Magic Johnson first tried to save my ass in 2002. He and his agent cooked up this idea for a charity event in the Hamptons, the playground of rich New Yorkers. They knew I had thrown a party or two up there, and so the agent called, and I agreed to co-host a celebrity basketball tournament. While we were talking, I told the agent that I was toying with the idea of returning to the NBA. He later mentioned it to Magic, and Magic said he’d like to help. That was huge. Magic’s got a lot of credibility with GMs all over the league, and they knew, as the agent said, “He’s not gonna go to bat for a guy he doesn’t truly believe in.” So the agent says to Magic, “Let’s go down to Newport Beach and surprise Dennis with the news.”
So they called ahead to my handler in Newport Beach and said they were coming at such and such a time, make sure Dennis is at Josh Slocum’s. Whatever you do, don’t let him leave. This was when I was binge drinking, and you just never knew. So the two of them showed up unannounced. I’d had a couple of cocktails, of course, and that made me even happier to see Magic. I was like, “Holy shit! Holy shit! Magic Johnson is here.”
Magic and I hugged on each other, did a bit of catching up, and then got down to business. Magic said he could help me get on with the Knicks. He was like, “I’ve got a lot of pull there. If you start working out, coming up to UCLA two, three times a week, we can make this happen. But you have to cool it on the partying. The body’s not gonna respond at 40 like it did at 30.”
“No problem,” I said.
Right before he left, Magic said, “Listen, I’m having a grand opening tomorrow for this 24-hour fitness center up in Sherman Oaks. I would love for you to come and be one of my guests.”
I’m in.
All during the meeting, I’d been sizing up Magic’s agent, this guy named Darren Prince. Then in his early thirties, Darren was New Jersey born and bred, and had the accent and attitude to go with it, but with a lot of heart and warmth just beneath the surface. He’s not that tall, under six feet, has dark hair and is attractive enough—you should see his fiancée—but the bottom line was I liked the guy. And we had a bit of a track record. When my old agent, Dwight Manley, and I split up back in 1999, I called Darren, drunk, to see if he might be interested in representing me. He was cool with it, and he called Dwight to make sure he wasn’t stepping on any toes. Dwight gave him a “thumbs up” and told him to get hold of my sister, Debra, who was then my business manager. Darren left her a ton of messages, but Debra never returned his calls. So I ended up with an agent named Steve Chasman for a couple of years.
By the time Darren and Magic came to Josh Slocum’s, I was again in the market for an agent, and I was thinking, “If he’s good enough for Magic Johnson. …”
So when he was on the way out, I handed Darren this huge box of shit out of the backseat of my pickup truck, all these business proposals that had been sitting around collecting dust while I attended to the only business I really was interested in—partying. “You’re now my agent,” I told him. “Go through all this crap and see if we can make some money together.”
I’m not sure when I actually signed with Darren, but it wasn’t long after that. Why Darren took me on, I’ll never know. I think maybe it had something to do with this boyish enthusiasm for sports he had developed as a kid collecting baseball cards back in New Jersey. As an adult, Darren had turned his childhood hobby into a successful sports memorabilia company before parlaying that into Prince Marketing Group, where he serves as agent and marketing guru for a long list of clients including me, Joe Frazier, and his first client, one Magic Johnson. What I really like about the guy is that when it comes to his clients, Darren is a fan first, a businessman second, and I’m thinking it was the fan in Darren that made him take on the hard case known as “Dennis Rodman.”
When I arrived at the grand opening of the fitness center in Sherman Oaks the next day, around 200 people were waiting in line to get Magic’s autograph. Magic had a reason for inviting me. He knew I had been roughed up a bit by the NBA since leaving the Bulls, and he wanted to boost my confidence, show me the public hadn’t forgotten about Dennis Rodman. It worked. The fans spotted me, and they started screaming, “Dennis! Dennis!” The media came running over and then, in Darren’s version, “Magic’s line little by little started moving into the direction of Dennis.”
I couldn’t believe it. We’re talking Magic Johnson, bro. The main man. But like Magic said, “When Dennis Rodman walks into a room, it’s like everyone else becomes invisible.”
I wish things had gone as well with the workouts at UCLA. I blew the first one off. Just didn’t go. Second one, I got so hammered the night before, I couldn’t make it. I missed the third one because of a little booze-inspired ego flare-up. I was like, “I don’t need this, I can get back in the league without workouts, without Magic.” So I blew a real chance to get back in the league, thanks to my drinking. It wouldn’t be the last time.
There would be another little NBA nibble in 2002 courtesy of Magic. Magic was business partners with a guy named Howard Schultz, who owned the Seattle SuperSonics. He told Schultz, “You should sit down with Dennis. I think he could help your team.”
So when we were in New York, Darren and I drove over to Schultz’s house in the Hamptons, and he was like, “Can you help this team?”
“I can help fill the stands,” I said. “I can get 11 or 12 rebounds a game, no problem. I can help young players.”
A lot of these kids today are like, “I got my $50 million guaranteed, what else is there to prove?”
Everything, baby. You can spend every fucking nickel of that cash, and it won’t buy your ass one rebound, one basket—much less a championship. No matter how much you’re making, you still have to play. That’s the kind of shit I could have laid on the young players in Seattle. Shultz wasn’t interested.
“Your reputation is so bad,” he said, “I don’t know if the city will embrace you or hate me for making a move like this.”
I’m thinking, “Whatever.” Some people hate me. Some people love me. But no matter where they fall, they’re all buying tickets.
Then Schultz’s wife came out of the house with their two sons. She was gawking, the kids holding balls they wanted autographed. She was like, “I’m sorry for interrupting, but you’re my idol. I just had to come out and get an autograph and a picture.”
So I was signing autographs, posing for snapshots with Schultz’s family, and I leaned over and whispered in Darren’s ear, “This is a guy who obviously doesn’t talk things over with his wife.”
I mean, the wife may not have known a damn thing about basketball, but she knew star power when she saw it. And that’s what I can bring along with those dozen rebounds a game. That’s what fills seats. That’s what makes money. And next to winning championships, that’s what the business is all about.
As for that bad-boy reputation Howard Schultz was so worried about, it was soon destined to get a hell of a lot worse.