I Should Be Dead By Now

by Dennis Rodman

  Why James Worthy? I’m one of the best defensive players of all time, and I couldn’t guard his ass.

  “If you defended me three or four different ways,” said Worthy in the NBA at Fifty, “ … then I had three or four different moves.”

  No shit. He would be coming off a screen, and I’d be trying to figure out whether he was going over the top or underneath. Next thing I knew, he was at the rim. Now if we’d played those guys more, I might have figured out how to guard his ass. But there was nothing but frustration with James Worthy. Clever, quick, a great player—he’s one of the few guys who flat pissed me off. I want him on my team just so I don’t have to guard him.

  Now if you ask me what real team I was on that was the best— a team I would like to be on today—that would be the team we had the first two years that I was in Chicago. Aside from all the talent, this was a team that was happy. Just happy. There was no bitching. I mean it was great. Of course, all that happiness might have had something to do with all the winning we were doing. In 1995-96 we won 72 regular-season games—best ever—and the NBA championship. Then we won another championship in 1996-97. You’re winning baby, and the owner’s happy, the GM is happy, the coach is happy, and the guys playing are happy. And the guys who aren’t playing? They’re not so happy, but they’ve got no grounds for complaining.

  And me? I might have been the happiest motherfucker of all. Perfect coach, perfect team, perfect city. Today? I’m not so happy. Not after being kicked around by the NBA for four or five years. But as I looked around the Cedars-Sinai banquet table that night, I could see I wasn’t the first guy to be abused by the NBA. Paul Westphal coached at the Phoenix Suns and Seattle Supersonics before ending up at Pepperdine, not exactly the college elite. Drew Gooden has been on three teams in four years. This league can chew your ass up and spit it out, and nobody exits unscathed. Even superstars get hurt, lose a step, get old, and then “there’s no room in the inn,” y’know? It’s something you understand in your head. In your heart? That’s another deal. I looked at the reporter. He played somewhere back in the sixties, and he was thinking he could still play— half-speed anyway—right up until about a year ago. That’s when he blew out his ACL. Shit, anybody could have seen the son of a bitch shouldn’t have been out there. What is he? 55? 60? I guess his body gave out before his heart. Maybe that’s what they’ll say about me one day.

  But not yet, baby, not yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THREE RUMORS, FIVE DENIALS

  Some of the people around me think Michelle has been fooling around. A revenge kind of thing. They didn’t tell me, of course. They told the reporter. So the guy came to me and Michelle with all this gossip, so off the wall it was almost funny.

  Here’s the big picture:

  “Michelle has a boyfriend right now,” a friend told the reporter. “She’s had one for a while. But she has double standards. Dennis is not allowed to, but she is.”

  First, I was going to just ignore all this shit, but then I was afraid if I did, I would be accused of sweeping it all under the rug.

  “The guy’s supposed to be doing this tell-all book, and he leaves all the sleazy stuff out trying to protect Michelle. He’s kissing Michelle’s ass.”

  So instead of ignoring it, I’ve decided to put it all to rest. Let’s take it one rumor at a time.

  First up is the motocross “boy toy.”

  That was a fun night.

  Me, Michelle, a couple of friends—the usual bunch—were hanging out at Josh Slocum’s. Michelle got pissed at me for something—no news there—and she left with a couple of people to go to another bar. They came back. She didn’t, so I was like, “Where the hell is she?”

  I was the only one wondering; or so the story goes.

  “We all had our suspicions it was that guy from motocross.

  Everybody knew something was going on with that guy,” recalled a friend. “She actually had the balls to go to his [Dennis’s] restaurant with this kid when he [Dennis] wasn’t there to have a couple of drinks.”

  I ended up driving all over Newport Beach at like four o’clock in the morning trying to find her ass. Friends took this to be a sign that I was jealous. Meanwhile, a friend of a friend spotted her car parked at the motocross boy toy’s house. Newport Beach is a very small town. So we drove over there. I let the air out of her tires, had a change of heart, pumped the tires back up. Then I went home and waited. Come daylight, she showed up. I called her on it, and she said she and the motocross boy toy were only friends. She was just trying to score some free riding lessons for our son D.J., who was maybe four at the time.

  I bought it.

  “I don’t think he wanted to believe she was actually cheating on him,” a friend told a reporter, “actually sleeping with somebody else.”

  So that’s the rumor. Some of the basic facts are true. We were sitting around drinking at Josh Slocum’s one night; and Michelle did disappear and end up with the motocross guy. I did go looking for her, but it didn’t have anything to do with jealousy. The reason I was chasing around after Michelle is that I didn’t want her to be driving drunk—didn’t want her to get hurt. I was so pissed she had disappeared, that when I finally found her, I let the air out of her tires. The whole thing had to do with worry, not jealousy. I’m just not a jealous guy. There’s not a man on the planet who can make me jealous. If somebody is trying to fool around with my woman, I just go up and shake the guy’s hand, say, “How you doin’?” No big deal.

  Here’s what Michelle said when she heard the rumor.

  “This motocross guy is 24 years old,” she told the reporter as if the kid’s age alone were enough to put it to rest.

  “My [teenage] daughter’s even friends with him,” she continued. “I met him at a motocross event, and we all became friends. That was it. He was gonna teach our kids. Teach our little boy [how to ride]. That was it.”

  As for Michelle parading him around at Josh Slocum’s: “This guy and his friends would come into the restaurant. Dennis had met them.”

  And what about the night in question?

  “I was drunk. I walked down to Villanova, which is a restaurant down the street,” said Michelle. “I called [motocross guy] to come get me because I was too drunk to drive. And I obviously didn’t feel like dealing with Dennis—that’s why I left the restaurant in the first place.”

  So the motocross guy and the man he worked for showed up.

  “His boss and his wife drove my car. I rode with [motocross guy],” said Michelle, “We all went back to [his] house,” where they all ended up sitting around in the living room.

  “Where the cheating became a deal was [Dennis] slashed my tires. I wasn’t able to leave blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.”

  So Michelle stayed for what was left of the night, and a rumor was born.

  “They made a big deal out of that one night, me being drunk,” continued Michelle. “But nothing happened. If I cheated on him, I’d tell you, ‘I cheated on him.’”

  And what did I say when the reporter asked me point-blank if I thought Michelle was cheating with the motocross guy?

  “No. Not at all. Not at all. Not at all.” So this was a really big deal with my friends, and I could have cared less—just another little ripple in the polluted pond of Dennis Rodman’s love life.

  Rumor two also involves motorcycles. Remember Michelle’s overnight trip to Big Bear that ended badly and her week-long excursion to the Black Hills Motor Classic in Sturgis, South Dakota? Opportunities, so the story goes, for Michelle to fool around with “a lover,” we’ll call “motorcycle man.”

  “Bullshit,” said Michelle.

  “I know who you’re talking about,” she told the reporter. “You’re talking about a friend of mine that I’ve been friends with for going on eight years. And he will be a friend of mine until the day I die.”

  The motorcycle guy sealed the deal with Michelle the night her husband allegedly beat her up.

  “The actu
al night that happened, this guy put me and my daughter in a hotel—the very first night it happened. That’s how long [we’ve] been friends,” said Michelle. “I chose not to have him in my life for a while, because I was too busy chasing Dennis around and not being friends with my friends.

  “And up in Big Bear, I was literally with him, another guy, and two of my girlfriends.” Michelle continued. “So it was three girls and two guys. And all of us girls had a bedroom, and the boys had a bedroom in our friend’s cabin. So there was nothing.

  “In Sturgis, same deal,” she said, speaking of the sleeping arrangements.

  “He is a friend, and he will remain a friend for good,” she continued. “There’s just nothing to tell. And Dennis—it bothers the hell out of Dennis—he can’t stand it.”

  “That you’ve got this old friend,” said the reporter.

  “He can’t stand it. I turn to this friend because this friend is very intelligent. He’s got his shit together. And I turn to him for advice. And it bothers Dennis.”

  She’s right about that one.

  “Anyway, no, I’m not cheating on him,” continued Michelle. “And I would not see another man until we were completely separated or I was divorced. I won’t go there. I just won’t do it again [like she did with her first husband.] And the one time I did cheat on him, and Dennis knows about it…Iwas lonely. I wanted a man to treat me good, pay attention to me, and that was it.”

  Which brings us to the third rumor, somehow linked to the internal combustion engine. In this one, Michelle left me for some valet parker.

  “Where do you get these stories?” Michelle asked the reporter.

  So why’d she really leave me?

  “He was screwing around with some chick,” said Michelle. “That and because he wouldn’t involve me in his life.”

  So after Michelle filed and we were “completely over,” she started “seeing a guy that was a valet parker.”

  That one would have a happy ending, for me at least. After Michelle left the valet parker to come back to me, I went over to the restaurant where the guy worked. I figured Michelle had been talking his ear off for days, and I was like, “What do I need to do with Michelle that I’m not doing?”

  He was like, “If you want to know what Michelle is about, just look at her back.”

  What he meant was, check out that big “Mrs. Rodman” tattoo.

  “He was trying to tell Dennis that what I’m all about is my husband,” said Michelle.

  “And your husband is Dennis Rodman,” said the reporter.

  “Yep, damn it.”

  Going through all these rumors, I can see why some of my friends might have been suspicious. You stay overnight a couple of places with eligible guys, you go on vacation for a week with another man, it looks bad. But you can’t build your life around what other people think. And sometimes when “it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck,” it’s not a duck at all. It’s just, say, an AFLAC commercial.

  “I’d love to know who these people are who say that I’m the one that’s cheating,” said Michelle. “But I should expect it. Anybody’s that’s gonna talk, they’re gonna say good things about Dennis, bad things about me. I’ve cheated on Dennis one time in six and a half years.”

  While she was in a denying mood, Michelle took exception to all of us calling her jealous, saying her blow-ups were more about disrespect.

  “This guy is screwin’ this other girl and then brings her in front of me,” said Michelle. “I don’t know if that’s about disrespect or jealousy. I’m not quite sure. Or me being pregnant with his kid and he’s got another chick over at his house he’s messing around with, and I see it.”

  And as far as her knocking the shit out of me the day I came back from shooting the Super Bowl commercial in Houston?

  “The guys is six-how tall, six-seven? Anybody with a brain would know that I couldn’t knock the shit out of him. How am I gonna knock the shit out of Dennis Rodman?”

  That’s a question my jaw has been asking for about six years. To look at her, it doesn’t seem possible. And I am happy to hear that Michelle has been holding back—that there are limits to her violence.

  “I’ve pushed him. I’ve hit him in the chest. I’ve used like open palms, but I’ve never actually socked him. Even the time I caught him naked behind the door, and I broke down the door—I slapped him. I never hit him.”

  “So you’ve never hit him with your fist,” said the reporter. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Exactly. Never with my fist. I don’t know how I could ever knock the crap out of this guy.”

  “But you have slapped him.”

  “Oh, yeah. Oh, heck yeah.”

  “Upside the head?”

  “No, on his face. And he deserved it, let me tell you.”

  “So if somebody said you slapped him in the face, then that probably happened. That could have happened?”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  Reality Check: Sometimes, where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CITIZEN RODMAN

  On Tuesday, June 14, 2005, I drove down to my restaurant in Newport Beach to meet with the manager. There’s no connection, but it just happened to be the same day the Los Angeles Times announced that Michael Jackson got off scot-free. “Jackson Acquitted on All Ten Counts” said the front-page headline. Inside there were five more pages of coverage. Un-fucking-real.

  I pulled into the parking lot and parked across from the infamous black Ford 350 XLT pickup that had ferried my ass to Las Vegas just in time for the motorcycle pile-up at the Treasures Gentleman’s Club. It was parked in the handicapped spot. Figures.

  The restaurant hadn’t been what you’d call a cash cow, and I had stepped in to get it back on track. Now that my drinking is no longer a problem, I can really help. Who better than a guy who, for years, spent most of his waking hours in one club or another? Out front, I talked with a couple of guys who were installing lights on the covered patio entryway, cardboard boxes and tools sitting around. I had been thinking about re-doing the entrance all together, make it like the ivy-covered trellis at Mimi’s Café over in Costa Mesa. I asked the guys to run by Mimi’s later and check it out. Not that my place wasn’t inviting to begin with.

  The architecture is Victorian, and the building has a story-and-a-half cupola on the right with lots of bric-a-brac painted gold with red accents. The building itself is a soft green, the roof a darker green, done in hexagonal shingles with an occasional red shingle accent. Being California, there were a couple of palm trees out front and a dozen or so potted plants.

  I walked inside, and the place was dark as a cave, smelled a little musty. But even in the dim light you could see the full bar on the left with stools and the tables in the main room, looking naked without their tablecloths. Several not-quite-to-scale statues of topless women—not Playboy topless,Venus de Milo topless—were scattered around, two flanking the fireplace, one part of a room divider. There were Greek columns, gold woodwork, and heavy drapes. In back, down a couple of steps, several red couches backed up to large windows that looked out on the marina where white boats were bobbing up and down in their slips. The overall effect: comfortable, just short of elegant, like an upscale gentlemen’s club.

  I hooked up with the manager, and we settled in at a table. After I lit up a cigar and took off my sneakers, we got down to business. We talked about how much to pay a band; what the cover charge should be. We discussed whether we should spend $6,000 for an ad in a trade magazine for event planners, a target audience if there ever was one. We talked about hiring bartenders, and in the first and last “Dennis Rodman moment” of the meeting, I suggested we hire “three hot girls.” As I said, a drinker knows drinkers. Does all this shit sound boring? Perfect. I have been trying to piece together a new boring Dennis Rodman for Newport Beach use. The kind of guy who is invisible to cops. The wild boy was ready to show a whole new side: respectability.

 
As a part of that, I had even changed the name of the restaurant six months before. Josh Slocum’s was now “Rodman’s.” It was my way of announcing Dennis Rodman’s “second coming” as a businessman, a citizen, and a human being. At the time of this meeting, it had been about a year and a half since, in the midst of the intervention in Vegas, Wendell had told me just how far I had fallen. He had called me a disgrace to my children, my family, my friends, and black people in general.

  Other than that, things were good.

  “What was the point in snatching all those rebounds and going down in history as one of the greatest rebounders if you’re gonna go out like a fucking drunk?” Wendell said. “What’s the point of being able to boast and brag about playing on one of the greatest championship teams with the greatest basketball player ever, Michael Jordan, if you’re gonna go out like a drunk?”

  At the time, I was getting similar “You’re a loser—Fix it” messages from Michelle, Darren, and Thaer. So I made a decision to sober up. But that was just the first phase of my comeback. Now I had a reputation to live down. Needed to retool my image. Wendell had some ideas.

  “You know what you need to do?” he told me. “You need to get you a tailor-made suit, something that Michael Jordan would wear. Dye your hair back to its natural color, take off the sunglasses and go on Oprah. You will blow people’s minds. The same way you blew their minds when you put on a dress.”

  “Being wild and crazy has no shock value anymore,” he continued. “When you’re 44 years old and tell someone, ‘Look at my new piercing,’ they’re like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’”

  One final piece of advice: “Blame it all on alcohol,” said Wendell. “People love comeback stories. Blame it all on alcohol because, guess what, Dennis? It’s the truth.”

  Well, alcohol was the symptom and not the disease. The disease was basketball or maybe the lack of basketball. As Wendell told a reporter: “After he got cut from the Lakers, it all started crumbling down.”