I Should Be Dead By Now

by Dennis Rodman

  Reality Check: Don’t drink and go live.

  I had been up drinking all night before a meeting Darren had scheduled with a couple of producers from Celebrity Mole.

  “They’re coming down to find out if they want to hire you,” Thaer reminded me. “You don’t just have this job. Nobody wants to give you a job because you’re drunk all the time.”

  Nobody trusted me. Nobody wanted anything to do with me because I would commit to something and then just blow it off, like I did for the ESPYs one year, or I’d show up drunk like I did for the Best Damn Sports Show Period fiasco. So this Celebrity Mole thing was a chance to redeem myself while collecting an easy $50,000. And, like Darren said, a weekly hour in primetime on a major network for a couple of months wouldn’t hurt—you can’t buy that kind of exposure. So he was like, “Don’t blow this interview.”

  Me, I was thinking it was not so much the exposure or even the money I needed as the work, something to keep me busy. I knew I did better with the partying, did a better job of keeping things in balance, when I had something to do. Not that you could tell the afternoon of the interview.

  I showed up drunk, Michelle by my side, and we sat around drinking wine at Josh Slocum’s as Thaer prepped me on Celebrity Mole.

  “Act like you’ve seen it,” he said.

  Whatever. I flagged down a busboy and asked him to bring us some beers out on the dock. I had decided to hold the meeting out there, because it was such a beautiful setting. Sunshine on blue water. Sleek white yachts in their slips. So it would be a business meeting with beer on the side for the boys, a bottle of wine for Michelle. Life was good.

  Thaer met the two producers in the parking lot out front. They were driving what he would later describe as a “piece of shit” rental car and were wearing shorts (one in denim cut-offs), T-shirts, and sneakers. They didn’t look like people anybody would take seriously. We all sat down, I offered them a beer, they accepted, and then they began this long, boring song and dance about Celebrity Mole.It was going to be shot in Yucatan. The idea was to identify the traitor, the mole, who was “sabotaging” everything. There were games. Quizzes. Stephen Baldwin, my old co-star from Cutaway, was one of the nine celebrities in the cast. Blah. Blah. Blah.

  I was about to nod off when I heard a plane fly over. I looked up. “That’s a G-5,” I said. Then I started reeling off imaginary specs for the plane. The two guys looked at each other.

  Thaer jumped in and steered me back into Celebrity Mole mode. The producers started yapping again. I heard a boat, looked over, made up a name for it, and ad-libbed some more imaginary specs.

  “I mean he was talking out his ass to these guys,” Thaer recalled. “Complete gibberish.”

  Finally one of the producers tires of all the chatter about boats and planes and cuts to the chase.

  “Dennis, have you ever seen the show?” he asked.

  “Fuck the show!” I said.

  Thaer was thinking, “Oh shit!”

  “What he means is the particular show doesn’t matter,” Thaer said. “He could do any show.”

  Nice try. I figured we were fucked. Not that I really gave a shit. Now Darren, that’s a different story. He’d been trying to put this gig together for months, and he wasn’t about to let it go.

  “We gotta fix this,” Darren told Thaer.

  So after talking to Thaer, Darren called the casting agent. The plan was to get to her before the two producers could tell her, “This guy’s a flake,” he’s this, he’s that.

  “I just talked to Dennis,” Darren told the woman. “What’s with these two guys you sent down here? Dennis thought they were pulling some kind of joke on him.”

  She was like, “What?”

  Then he told her how these two dudes showed up in a crummy car wearing shorts and T-shirts, were drinking beer during a business meeting, and how I thought I was being punked.

  She was like, “Are you kidding?”

  “No. No, I’m not,” said Darren.

  Fifteen minutes later, Thaer calls her with the same story. The guys were dressed like bums, Dennis thought they were a joke, this and that.

  So when the two producers got back and said, this guy’s bad news, this guy’s a drunk, whatever, she had a ready explanation. It was all a big misunderstanding. Dennis wasn’t wasted, he was just playing with you.

  Yada, yada, yada.

  It worked. Darren and the casting agent sealed the deal, she said she liked my “Who-gives-a-shit?” attitude, and soon Michelle and I were enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip to Mexico, which we turned into a working honeymoon.

  For real.

  Michelle made an honest man out of me at the Orange County Court House on my birthday, May 13, 2003, and we left the next day for the Celebrity Mole shoot in Mexico with Darren and Thaer in tow. At that time, Michelle and I had been together for about four years and had two kids. So it wasn’t like we needed a honeymoon to get the sex life up to speed or anything.

  We spent two weeks south of the border and, while I did get drunk a couple of times, it was nothing major. I was working, so I didn’t drink as much. Off set, anyway.

  In what would end up being in Episode 4, Mole host Ahmad Rashad gave four of us, me and these three girls, the chance to make some easy money if we would eat the worm from the bottom of a bottle of Tequila. The girls were grossed out. So I went, “Fuck it. I’ll eat the worm. I’ll eat everybody’s worm,” like I was doing them a big favor, you know? So I downed, I think it was, four Tequila shooters with worms, we made $6,000 on the deal, and the girls made me out to be this big hero. “Oh, thank you, Dennis. Thank you. Thank you.”

  Me, I was just taking advantage of an opportunity to have a couple of drinks.

  When the Mexican part of the shoot wrapped in late May, the production moved back to L.A. for the big finale. I holed up in Newport Beach for a few days and soon was back to my bad habits. Come the day of the finale shoot, I was upstairs in the beach-house duplex sleeping one off with the doors locked, not answering any calls. The way the house was laid out you had to go through two locked doors to get to my unit. Thaer had been through all this before—me not answering the door, hiding out, refusing to do what I was supposed to do. So he had gotten with the cleaning crew and had a couple of keys made without me knowing about it. So I was lying in bed, and I heard the key turning in the lock. No problem. I had latched the door. That didn’t stop Thaer. He knocked the fucking door down and came barreling in the room under a full head of steam.

  “Get up! Get in the fucking shower!” he shouted. “You’re going to do this show!”

  “Fuck it! I ain’t going,” I said, and jumped up like I wanted to fight. He pushed me back down on the bed.

  “He knew by the tone of my voice I wasn’t fucking with him,” Thaer recalled. “I was gonna whip his ass, or he was gonna go to the show.”

  I don’t think there was much chance of him whipping my ass, but I went along anyway. At that point, there were only two contestants left in the Celebrity Mole competition, and I had a chance to win a whole lot of money. Not that I would make it easy for Thaer or the producers.

  About three hours after Thaer dropped me off at the hotel in L.A., the producers were calling him. “Where’s Dennis? Do you know where Dennis is?” Thaer called some of his spies and they got me back in time.

  It was never easy with Dennis Rodman.

  Long story short, I ended up winning the damn thing. I figured out who the mole was and got more right answers on the final quiz. Sound like silly horseshit? Maybe so. But the payday was good. I made $220,000. Not bad for a drunk who Mole fans slammed for not taking note one during the competition.

  We wrapped the show in late spring, and the only thing left was to keep my big mouth shut until the series aired in January. Now I’m a guy who can’t keep a secret sober—forget drunk. But if I had let on who the mole was, who won the game, it would have cost me millions, or at least that’s what the contract said. So I just kept on doing what
I did on the show. You know how everybody went around saying “I’m the mole, I’m the mole”? Well, I just kept that shit up for however long it was.

  “I’m the mole,” I said.

  “No, Dennis, really come on.”

  “Yeah, I’m the mole.”

  It was like that was the last leg of the competition. To really win, you had to keep your mouth shut. And I’m nothing if not a competitor. So I walk away with it all. Advantage Rodman.

  For me, television has always been a crap shoot. Win some. Lose some. The Best Damn Sports Show Period interview had been a total disaster, Celebrity Mole a major triumph that proved that, partying or not, I could still focus when I had to, just like when I was in the NBA. And, to outsiders at least, it looked like I had really turned my life around. Nope.

  Reality Check: Television giveth and television taketh away.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SPORTS SINNER

  Newport Beach, September 6, 2003. It’s amazing it took them as long as it did. Like Michelle told them, “The last three years for Dennis have been a party. Nothing but drinkin’ and drinkin’ and drinkin’.”

  But we were about midway through the five-month shoot for a two-part reality show called Rodman on the Rebound, and ESPN still hadn’t caught me drunk on camera. They had missed a big opportunity on the afternoon of September 2, when the cops cited me for “public drunkenness” after spotting me, literally, falling-down drunk on the dock outside of Josh Slocum’s. ESPN would make up for it four days later.

  On that balmy evening in early September, I was in the parking lot welcoming people to Josh Slocum’s, which, as the sign says, offers “seafood, fine meals, and libations.” Lots of libations. Decked out in a black T-shirt, blue baseball cap, and jeans, I tried to usher three girls inside as the ESPN camera rolled.

  I give one of the girls a half-hug.

  “We heard this place was fun,” she said.

  “Oh, honey, it is fun,” I replied, slurring my words. And on this particular night, it was going to be a real fucking barrel of laughs.

  Cut to dancing inside.

  “Right now, what Dennis cares about is drinking,” said my wife Michelle on camera.

  To prove it, ESPN would soon follow Michelle’s sound bite with video of the raving-drunk, “Mr. Entertainment,” Dennis Rodman. By the time this tape was shot, it was after legal drinking hours, sometime after 2:00 a.m., and the joint was empty. Just me, Thaer, Darren, and Michelle hanging out in the back, me holding court.

  I sat in the middle in a blue easy chair, Darren on the right in an identical chair. Michelle was seated to his right, Thaer standing off to the left. As I raved, a lazy blue strobe light swept over the dimly lit scene, at times being picked up by the mirrors on the back wall. First, I dissed Darren.

  “I don’t need you,” I said. “Seriously, I’m gonna tell you right now, I don’t need you for nothing.”

  Darren was smiling, but that wouldn’t last.

  Then I moved on to Thaer. “You know what, Thaer? I don’t need you. I don’t need you at all,” I said, raising my voice. “I made my career without your ass. Hello!” I gestured wildly, huge hands clawing the air.

  Cut to Darren. He wasn’t smiling anymore. His client was showing his ass on videotape that would be seen by a gazillion viewers on ESPN.

  “You swore to me you’d be on the court,” Thaer said, bringing up my NBA ambitions. “I think you will be on the court, but not if you keep drinkin’ like this.”

  That called for a little historical perspective, and I jogged his memory, saying I had partied a lot harder in Chicago and still pulled down umpteen rebounds a game. Thaer pointed out I had been a lot younger. Then Michelle weighed in, my favorite bad girl sounding like she was auditioning for a shot on Oprah.

  I sat there playing with my fingers, biting my lip, looking like an eight-year-old boy being chewed out by a grouchy school marm as my favorite drinking, smoking, tattooed, beautiful, blonde delivered a mini-lecture on “family values,” reminding me that I had a wife and kids now and needed to clean up my act.

  From Michelle, ESPN cut back to me and I was crying. What brought it on, other than a river of booze, I don’t know. Anybody hip to the ways of television knows I actually could have tuned up right after Michelle’s lecture or they could have caught me on tape an hour later and put the two together in the editing room. What I’m saying is: I have no idea why I was suddenly crying.

  “I know I fucked my life up. I did it,” I said, blubbering. “Everybody thinks I’m stupid. I’m not stupid, you know. I made my life what it is.”

  And apparently I wasn’t real happy with the way that life turned out. ESPN closed out this segment with the camera still on me, as I, still crying, mumbled, “It’s all love. It’s all love. It’s all love.” Long, long pause. “It’s all love.”

  I didn’t look like a guy who would be returning to the NBA anytime soon. I looked like a drunk on his final glide path into oblivion. Commercial break. Thank God.

  Ever think you were the life of the party and then see snapshots, video, of yourself and think, “Oh shit! Who is that fool? That drunk?” That’s what watching Rodman on the Rebound was like for me.

  The reality series was supposed to tell a feel-good story about Dennis Rodman’s comeback to the NBA. But what ESPN would catch on tape was not my comeback, but my downfall, arriving just in time to see me bottom out, personally and professionally.

  So why did I drink?

  “He can’t stand being famous. He can’t stand the fact that he can’t go anywhere without people bothering him,” Darren told a reporter. “And the only way to feel comfortable with the public is to drink.”

  “When you’re drinking every day, you’re suffering inside,” Wendell told the same reporter. “Dennis is an extremely introverted person, extremely introverted. Yet he placed himself in an extroverted position, meaning a basketball superstar. So in order to deal with what that comes with, he [turned to] alcohol.”

  “His image is playboy, wild man-slash-superstar athlete,” Thaer told ESPN. “And no matter what he does, he has to keep up that image, whether he wants to or not.”

  So why do I think I drank? At first, I drank because I enjoyed it. I drank because I loved to have a good time. Then I drank, drank myself silly, so I didn’t have to think about all the shit that had happened to me in my career and in life in general. Shit like getting canned by the Lakers and the Mavericks, marrying and divorcing Carmen Electra, parting ways with my longtime agent/friend Dwight Manley, and firing my sister.

  I gave my sister Debra the boot in early 1999.This was after she called me at this club called Gate in West Hollywood with the news that the Lakers had let me go. It wasn’t a “kill the messenger” kind of thing. She was convinced L.A. fired me because of my partying. So she tried to put her foot down. She was like, “Listen, you gotta stop. The NBA is sending you a message. They’re over your wild and crazy crap.”

  I wasn’t hearing her. I was like, “You need to go,” and she went back to Dallas. So now there was no one around who had known me before I was a big shot, no one who had loved me when there was nothing in it for them. I was on my own and had no one to answer to. Dennis Rodman had a license to party, and I hung my shingle at Club 4809.

  You don’t just wake up one day and you’re an alcoholic. It takes a lot of work. And by the time the ESPN cameras showed up to tape Rodman on the Rebound in the summer of 2003, I had been steady at it for about four years. Now I drank all the time. I drank all the time, every fucking day, 24 hours a day, without a care in the world, not even my kids, not anybody.

  I had become a drunk, and that was the reality, the ugly reality documented on video tape by ESPN. Rodman on the Rebound had now become “Rodman on the Rehab.” If Darren, Wendell, and Thaer didn’t know that the show was a catastrophe in the making before that drunken September night, they had to know it then. ESPN had this “great footage” of a drunken Dennis Rodman losing it on camera, and
they had editorial control. They and only they would decide what was going to be aired on national television.

  I was fucked.

  Still, on tape at least, Darren soldiered on, trying to negotiate my way back into the NBA. He was making a list and checking it twice: Indiana Pacers, Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat, Denver Nuggets, Detroit Pistons. The man gets paid to be optimistic, and he was earning his money.

  Those NBA pitches would come to an abrupt halt in mid-October, after my sorry, motorcycle-wheelie-attempting ass had a close encounter with a light pole in the parking lot of the Treasures Gentleman’s Club in Vegas. After that, Darren’s attitude toward the reality show, was like, “Fuck it! Forget damage control, there is no way to put a happy face on this shit.” So he sicced the cameras on me the day after my motorcycle accident. He was thinking that while the show was going to be a public relations disaster, something good might come out of it if I “could see myself as others see me,” as the old adage goes. That might wake my ass up, he thought, get me into rehab.

  So at 9:45 a.m. on October 20, 2003, ESPN showed up at my room at the Hard Rock to get some footage of what was left of Dennis Rodman. A quick recap. I was coming off a two-day drunk, and the accident had left me with 70-some stitches in my right shin, lacerations on my left, and two badly bruised and swollen knees.

  I dressed up for the camera, putting on the top half of the limegreen scrubs the nurses had given me to wear home from the hospital and completed the ensemble by tying a white towel around my waist, creating what looked like a terrycloth mini-skirt. Close-ups revealed a puffy face and dark circles under my eyes. My earrings were still in place, but I was missing my left nose ring. I looked every bit of my 42 years and then some.

  The camera rolled, me grimacing, as my driver swabbed the stitched-up right shin and the “beef jerky” left shin. It was not the kind of footage that was going to show up in an authorized biography. It was like, “You’ve heard the story of the downfall of Dennis Rodman, now here’s the pictures to prove it.” As for Darren’s hope that the video would wake me up, the show wouldn’t air for six weeks. In the meantime, it was the same old Dennis.