RODMAN UNCHAINED THE SPURS' NO-HOLDS-BARRED FORWARD GIVES NEW MEANING TO THE RUNNING GAME
Sports Illustrated - MAY 29, 1995
The Sunday morning topics at Dennis Rodman's house have ranged from gay sex to Pearl Jam lyrics to his own drunken failures at Las Vegas craps tables, and now America's most provocative athlete has a more compelling matter to discuss. ``Let's talk about shot selection,'' says Rodman, his low voice barely audible amid the clatter of 15 exotic birds and two German shepherds who actually hail from Deutschland.
It is the day before Rodman's employer, the San Antonio Spurs, will open the Western Conference finals at home against the Houston Rockets. Is Rodman so consumed by basketball that he wants to discuss it here amid a gathering so eclectic it makes MTV's Real World look like The Waltons?
``Hell, no,'' Rodman says, then clarifies. He wants to talk about the magazine photo shoot that is about to take place, one he thinks should include shots of him wearing makeup and women's clothing or, better yet, nothing at all. ``I mean, why not be a little risque?'' Rodman asks. ``Push the envelope.''
The beauty of this attitude is not just that it is designed to test the boundaries of mainstream society but that Rodman has absolutely no concern for how his antics will play in the basketball community. And though he has a desperate and obvious need to draw attention to himself, Rodman doesn't give a flying
halter top about what his NBA peers or employers think of his behavior. He is moved far more by the opinions of the people in his midst: Gregg, a manager for a mail-order company specializing in gay men's apparel; Lara, a dancer, model and horse trainer; Bill, who works for Rodman's excavation company; and several other guests.
``I don't give a ---- about basketball anymore,'' Rodman says. ``It's like the Back to the Future ride in Orlando, like virtual reality. I'm already out of life in the NBA. I'm just living my life the way I want to. I'm not an athlete anymore. I'm an entertainer.''
An hour later, when Rodman emerges wearing a shiny tank top, metallic hot pants and a rhinestone dog collar, his guests ooh, aah and gawk in amusement. ``Dennis is in one of his transvestite moods,'' says Rodman's friend Amy Frederick, rolling her eyes. Were it not Rodman, a man who dreams of playing his last NBA game au naturel, this behavior might be a bit shocking.
This Sunday at home falls near the end of a 72-hour odyssey of Rodman-inspired insanity, a boundless weekend bender that has spanned three states and five figures' worth of frequent flier miles, and collected an entourage that at various times included Hollywood celebrities and fawning women, awestruck gamblers and acid-eating Deadheads, sultry strippers and a Bill Laimbeer-sized drag queen. Above all, this weekend has provided a rousing demonstration that Rodman is a rare human with both the positioning and the resolve to live by his own rules and attack life without regard to the demands or plans or standards imposed by others.
Flashbacks to impressions of Rodman that began to form three days earlier-- on Thursday night, to be exact--now seem like dim and distant memories.
It's an hour before tipoff of the sixth game of the Spurs' Western Conference playoff series against the Los Angeles Lakers, which San Antonio leads three games to two. The San Antonio players are gathered in the cramped confines of the visitors' locker room at the Great Western Forum. At one end of the room five Spurs are watching a video of Game 5 and quietly talking strategy. One man sits near that group but not with them, oblivious to his environs. Clad in plaid flannel pants and a white T-shirt, senses shielded by Oakley sunglasses and large headphones, the rebel hunches over in his chair, rocks out to the music and lets his mind run free.
At that moment it's impossible to tell where Rodman has flown off to. It's too early in the Rodman joyride to realize that the man who will be the catalyst for San Antonio's series-clinching victory is preparing for battle by listening to Pearl Jam at about 7,000 decibels and traveling via fantasy to places most people will never admit to venturing: horrific torture chambers, chosen suicide spots, bedrooms with various partners. This is a Rodman who is darker and weirder than his image--the one who, depending on your outlook, is either a selfish problem child or an authentic genius who transcends his sport. Most of the Spurs would choose the former, less- flattering description, and that would be hunky-dory with Dennis the Menace, who values the opinion of his basketball peers about as much as Albert Einstein valued his report card.
Right now all that has been revealed is a 34-year-old, sculpted 6' 8" black man with hair of a red-orange color that looks like it was lifted off a 1977 Camaro. Eyes closed, Rodman is visualizing himself on stage with Pearl Jam, drumming to the beat of Indifference:
``I'll swallow poison until I grow immune.
I will scream my lungs out till it fills this room.
How much difference does it make?''
In L.A., Rodman is the difference. Having survived a full-game benching for insubordination earlier in the series, he assumes the incongruous role of battle-tested leader. One by one before the game, teammates Sean Elliott, David Robinson and Avery Johnson approach the man who owns the only two NBA title rings on the Spurs' active roster and ask, ``What's the best way to approach a game like this?'' Rodman tells them to stop thinking and thrust themselves into the flow.
There are reasons Rodman is the best rebounding forward in NBA history, and the most important one is not that he works his butt off or gets outrageously physical or has no fear. It has more to do with the fact that, like hockey star Wayne Gretzky, he sees the game like no one else and is two moves ahead of the competition. He is less athlete than artist. He gets into his flow and becomes one with the ball, and before anyone else knows what's happening, it is his. ``It's a whole different game for me,'' says Rodman, the winner of the last four NBA rebounding titles. ``I know where the ball's going to go.''
Once the game begins the L.A. fans ride Rodman hard. They chant, ``Rodman sucks,'' but it becomes increasingly clear as he plays to the crowd--at one point he playfully knocks the hat off a courtside heckler--that he is made for this town. Athletically, he carries a mystical beauty. He runs up and down the court like a gazelle, and his defense is a study in body control. Even the weakest part of Rodman's game, his offense, is deceptively potent. ``He can control the tempo of a game without scoring, and that's amazing,'' says teammate Doc Rivers, an 11-year guard. ``He's a great offensive player. He's so smart, and he sees the floor like a guard. He'll set the key screen or make the great pass. His pass might not lead to the basket, but it's the pass that leads to the pass that leads to the basket.''
San Antonio wins 100-88. Every time the Lakers make a charge, a burst of energy from Rodman helps repel them. For the first time as a Spur he assumes the unlikely role of floor leader, directing traffic with emphatic arm waves and barking out commands. Afterward he strides off the court, past the locker room and into an empty corridor. ``This is what gets me so jacked, winning a series in L.A.,'' he says. ``This town gets me off.''
Rodman refuses to talk to the media, saying his teammates deserve the attention. Later he relents. Then in the parking lot he charges a Laker fan, chasing him down and grabbing him by the throat. Rodman's explanation? ``He reached into my bag and stole my shades. I told him to keep the damn things.'' A 12-passenger stretch limo is there to rescue Rodman and transport him to Sanctuary, a trendy Beverly Hills hangout.
``You need a name,'' yells Jack (Une) Haley, Rodman's friend, teammate and guardian angel. A seven-footer who seldom plays but has ridden Rodman's coattails to a small celebrity of his own, Haley is the Spurs' middle man, the guy who alternately explains Rodman to the world and explains the rules of the world to Rodman. Though Rodman seldom listens--``He rebels just to rebel,'' Haley says--the two form an odd couple who come with their own lingo. In exaggerated California accents the two bust out words like schnay, a rough equivalent of the term ``not'' that Rodman's ex-girlfriend, Madonna, helped popularize. The key word in this private language is june (pronounced gee-OOOON), which serves both as Rodman's nickname and as a verb form that can be substituted for virtually any act. Haley goes by the shortened Une, and now he's brainstorming. ``I've got it! You're Si,'' he says, addressing me.
Sigh?
``No, Si--S.I., for your magazine.''
I don't dare say schnay.
Sanctuary is filled with celebs, deal makers and ladies of the evening, but Rodman is the center of attention. His table includes Haley, models galore and comedian Jon Lovitz. Movie producers and agents come over to shake his hand and pine for his time. ``I will be in show business,'' he says, ``but I'm not going to play some weak-ass basketball player. That would be stupid.'' An agent who says he helped put together Pulp Fiction thinks Rodman would be a classic Quentin Tarantino villain. Rodman is interested, though he says he's also talking with Warner Bros. and Disney about big projects.
Later, in the jumpin' back room, shots of Jagermeister and Goldschlager are passed around. Rodman says that he has never been into drugs, but he can drink like a fish, and keeping up requires commitment. Haley, who played at UCLA, is getting autograph requests up the wazoo while Lovitz watches. Only in L.A. could Jack Haley be bigger than Jon Lovitz. ``Hey,'' Lovitz protests, ``he's not that much bigger than me. Only about a foot.''
A woman with a sexy Middle Eastern accent wants to know what the deal is with the flame-haired dude. ``Who ees this man?'' she asks. ``What makes heem so special? Why does everybody want so badly to speak with heem?''
The answer is that Rodman, after three decades of confusion, anger and longing for acceptance, turned a corner a couple of years ago. He became a man who strives to live for the moment, with no watch, no pager and few worries about how he may be perceived--but with a quenchless thirst to be noticed. His explanation: ``I woke up one day and said to myself, Hey, my life has been a big cycle. One month I'm bleeding to death, one month I'm in a psycho zone. Then, all of a sudden, the cycles were in balance.''
Rodman eats when he's hungry, sleeps when he collapses and does whatever the hell he pleases. Few celebrities can pull this off, and athletes almost never do. He lives more like a rock star, an updated version of Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, than an athlete. There is a fatalistic side to Rodman, but he's more of a '90s dissident than a '60s insurgent. He thinks anything political is crap and has adopted a younger generation's everything-is-screwed-up-beyond-repair resignation. He is a man drunk on his own ability to do whatever he wants, a rebel without a boss.
Why don't more people in his position behave so freely? ``They hide behind their money, fame and success,'' he says. ``Then all of a sudden they have no opinion, or they're afraid to voice it because they're afraid someone will take away what they've got. You can be famous and still voice your opinion, as long as you don't hurt anybody. You can do anything you want.''
It is not surprising that some of Rodman's friends, including Madonna and Eddie Vedder, are icons. Rodman met Vedder, the Pearl Jam singer, and other band members two years ago; he has hung out backstage for three shows, a number he plans to triple next month. ``I'm going to tour with them for two weeks,'' he says. ``They'd better let me sit in on drums, or I'm out of there.''
He busted loose from Madonna a year ago, ending a hot-and-heavy romance, but not before he learned a great deal from her about shock value and self- promotion. It is 3:30 Friday morning, and a heated Rodman is out front of Sanctuary talking Material Girl with a bouncer. ``She wanted to get married,'' he says. ``She wanted to have my baby. She said, `Be in a hotel room in Las Vegas on this
specific day so you can get me pregnant.' She had ways of making you feel like you're King Tut, but she also wanted to cuddle and be held.'' Through her publicist, Madonna declined comment.
The Spurs return to San Antonio on Friday afternoon, and aside from a trip to a local workout facility, Rodman's day is relatively tame. That night he is back at his house with his inner circle, barbecuing. Included are Rodman's surrogate brother, Bryne Rich, whose family essentially adopted Rodman when he was 19; Rich's girlfriend, Frederick; and Dwight Manley, a Southern California rare-coin dealer who, despite being five years younger than Rodman, serves as his caretaker. Rodman has about 800 messages on his answering machine; he speeds through most of them and writes down nothing.
At 9 p.m., the meat still thawing, Manley announces Continental has a 10:40 flight to Vegas. ``Let's do it,'' Rodman says, and an hour and 39 minutes later, the five of us sprint through the San Antonio airport like O.J. Simpson, circa 1977, making the flight with seconds to spare. As the plane takes off, Rodman is blasting his favorite Pearl Jam song, Release, through his portable CD player--``I'll ride the wave where it takes me''--and laughing. ``What are we doing?'' he asks, and everyone cracks up.
Everyone in the group is drinking Bloody Marys immediately after takeoff-- everyone except Manley, who talks about Rodman and how he met him two years ago at a craps table at the Mirage in Vegas. ``Dennis and Bryne were supposed to be out there for a few days,'' Manley recalls, ``and they stayed for five weeks.'' Rodman has been known to drop as much as $30,000 on a trip but has won as much as $72,000 at a single sitting. Money, to him, seems incidental. ``He makes $2.5 million a year,'' Manley says, ``and he doesn't save a penny.''
Rodman's father, Phil, deserted the family when Dennis was three. Rodman grew up in Dallas, around his mother, Shirley, and older sisters, Debra and Kim, both of whom were college basketball All-Americas. At 22 he was working as a janitor at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport before he got his life together through basketball and became a key member of the Detroit Piston teams that won NBA titles in '89 and '90. ``He never got to be a rebel as a kid,'' Rich says, ``so he's really going for it now.''
Says Manley: ``It's the classic case of a boy who grew up without a strong male role model. He is learning manhood on his own, and he's learning it with no one to tell him no. He can get away with anything. No one stops him. When you're raised without boundaries, you have to find them for yourself.''
Vegas is going nuts on this warm Friday night. The Grateful Dead is in town, and Rodman receives glassy-eyed, LSD-inspired stares as he walks into the Mirage Hotel. He heads for the craps table and starts blowing dough.
The American public's lack of composure around celebrities never ceases to amaze, but Rodman handles it pretty well. One guy wants to trade his beat-up Vermont baseball cap for Rodman's black lid that says simply aphrodisiac. ``Schnay,'' Rodman answers. A pair of buxom Australian expatriates who have settled in L.A. end up with the crew and follow Rodman into the men's room. Later a man spots Rodman and lifts up his girlfriend's miniskirt, revealing her bikini underwear. Rodman smiles and moves on. Everyone wants to talk basketball, and he just wants to roll bones until dawn.
Sleep comes after Saturday's sunrise and is ended rudely at nine o'clock by the voice of Haley, who has tracked Rodman down and telephoned his suite at the Mirage. ``What the ---- are you doing?'' Haley rails at Manley. After some back and forth, Manley wakes up Rodman, now $5,000 lighter, and puts him on the phone.
The dilemma here is nothing new. Rodman has been in trouble all season with the Spurs. San Antonio general manager Gregg Popovich, a former Marine, and coach Bob Hill set rules for the team, and Rodman decides the rules are stupid and disregards them. Rodman refers to Hill as Boner and has nothing very positive to say about the hard-line Popovich.
This time Rodman wants to blow off a Saturday afternoon film session and a team dinner back in San Antonio. Haley, in the name of stability, urges Rodman to be there. The problem is, the harder you push Rodman, the more likely he is to rebel for the sake of rebellion. It's a dangerous prospect because he has already pushed his superiors and teammates near their limits. In San Antonio's Game 3 defeat by the Lakers, Rodman lay down on the floor with a towel over his head and took off his shoes during a second-half timeout. Hill sat him for the remainder of that game and all of Game 4, which the Spurs won, and held him out of the starting lineup for Game 5 as all the while he and Rodman engaged in a hissing match via the media.
``That's just immaturity,'' says Rivers, who joined the Spurs in December. ``If you want to go out and party and have crazy hair, that doesn't make you a bad guy. But when your actions impact the team, that's not good. There have been guys who have decided we'd be better off without him. I haven't done that yet, but I haven't been here that long.''
Despite Haley's protests Rodman wants to follow through with a plan to jet to Phoenix for Game 7 of the Sun-Rocket series this afternoon, ``just to freak everyone out.'' Haley calls Hill, who promptly phones Rodman. After 20 seconds Rodman slams down the phone and launches into a tirade: ``Yeah, I really want to go to a goddam dinner with all the wives and old people-- that'll be really fun.'' Haley is relieved by Rodman's decision to attend the dinner, saying later, ``The organization has been fair with Dennis. If he'd have blown this off, the players would have said, `To hell with him.' ''
It's Saturday afternoon, time to get down and dirty, though it takes a while to figure this out. Rodman is at a specialty store in the Las Vegas airport, buying a sheet of Elvis stamps, and I'm carrying four pieces of luggage and getting ready to fly home to Oakland. We walk to the gate for Rodman's 12:15 p.m. flight to Houston, and I start to say goodbye. ``Why the hell don't you get your ass on this plane so we can do some talking?'' he asks, and before a plausible answer comes to mind, we're sitting in first class, listening to Eddie Vedder moan, ``Why go home, why go home. . . .''
Sleep deprivation has turned us into a punchy and expansive pair. Rodman is talking about life, philosophy, his divorce and getting naked in public, which naturally leads to Madonna. Rodman has great respect for his former squeeze, who has done a lot to promote homosexual lifetsyles. Rodman often goes to gay bars in San Antonio and doesn't shy away from hugging and kissing male friends. He says that's as far as it has gone, ``but I visualize being with another man. Everybody visualizes being gay--they think, Should I do it or not? The reason they can't is because they think it's unethical. They think it's a sin. Hell, you're not bad if you're gay, and it doesn't make you any less of a person.''
Rodman's eyes are glistening, but he is not laughing. I ask him if he thinks about dying young. ``Sometimes I say I'm going to play basketball and go-go-go until I drop dead,'' he says. ``I'm not afraid of dying at all. It's just the next boundary.''
Does he contemplate suicide?
``Sure. Sometimes I dream about just taking a gun and blowing my head off. If I ever know it's time to die, I'll head for a waterfall and camp out for a day, knowing I only have 24 hours to live, fly off the waterfall and just juuune.''
The next question is whether Rodman's fantasies include murder.
``Yeah, I'd kill somebody--in my mind,'' he says. ``All of a sudden I lose control of what I'm doing. I'm in a torture chamber, and I've got to fight my way out. I definitely come out with a vengeance.''
And who, in this fantasy, does Rodman most want to kill?
``The person I used to be. He tried to be something he wasn't. He wanted everybody to like him because he was an athlete who had this and had that. He was dead wrong.''
Rodman and I get to Houston with an hour layover before the connection to San Antonio and head to an airport bar to watch the last quarter of the Rocket-Sun game, with the winner to face the Spurs. ``We should be there, SI,'' Rodman mumbles forcefully, and then we're drinking beer and eating gumbo and talking about which NBA players have the most guts. Hakeem Olajuwon, who is leading the Rockets to victory, is an obvious choice. ``Best center in the game,'' Rodman says, placing Robinson, his teammate, second. He also picks Tim Hardaway and Clyde Drexler and the underappreciated Danny Ainge. The Suns expire as we race to catch the flight.
Back in San Antonio, Rodman returns from the team dinner. ``Ever been to a gay bar?'' he asks.
At 11 p.m., propped up by adrenaline and chocolate-covered coffee beans, I'm in the passenger seat of Rodman's custom Ford monster truck. ``Everyone in the state knows my truck,'' Rodman says of the pink-and-white vehicle, ``and they all know where I live.''
Much later, after a night of drinking and dancing at that hopping gay bar, we pull up to his house and find the trees out front streamed with toilet paper. A carload of young revelers passes by, leaving a wake of unintelligible yells. We walk through the back door, past the four bottles of Goldschlager in the backup refrigerator, and understand each other without speaking. I will write all night and then be gone, out of Rodman's whirlwind, leaving him alone to pursue his calling as an unfettered spirit. Rodman's German shepherds are barking unconscionably, and his exotic birds are squawking with abandon. The Spurs' 10 a.m. practice will begin in a few hours.
Something profound needs to be said as we separate, but the silence persists. I'm walking to my computer when Rodman's low bellow runs me down. ``Have fun juuuning that story,'' he says merrily. ``And wake me up about 10:30.''
He seems to be kidding, but who can know?
"I'm living my life the way I want to. I'm not an athlete anymore."
"I'll be in show business, but I'm not going to play some basketball player."
"Yeah, I really want to go to a dinner with all the wives."
``I'm not afraid of dying at all. It's just the next boundary.''
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