I Should Be Dead By Now

by Dennis Rodman

  A week after the motorcycle accident, I was back in Vegas for the Radio Music Awards, ESPN hot on my trail. That was the night I got shit-faced, pinched P. Diddy on the ass while he was doing a television interview backstage, and capped off my performance by getting kicked out of the place. The good news was that on the tape shot at the awards show you couldn’t tell I was drunk. ESPN made up for it later that night after I parked my ass at this bar in the Aladdin Hotel for the second Dennis drunk-on-camera scene.

  I was wearing the same outfit I wore to the Radio Music Awards: jeans with an unbuttoned, long sleeve, white shirt over a blue and white Southeastern Oklahoma State basketball jersey— number 10, baby—with “Savages” appliquéd across the chest. I topped the outfit off with a matching blue baseball cap.

  Maybe it was the outfit or maybe it was because I was smoking a cigar and throwing down one Grey Goose and cranberry juice after another, getting drunker and drunker and more and more obnoxious by the minute, but I wasn’t exactly a chick magnet that night. If the cameras don’t lie, I was only able to pull in three women in about two hours.

  “You want me?” I asked this blonde wearing an off-the-shoulder white blouse.

  ESPN fast-forwarded the tape. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “That’s up to you,” I replied.

  She gave me a playful, “Oh-you-bad-boy” slap to the thigh. “I’m not going to do anything funny,” she said.

  The girl left. “She’s stupid,” I said to the bartender.

  Next up, I spotted another girl. “Hello!” I shouted across the room. “Hell-ooo!”

  ESPN fast-forwarded to this brunette sitting with me at the bar. It was now 1:15 a.m. She was wearing shades, a red baseball cap, a sleeveless black top, with a silver crucifix around her neck. You could tell this nervous Christian was anxious to leave, but I kept saying, “Stay, stay, stay stay,” like 10 or 15 times. She left.

  “Phone! Phone!” I shouted, as another brunette joined me, her back to the camera. Guess she didn’t want her mama to see her with Dennis Rodman. My bodyguard, Wendell, showed up at 2:45 a.m. Time to go. He escorted me and four girls, including the blonde in the off-the-shoulder blouse and the brunette wearing the crucifix to my 19th floor suite. I didn’t allow the camera inside. Bad move.

  The blue double doors to the suite closed, and the camera lingered outside where Wendell and Darren had a little chat about my immediate future, and the subject wasn’t basketball. Both were dressed in black. It seemed appropriate.

  It had been about a week from what was supposed to have been my wake-up call, the motorcycle accident. Not only did I almost kill myself, I had ended any hopes of returning to the NBA for the foreseeable future, and my career as a celebrity whatever was in jeopardy. What’s more, everybody who cared about me—Darren, Wendell, Thaer, and Michelle—had been threatening to pull up stakes. Rock bottom, baby. No career. No family. No friends. All because of booze.

  So did that stop my drinking?

  Nope.

  Not that everyone around me wasn’t trying to help—like Wendell. He had been my bodyguard for about three years when I first moved to Newport Beach before he quit out of sheer exhaustion.

  “Working with Dennis was like getting on a rollercoaster that never stops,” he said. “The only way you can get off is you drop off. ’Cause it never stops.”

  Wendell had come out of retirement to help get me straight. He didn’t need the work. One of the 38 straight men in the fashion industry, he had been happily hanging out with his family and managing his business, “Wendell Wade Williams Custom Clothing,” before Darren gave him a call—three calls actually. Now, after less than a week, he had already had it as he told Darren in the hallway outside my suite’s blue double doors.

  “I have no problem sticking around to help him become healthy,” he told Darren as the ESPN camera rolled. “But our strategy right now isn’t working. And if you and I and Thaer don’t sit down and put together a new game plan, then we are just as sick as him.”

  “Uh huh,” mumbled Darren, looking like a beaten man. Or maybe he was just worn out. After all, it was coming up on four o’clock in the morning.

  “You can’t compete with these young kids when you’re 42 years old on two hours’ sleep and 15 hours of [bleep] Jägermeister,” Wendell continued.

  The camera loves Wendell, and Wendell loves the camera. Warm, down to earth, a “philosopher from the ’hood,” someday he should get his own reality show. In the meantime, he had to settle for hijacking this one.

  “Let’s have our own little reality show,”Wendell said to Darren. “Reality one: Dennis Rodman is an alcoholic. Reality two: if he keeps drinking alcohol, there’ll be no NBA.”

  As of that sound bite, Rodman on the Rebound officially stopped being about a “rebounding” basketball player and started being about a “rehabbing” alcoholic.

  So to sum up: at around 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, October 28, 2003, in Las-fucking-Vegas, Nevada, my fate was being decided, on camera, by two very tired men standing in a hotel corridor. In hindsight, I’m thinking it would have been better to invite the camera inside. So exactly what was going on behind my 19th-floor suite’s blue double doors? That night, I haven’t a clue. The next day? There was a gang bang, baby, as Darren, Thaer, Wendell, and ESPN combined forces to jump my bones in what they called an “intervention.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PARDON MY INTERVENTION

  Las Vegas, October 28, 2003, 12:45 p.m. The setting seemed all wrong. The living room of the suite was cheery, bright, light streaming through open drapes. There were yellow walls, facing couches with wide orange and yellow stripes, and a perky green plant. The place looked like a set for one of those local women’s shows.

  I sat on one couch, my back to the sliding glass doors—Darren and Thaer sat directly across from me on the other. Wendell was camera right in a straight-backed, upholstered blue chair. The camera was set up behind Darren looking over his shoulder at me, occasionally panning right to get Thaer and Wendell.

  Cut to a close-up of my “get-on-with-it” right knee, that was bouncing up and down, up and down, working off nervous energy.

  Darren set the stage.

  “We’re in the fourth quarter now with two minutes to go. It’s your life on the line. Because if nothing changes, I’m gone,” said Darren, “He’s [Thaer’s] gone. Your wife just called me—this is for real this time. She’s got a noon meeting with a divorce lawyer tomorrow.”

  Why was ESPN there? Again, Darren had invited them in. By then, we really were in full blown, nothing-to-lose mode.

  Time to vent.

  “I honestly think that this alcohol has got you, brother,” said Wendell. “It’s got you, man. It’s hurting you, bro.”

  “I don’t want to see you go out like Joe Louis,” said Darren, “as a casino host for a thousand bucks a week.”

  Not a good example. Many a black man would gladly swap lives with Joe Louis, casino host or not. He was a god.

  Next up, more with Wendell. At this point in the shoot, he knew that ESPN had more footage of me in clubs than on court, more drinking than dribbling. And the little bit they had on court was of me fiddle-fucking around by myself. There was zero footage, not a frame, of me actually playing basketball.

  “That’s not a rebound tape,” said Wendell, pointing at the camera. “That’s Dennis Rodman’s funeral. No NBA team’s gonna go, ‘Oh, yeah! Dennis Rodman gets all the [bleep] in the world and goes to the clubs. Let’s bring him on board to win a championship.’”

  The first upbeat comment came from Darren when he switched into agent mode. “In a matter of a week, this whole thing could be turned around,” he said, “but you gotta be committed to it.”

  Cut to the resolution.

  “Talk to me, Dennis, what is our game plan?” asked Wendell. “You’re the coach of this whole team. What is our game plan?”

  “What’s the game plan?” I asked, then looked out window.
Luckily there were no airplanes or boats in sight. “You tell me,” I said wearily. “What’s the game plan?”

  “The game plan is to get sober, stay sober, and get your ass on board,” said Darren.

  Sure, I thought. But don’t pretend like it was your idea. “What’d I tell you I was going to do, Thaer?”

  “He already told me he was gonna take the pill when we got back from Vegas,” said Thaer. “He told me that before we left.”

  The “pill” was something called “Antabuse,” a drug the judge had ordered me to take as a part of the settlement for the public drunkenness charge back in September. According to the rexmed.com website, Antabuse, when combined with “even small amounts of alcohol,” can cause, among other things, “nausea,”“copious vomiting,”“confusion,” and in “severe reactions,”“unconsciousness, convulsions, and death.”

  Other than that, it’s cool.

  ESPN wrapped up the intervention scene with me pacing back and forth in the cheery hotel suite trying to digest what just happened.

  “I don’t really pay attention to too many people or listen to too many things people say,” I said on camera. “So they must care if they came and said something. It’s not like I don’t realize myself. I mean, I’m not stupid, you know? What they’re telling me is what I tell myself all the time.”

  After briefly mulling it over, I decided to “Try this angle. See how it works.”

  So the big dramatic scene of the reality series, Rodman on the Rebound, was not Dennis Rodman running on the court to a standing ovation or snagging 18 rebounds in the first game after his comeback to the NBA. No. No. No. The big dramatic scene of the Rodman on the Rebound was a drunk being confronted by his friends during an intervention.

  “Friends are here to support you, lift you up,”Wendell had said. “You know you got a problem, we know you got a problem. We’re gonna help you. Why? Because we love you.”

  It made for good T.V., but, truth be told, I had begun to gradually make my way back months before. Like I had said at my press conference announcing my return to the NBA way back in July, I was working out, not enough, but making a stab at it, and my weight was down. And I was partying less, maybe three or four days a week instead of 24/7.What I’m saying is the seed had been planted months before that showdown in Vegas. The intervention was more of a turning point for Darren, Wendell, Thaer, and Michelle than it was for me. I was already on my way.

  I’ll have to give ESPN credit, the guys did their best to end the reality show on a high note. They show me sober, working out, and “waiting by the phone” for a call from the NBA. They even promoted the show as an “intimate look at Rodman’s comeback efforts.” And even though this was not a show about a basketball player, but a show about an alcoholic, the closest they came to mentioning my drunken antics was a reference to “off-the-court challenges.”

  A couple of paybacks before putting the reality show to rest. There were only three people on the show who came off like assholes: me, of course, in my two drunk scenes, NBA commentator Stephen A. Smith, and my old Detroit teammate, Bill Laimbeer.

  Smith, the son Howard Cosell never had, said of my playing days, “Dennis Rodman as a person was quite frankly horrific. I don’t think he has any place in this league.”

  Later Laimbeer weighed in.

  “You have to assess the strengths and weaknesses that Dennis would bring to your ball club,” he said. “And right now the weaknesses probably outweigh strengths tenfold over.”

  Smith, who makes a living being an ignorant asshole, isn’t worth talking about. As for Laimbeer, would it have killed him to either decline to do the interview or just say some horseshit like, “Getting back in the NBA will be an uphill climb, but I wish Dennis the best”? Would that have killed his sorry ass?

  Rodman on the Rebound aired at midnight eastern standard time on December 3-4, 2003.

  Reality Check: Don’t drink and do reality shows.

  Following the intervention, ESPN cornered Darren in the back of an Aladdin Hotel limo for a parting comment.

  “This is it, there’s no turning back at this point,” he said. “Either he’s gonna make it, or the guy’s gonna be dead in a couple of years.”

  Nah. It never would have gone that far—not that I wasn’t out there. But as I said in that raving drunk scene at Josh Slocum’s, I knew exactly what I was doing. I always knew when the time came I could reel it back in, bring myself back to what I call my “safe place.” I’ve always been able to do that. I just never wanted to do it before. But it was there waiting. And I’ve always gone there when I needed to get my shit together.

  People have always thought I was just this train wreck, this fucking devil running wild, you know? It was never like that. The partying was something I let happen. I created it. I could have stopped it at any time, but I didn’t. I wanted to see how far I could take the roller coaster before it came to a dead end. People thought my dead end was the motorcycle accident at Treasures or my ass-showing antics at the Radio Music Awards. But it was more than that. It was like my whole life culminated into one big foot that hit the brakes. It wasn’t just one thing. It was a lot of things.

  As for the partying, I was just over it. I was tired of drinking. Tired of women. Tired of setting up my table, getting my troops together. Bored with it. Like on my last birthday, everybody was like, “Hey, let’s go party!”

  I went, “Well, okay, all right. If I have to. You twist my arm.” It was routine, you know?

  So I went to my safe place. A place where no one can hurt you. No one can bother you. It’s like going to the Garden of Eden. I go there to be peaceful and humble, and think things through. I knew I needed to get my shit together. I needed to do this. I needed to do that. I could see I was partying and drinking to bypass all the heartache and pain I suffered in life. And I realized whether it was problems with my fucked-up family, my kids, my career, or my love life, I had to find a new way of dealing with it. The liquor, the partying, the women weren’t working any more.

  So I took the pill, the Antabuse, not that it was totally voluntary. There was the court order—or at least that’s what they told me.

  “I literally, literally, put that thing in his mouth every day for months,” said Wendell. “I drove from L.A. to Orange County every day to give him his pill.”

  I found out while working on this book that Darren, Thaer, Wendell, and my lawyer had conspired against me.

  “Because of the Treasures thing, me, Darren, and the lawyer,” said Thaer, “we completely lied to him. Told him he was court-ordered to take the Antabuse, which was not true.”

  And they kept on telling that lie, saying the court order had been extended, and I ended up taking that shit for about a year and a half. Turned out lying was SOP for these guys.

  “I lie to him every day,” Thaer told a reporter. “I lie to him about what time a meeting is, what time our flight is every time we get on a plane. Because if I tell him what time, he’ll wait until the last second.”

  I guess this would be a good place to thank Thaer for all the fucking meetings I’ve made and flights I haven’t missed, and, oh yeah, for all the Antabuse I’ve taken and alcohol I didn’t drink.

  Here’s to you, bro.

  In one of my favorite scenes from Rodman on the Rebound, I was walking to my car behind the beach house when I spotted the ESPN crew.

  “What year is it?” I asked. “Two thousand and three?”

  They thought I was kidding.

  “No, seriously,” I said.

  “Yes,” some woman replied.

  I was two days sober then, the fog just beginning to lift, and I soon began taking stock. For the better part of a decade, I had spent nearly all my free time pretending “every day was New Year’s Eve.” But now New Year’s Day had finally arrived. No more booze, no more partying, no more spending every waking hour in search of the next good time.

  Wendell, at least, was happy for me, as he would tell a reporter: “Once De
nnis became sober, the party was over, because that’s not who he is.

  “Every day is New Year’s Eve?” he continued. “Every day is a Tuesday.”

  The reporter asked me if Wendell was right, if my ongoing attempt to “live every day like it was New Year’s Eve,” was over.

  “Nah,” I replied. “It’s never, ever gonna be over.”

  But it was going to be different. Now it was more of an attitude—a big grin without the party hat, you know?

  A state of mind, without the champagne.

  Or at least that was the plan.

  So on the 30th day of October, 2003, in Newport Beach, California, I had my life back. Now what? This really was the first— make that the second—day of the rest of my life. I could see there were many things that would need cleaning up during the long string of New Year’s Days just ahead. Both my careers, the one as a basketball player and the other as a celebrity spokesman, were on the downswing. My personal life was in a shambles, my marriage to Michelle hanging by a thread. I had been a lousy father, a stranger to my two youngest kids, a distant memory to my two oldest and their mothers. I had even split with my family down in Dallas. As for my neighbors, the people in Newport Beach thought I was a freak and a flake. It was time to show them I was a normal person. Or at least as normal as a six-foot-eight, pierced, tattooed, blond-haired black man can be. All in all, there was a ton of work to be done.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  YOU’RE NOT IN CHICAGO ANYMORE

  As I was lying in University Hospital in Vegas after my motorcycle accident, Darren was looking back, considering how very close we came.

  “I spoke to Phil Jackson no more than 48 hours after the accident,” Darren later told a reporter. “He didn’t make any promises, but said he’d be willing to sit down and talk. ‘Phil,’ I said, ‘he’s being flown into Denver this Wednesday for a workout.’ And Phil was like, ‘If there’s anything I can do to get him signed with Denver, let me know. Otherwise call me towards the end of the week, and by the way, I’m glad to hear that Dennis has been slowing down on his partying.’