right before he left, Magic said, “Listen, I’m having a grand opening tomorrow for this 24-hour fitness center up in Sherman Oaks. I would love for you to come and be one of my guests.”
I’m in.
All during the meeting, I’d been sizing up Magic’s agent, this guy named Darren Prince. Then in his early thirties, Darren was New Jersey born and bred, and had the accent and attitude to go with it, but with a lot of heart and warmth just beneath the surface. He’s not that tall, under six feet, has dark hair and is attractive enough—you should see his fiancée—but the bottom line was I liked the guy. And we had a bit of a track record. When my old agent, Dwight Manley, and I split up back in 1999, I called Darren, drunk, to see if he might be interested in representing me. He was cool with it, and he called Dwight to make sure he wasn’t stepping on any toes. Dwight gave him a “thumbs up” and told him to get hold of my sister, Debra, who was then my business manager. Darren left her a ton of messages, but Debra never returned his calls. So I ended up with an agent named Steve Chasman for a couple of years.
By the time Darren and Magic came to Josh Slocum’s, I was again in the market for an agent, and I was thinking, “If he’s good enough for Magic Johnson. …”
So when he was on the way out, I handed Darren this huge box of shit out of the backseat of my pickup truck, all these business proposals that had been sitting around collecting dust while I attended to the only business I really was interested in—partying. “You’re now my agent,” I told him. “Go through all this crap and see if we can make some money together.”
I’m not sure when I actually signed with Darren, but it wasn’t long after that. Why Darren took me on, I’ll never know. I think maybe it had something to do with this boyish enthusiasm for sports he had developed as a kid collecting baseball cards back in New Jersey. As an adult, Darren had turned his childhood hobby into a successful sports memorabilia company before parlaying that into Prince Marketing Group, where he serves as agent and marketing guru for a long list of clients including me, Joe Frazier, and his first client, one Magic Johnson. What I really like about the guy is that when it comes to his clients, Darren is a fan first, a businessman second, and I’m thinking it was the fan in Darren that made him take on the hard case known as “Dennis Rodman.”
When I arrived at the grand opening of the fitness center in Sherman Oaks the next day, around 200 people were waiting in line to get Magic’s autograph. Magic had a reason for inviting me. He knew I had been roughed up a bit by the NBA since leaving the Bulls, and he wanted to boost my confidence, show me the public hadn’t forgotten about Dennis Rodman. It worked. The fans spotted me, and they started screaming, “Dennis! Dennis!” The media came running over and then, in Darren’s version, “Magic’s line little by little started moving into the direction of Dennis.”
I couldn’t believe it. We’re talking Magic Johnson, bro. The main man. But like Magic said, “When Dennis Rodman walks into a room, it’s like everyone else becomes invisible.”
I wish things had gone as well with the workouts at UCLA. I blew the first one off. Just didn’t go. Second one, I got so hammered the night before, I couldn’t make it. I missed the third one because of a little booze-inspired ego flare-up. I was like, “I don’t need this, I can get back in the league without workouts, without Magic.” So I blew a real chance to get back in the league, thanks to my drinking. It wouldn’t be the last time.
There would be another little NBA nibble in 2002 courtesy of Magic. Magic was business partners with a guy named Howard Schultz, who owned the Seattle SuperSonics. He told Schultz, “You should sit down with Dennis. I think he could help your team.”
So when we were in New York, Darren and I drove over to Schultz’s house in the Hamptons, and he was like, “Can you help this team?”
“I can help fill the stands,” I said. “I can get 11 or 12 rebounds a game, no problem. I can help young players.”
A lot of these kids today are like, “I got my $50 million guaranteed, what else is there to prove?”
Everything, baby. You can spend every fucking nickel of that cash, and it won’t buy your ass one rebound, one basket—much less a championship. No matter how much you’re making, you still have to play. That’s the kind of shit I could have laid on the young players in Seattle. Shultz wasn’t interested.
“Your reputation is so bad,” he said, “I don’t know if the city will embrace you or hate me for making a move like this.”
I’m thinking, “Whatever.” Some people hate me. Some people love me. But no matter where they fall, they’re all buying tickets.
Then Schultz’s wife came out of the house with their two sons. She was gawking, the kids holding balls they wanted autographed. She was like, “I’m sorry for interrupting, but you’re my idol. I just had to come out and get an autograph and a picture.”
So I was signing autographs, posing for snapshots with Schultz’s family, and I leaned over and whispered in Darren’s ear, “This is a guy who obviously doesn’t talk things over with his wife.”
I mean, the wife may not have known a damn thing about basketball, but she knew star power when she saw it. And that’s what I can bring along with those dozen rebounds a game. That’s what fills seats. That’s what makes money. And next to winning championships, that’s what the business is all about.
As for that bad-boy reputation Howard Schultz was so worried about, it was soon destined to get a hell of a lot worse.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
T.V. GUIDE
Newport Beach, September 23, 2002. It was one thing for me to get falling-down drunk and show my ass in the relative privacy of Club 4809 or Josh Slocum’s. It was quite another to do it on national television. But that was the next logical step in the downward spiral of Dennis Rodman.
The Best Damn Sports Show Period interview was supposed to take place in L.A., and Thaer couldn’t find me. Then somebody ratted, and Thaer located me and a couple of drinking buddies at a bar in Irvine.
“We gotta go,” he said.
“I’m not going,” I said. “Call Darren.”
Darren had promised John Salley, an old Detroit teammate, I would do the interview, and they had promoted the hell out of it.
“You gotta do it,” Darren told me. “If you don’t, they’re never gonna listen to me again. I’ll lose all credibility. All my other clients will be screwed, because no one is going to take me seriously anymore.”
“I’m not fucking going,” I said.
Darren didn’t give up. “What if I talk them into coming to your house in Newport Beach?”
Whatever.
So Thaer corralled me, gave the slip to my drinking buddies, and we went back to the beach house. Meanwhile my buddies were calling, calling, trying to get reconnected. Thaer put a stop to that.
“I grab Dennis’s cell when he’s not looking, turn it off,” recalled Thaer. “In a minute, he’s like, ‘Where’s my phone?’ ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘You probably left it somewhere.’”
That’s the kind of shit you can get away with when you’re dealing with a drunk.
At
the house, Thaer helped me clean up and get dressed. I was still drunk, but starting to level off, when the camera crew arrived and started setting up. Meanwhile I was getting thirsty.
“I’m starving,” I said, for Thaer’s benefit.
He wasn’t buying it. “You stay here. I’ll go get the food,” he said, determined to keep me away from the booze until the interview was over.
But then he made the mistake of turning his back, and I was out of there. I hooked up with the girl across the street, hopped on her moped—all elbows and knees—and we disappeared. We got back a few minutes before air time, and I handed out tacos to the crew. It was like, “See, I really was hungry after all.”
Thaer was shaking his head. “You’re fucked up worse than you were an hour ago,” he said.
I was opening my mouth to deny it when the dumb-ass moped girl said, “Yeah, we went and did shots.” I’ll say. Five or six in maybe half an hour. But it was too late to turn back.
The producers of the Best Damn Sports Show Period had done us a huge favor, scrambled together a crew at the last minute and spent like $5,000 on a helicopter to get their asses to Newport Beach on time.
So the red light comes on and things were looking good for about two seconds. Thaer had me decked out in a nice outfit, complete with shades, baseball cap, the usual. Then I opened my mouth, and it was pure liquor talking.
“John Salley! I love you, John Salley! Oh, I love you so bad. I love you so bad, John Salley!”
Thaer’s like, “Oh my God!”
Then I did this scream I do when I’m drunk. Think Tarzan with a chest cold. It was a total disaster. All this live on national television. Thaer called Darren with the news. “Your client just ruined any shot of an NBA comeback and made a complete idiot of himself,” he said. “He just did an entire interview drunk.”
So I ended up embarrassing myself, Darren, John Salley, and the Best Damn Sports Show Period and added to my rep as an unreliable flake on a downward spiral to oblivion. All in a day’s work.
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