When L.A. dumped me in 1999, that led to a little mix-up with my sister Debra, who had been working for me, and I let her go. My agent, Dwight Manley, and I already had parted ways right around the time I signed with the Lakers. Now there was no basketball, no Debra, and no Dwight in my life, and Carmen was coming and going. So there were huge holes to fill, and I topped them off with alcohol, alcohol, and more alcohol. Wendell, who was my full-time bodyguard at the time, watched me go down the toilet.
“Once Debra was gone, his drinking went into overdrive, man,” said Wendell. “It was like,‘My family’s all gone, my old agent’s gone, everybody’s gone. I’m getting ready to party my ass off.’ And that’s when I quit.”
When Wendell bailed out, that left another hole, and I filled it with still more booze. When I wasn’t at the Club 4809 beach house, I was at Josh Slocum’s. If it was after hours and I was still in the mood to party, I headed for Las Vegas.
“His life for a lot of years was a blur—just one long fucking blur,” said Wendell.
At the time, I felt totally alone. No one was around to pat me on the back and say, Dennis, “I’ll be there for you.” No one. So I kept on keeping on. And, other than the blip that was Dallas, the non-stop partying went on for almost four years before I hit rock bottom in the Treasures parking lot. Then, after I quit drinking, I was looking to go to the next level. I was looking for respect. That meant I had to change my ways. And that’s how I ended up ramrodding business meetings at Rodman’s.
Thaer showed up late for the meeting with Bugsy, his way-ugly, tan bulldog, trailing along behind. While Bugsy wandered around in search of snacks and petting, Thaer fired up his water pipe—it’s a Palestinian thing—and, between puffs, he brought up this idea we’d been kicking around for something called, “Arabian Nights” at the club. We’d feature Middle Eastern music to pull in the Arab crowd. Thaer even knew a D.J. who could do the spinning. So I was like, “Why not?”, and we put it in on the calendar for the first two Tuesdays in July. Talk about your niche marketing.
Somebody went, “What’s that smell?” and everybody was looking at Bugsy. It’s not what you think.
“When’s the last time this dog had a bath?” somebody asked, not really expecting a straight answer. Bugsy smelled so bad, nobody would be able to remember that far back.
Thaer shrugged, and Bugsy just kept waddling around, being a dog, totally oblivious.
“Insults don’t bother his ass,” said Thaer. “Fucker doesn’t speak English.”
After I moved to Newport Beach to live full-time in 1999, people got to know me as this person who partied all the time—this drunk. Sure, they respected me as an athlete, as a famous person, and that was great, but as far as being a human being, that was a different story.
My thing had always been, “As long as I don’t hurt anybody, it’s all good.” But after I sobered up, I saw I was hurting people: disgracing the community, doing all this crazy shit, disrespecting the cops. This is a town with a proud past, and I was kicking sand in their faces.
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall once lived here, as had James Cagney and that other “Michelle,” Michelle Pfeiffer. And while the town had seen its share of wild boys—Errol Flynn used to raise a little hell—I hold the all-time record for dissing cops and pissing-off neighbors. So my new thing was to be less like Errol Flynn and more like Shirley Temple, also a one-time Newport Beach resident.
I figured since I had turned on the fucking craziness, I could turn it off. So that’s what I did. In 2004, I shut down Club 4809— sold the beach house, moved to Huntington Beach, and got my life together. The bar was no longer open. And I was like, “You know what? Things are gonna be okay. Everything’s cool. I’m back in control now.”
It worked, and now people in Newport Beach look at me and go, “Wow! He actually did it. He’s actually cleaned up his act.” They saw me when I was down, and they were there to help me get up again. They were there when I needed them. Now when I walk the streets people say hello, they say, “Hey, Dennis, what’s going on.”
Today, I realize there were consequences to everything I did back in the day. Dominoes do fall. Scientists say the flap of a butterfly wing can eventually change the weather hundreds of miles away. I don’t know about that, but I do know the closing of a door can shake things up much closer to home. Here’s a retelling of the story of the “nice, clean girl,” the “librarian,” this time from the perspective of an eyewitness who saw things a little differently.
“This girl showed up and asked where he [Dennis] was. We’re like, ‘Oh he’s upstairs sleeping.’ And she freaked out,” said the eyewitness. “Just hysterical. That’s when she grabbed the knife from downstairs.
“It was a scary situation,” the eyewitness continued. “A girl that’s not right in the head at the time with a knife.
“Finally me and another person got her away from the door and got her down, and she ended up cutting her hand,” he continued. “We had to wrap it up for her.
“Dennis eventually opened the door and tried to talk her down,” said the eyewitness.
Here’s the good part:
“He never has intentions to actually hurt anybody,” the eyewitness said. “I guess some people don’t realize what they do emotionally sometimes to other people.”
I do now. Dominoes fall.
As for the other girl, the one on my side of the door? According to the eyewitness, she wasn’t sympathetic.
“You haven’t cut her off yet?” the eyewitness recalls Michelle saying to me. “I could’ve been stabbed.”
I have now made it through the worst time of my life, and I’m slowly working my way toward total respectability. I could’ve ended up in the gutter, but I caught myself just in time, made it back to my safe place, and things are good. I’m not bombed. I’m not broke. The kids are good. Michelle’s good. My life’s good. And I’ve learned a few life lessons along the way.
Reality Check: There’s a price you pay if you go by the rules.
Reality Check: There’s a price you pay if you don’t go by the rules.
Going by the rules in Detroit led me to a rendezvous with a rifle in a parking lot at The Palace of Auburn Hills. Breaking the rules in Newport Beach led me to a rendezvous with a light pole in a parking lot at Treasures Gentleman’s Club in Las Vegas.
The trick is to strike a balance somewhere in between. Before Treasures, “just being Dennis” meant breaking all the rules: getting wrecked, bedding some slut, going hog wild. In the future, “just being Dennis” will allow room for being a good father and a good husband. So move over wild boy and make room for “Citizen Rodman.” It’s my new thing. Not that I’d take back my old thing.
No. No. No. No. No.
The wild boy had a hell of a ride—a hell of a fucking ride: a helicopter landing on the beach, rock bands blasting; a very large black man running naked in the street; lots of “surgically enhanced” women; gallons of booze; tons of barbeque; Madonna; Carmen; Michelle throwing bottles at me so hard they ended up as permanent fixtures in the beach house walls; women knocking down my bedroom door. (I don’t know how many times I replaced that fucking thing. I do know I was keeping the local hardware store in business just buying hinges.)
But I understand now. I see. It was not all good. My eyes are open. I know that things went down in my beach house—the “librarian” with the knife, scumbags sneaking around doing drugs behind my back—that, with the flap of a butterfly wing, could’ve destroyed Dennis Rodman’s life and “earned” me a Michael Jackson-like six pages of coverage in the fucking Los Angeles Times. But my ass got lucky, and 20 years from now, all that negative shit will be forgotten. Instead, people will still be remembering that beautiful spring day back in May 2001 when Dennis Rodman turned 40.
“Remember the two rock bands?” they’ll say. “The cops in riot gear? And, hey—how ’bout that fucking helicopter?”
Like I said, it was a hell of ride.
CHAPTER TWENTY-S
EVEN
ROLL VIDEO
The video biography is not like having your life flash before your eyes. It is having your life flash before your eyes.
Sometimes it’s a highlight reel: “There it is! Rodman’s first career triple-double.” Sometimes not: “Police say Rodman faces a number of charges, including driving under the influence of alcohol.”
There are fond memories—Carmen and me at Planet Hollywood—and things I’d rather forget, like me exiting the paddy wagon in Miami. These flashbacks are from FOX Sports Net’s Beyond the Glory: Dennis Rodman. They shot the video in 2004, close on the heels of ESPN’s Rodman on the Rebound, which had aired earlier that year. But unlike the two-part ESPN reality series, Fox had no particular angle, producing a straight biography that ran 44 minutes and 32 seconds. (They filled out the hour with commercials.) Here’s a five-minute version, the highlights of the highlights, cobbled together by none other than Dennis Rodman himself.
Let’s begin with the Dallas childhood:
“The girls kind of overshadowed him a little bit,” my mother says.
No shit.
Cut to stills of my two sisters, the basketball stars, wearing their orange and black high school uniforms: Kim holding a trophy, Debra a ball.
Cut to Dennis Rodman, the undersized loser with very large ears.
Roll video of the six-foot-eight, skinny as hell Dennis Rodman—lucky if I weighed two hundred pounds—playing ball at Southeastern Oklahoma State.
Dissolve to video of the 1986 news conference when Chuck Daly announced that the Pistons had drafted John Salley and me.
Cut to the “bad boys” and then video of me flying over the scorer’s table, guarding Magic, dunking, blocking a shot, making a steal.
“The NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year, Dennis Rodman!”
Cut to a close-up of me crying.
Cut to pictures of Alexis and Annie, and then video of me after the cops picked me up in the parking lot at The Palace of Auburn Hills.
Roll tape of the Pistons hoisting the trophy after winning a second title, a much younger David Stern running for his life.
Cut to a sign in the stands in San Antonio: “Dennis Rodman: To Dye For.”
“I went and got my hair dyed, and that’s when my life changed completely,” I say.
“He went from a shy, unassuming kid to a megastar,” my mother says.
Cut to a close-up of Madonna in the stands and then video of David Robinson and me.
“I was the devil. He was God. He was Jesus,” I say.
Cut to a still photo of me, Michael, and Scottie.
“He plays. He does his job. He comes to practice. He keeps his mouth shut. He works hard every day. He’s never delinquent. He’s just a very easy person to have on a basketball team,” says Phil Jackson.
Cut to me wearing a Chicago, a wedding dress Rodman just kicked a photographer!”—then to video of the Bulls celebrating a third straight championship.
“When you’re flying that high, when you’re [at] like the peak of all peaks, there’s nowhere to go but down,” says Wendell.
Cut to me announcing my signing with L.A.
Roll the TV news clip.
“In handcuffs, former Baywatch star Carmen Electra steps from a police transport van. Also inside, her on-again, off-again lover, Dennis Rodman.”
Cut to Dallas. “A technical foul on Rodman. He’s been thrown out.”
Roll the voice over by FOX announcer, Chris Rydell. “His professional reputation was ruined, but the party was just getting started.”
Cut to video of the Treasures Gentleman’s Club in Vegas.
“We actually gave him an ultimatum, which was either you stop, or we’re done,” says Thaer.
“Everybody’s worried about, ‘Oh, is he gonna make the NBA.’ I could care less. To walk away from that alcohol is huge,” says Wendell.
“It’s step by step—and we work on it every day,” says Michelle.
Cut to me with a white, crinkle-permed, Don Quixote-looking hairdo playing for the Long Beach Jam.
Dissolve to the happy ending of me, Michele, and the kids in the park.
That’s the abridged version of my life on video—an overview of the overview. So what did Fox leave out? They didn’t even mention one low point: my arrest for stealing watches when I was a janitor at the Dallas airport. I was a nobody then, so there were no news cameras there, no video. If that happened today? I’d be all over SportsCenter. Leno and Letterman would be ragging my ass unmercifully. This brings us to the first really big-time thing FOX left out of the biography—Fame. They’re all over what I’m famous for—but as for what that fame means—that’s the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the living room.
Fame is what prompted FOX Sports to do my bio—what prompts them to do any bio—and it’s with me 24 hours a day. And whether the complaint is the across-the-board trust issues I’ve or personal privacy, fame is the water in already bitched about which this fish swims.
Michelle is over it.
“I just don’t want you to be ‘Dennis Rodman’ anymore,” she told me one day out of the blue.
Sometimes I feel the same way.
“We can’t go anywhere and do normal things,” she said, “And it sucks.”
Like last weekend.
“He [Dennis] took us shopping,” Michelle told a reporter. “He’s got his kids in his hands, people come up and say, ‘Hey, can we get a picture with you and our kids?’ They want him to let go of his kids so he can take a picture with them.
“And then the one time he said, ‘No, I’m with my kids,’” Michelle continued. “They called him an ‘asshole.’ And he wasn’t even rude.”
This kind of shit happens all the time. Now there are ways around it: like when we took the kids to Disneyland. I paid an escort to walk around with us to keep the people away. The cost? Two thousand dollars.
Whatever the source of fame—sports, movies, television, politics—once a person becomes a national celebrity, that very fame is a huge part of what their life is all about, dictating where they live, where they eat, where they can go and not go. Then there’s the ever-present bodyguard who, like it or not, is a part of the family. So it’s not the big house, the fancy car, the starring roles, and the championship rings that make a celebrity’s everyday life so very different from yours. It’s the fame. And FOX is a part of that.
FOX—all the media—and celebrities are, like Fred and Ginger, forever in lockstep. It’s hard to tell where one starts and the other begins. You can’t become famous and stay famous without the cameras, the reporters, the media. So even if FOX wanted to do the Dennis Rodman fame angle, I’m not sure how they’d capture it on tape. Do they shoot video of themselves shooting video? No clue.
Anybody have a number for 60 Minutes?
One last thing on fame and I will give it a rest. In the last few years, my celebrity status may have actually hurt my chances of getting back in the NBA. Whenever my name comes up, it’s all over the newspapers, and the battle lines are drawn. This guy loves Dennis. That guy hates Dennis. If some GM is considering bringing me on, he knows at some point he’s going to have to explain himself. I’m thinking a simple, “I want to win,” would get it done, but what do I know?
There’s a second way my fame has hurt my comeback. People accuse me of having my own agenda. They say I’m just trying to get back in the league to build my popularity, as some kind of publicity stunt. Well, I’m going to be famous with or without another NBA gig. Right now I can walk into any of these celebrity rat-fucks and—I don’t give a shit who’s hot—I’ll walk into that son of a bitch, and they are all over me. Bro, I’m famous in—at random— Finland, Spain, Puerto Rico, Croatia, Mexico—even China. Trust me, Dennis Rodman doesn’t need any more fame.
That’s it. I’m finally done bitching about fame. As of now, I’ve been a nationally known celebrity for more than a decade, and I’m going to be a celebrity for the rest of my damn life. Sometimes I regret it, and
sometimes I don’t. Whatever. I have decided to just get over it and play the hand I was dealt.
A second big thing given short shrift in Beyond the Glory is my failed relationships. (I guess I should be thankful for that.) From my mother and sisters, to my wives, children, and girlfriends, it’s been one long fuck-up.
Not that it’s all my fault.
Back in 1999, my mother and I weren’t on the best of terms to begin with, and then, when I let my sister Debra go, the shit really hit the fan. Debra threatened to sue me, she wanted to take this, this, this. Then my mother took Debra’s side, and I’m like, “Oh wow, all I did was take care of you guys.”
Back in the day, I spent close to a million bucks buying my mother and two sisters houses next door to each other down in Texas—they still live in those houses—and, as I said before, I send my mother $4,000 every month. But as the old saying goes, “No good deed goes unpunished.” So Debra was demanding this, this, this; my mother jumped in on her side; and suddenly, I got my own family fucking me over. Welcome to my world. I resolved that one in my usual way. I cut a fucking check, just paid Debra the money, because I don’t like confrontation with anybody, much less family. But even after all that, I can honestly say, I don’t hate my sister; I don’t hate my mother; we’re just not close.
Reality Check: Business and family don’t mix.
The amateur shrinks I’m surrounded with keep on nagging me about patching up the relationship with my family, especially my mother. Well, there’s nothing to patch up. There never has been any relationship. One of my shrinks thinks that explains a lot.
“I personally think that it affects him more than anyone knows, including him,” Michelle said in Beyond the Glory. “I think that has a lot of effect on how he treats people and how he is with people and why he’s got such a wall up and not loving people. That’s just my opinion.”
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