Reality Check: Don’t drink and go live.
Newport Beach, September 23, 2002. It was one thing for me to get falling-down drunk and show my ass in the relative privacy of Club 4809 or Josh Slocum’s. It was quite another to do it on national television. But that was the next logical step in the downward spiral of Dennis Rodman.
The Best Damn Sports Show Period interview was supposed to take place in L.A., and Thaer couldn’t find me. Then somebody ratted, and Thaer located me and a couple of drinking buddies at a bar in Irvine.
“We gotta go,” he said.
“I’m not going,” I said. “Call Darren.”
Darren had promised John Salley, an old Detroit teammate, I would do the interview, and they had promoted the hell out of it.
“You gotta do it,” Darren told me. “If you don’t, they’re never gonna listen to me again. I’ll lose all credibility. All my other clients will be screwed, because no one is going to take me seriously anymore.”
“I’m not fucking going,” I said.
Darren didn’t give up. “What if I talk them into coming to your house in Newport Beach?”
Whatever.
So Thaer corralled me, gave the slip to my drinking buddies, and we went back to the beach house. Meanwhile my buddies were calling, calling, trying to get reconnected. Thaer put a stop to that.
“I grab Dennis’s cell when he’s not looking, turn it off,” recalled Thaer. “In a minute, he’s like, ‘Where’s my phone?’ ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘You probably left it somewhere.’”
That’s the kind of shit you can get away with when you’re dealing with a drunk.
At the house, Thaer helped me clean up and get dressed. I was still drunk, but starting to level off, when the camera crew arrived and started setting up. Meanwhile I was getting thirsty.
“I’m starving,” I said, for Thaer’s benefit.
He wasn’t buying it. “You stay here. I’ll go get the food,” he said, determined to keep me away from the booze until the interview was over.
But then he made the mistake of turning his back, and I was out of there. I hooked up with the girl across the street, hopped on her moped—all elbows and knees—and we disappeared. We got back a few minutes before air time, and I handed out tacos to the crew. It was like, “See, I really was hungry after all.”
Thaer was shaking his head. “You’re fucked up worse than you were an hour ago,” he said.
I was opening my mouth to deny it when the dumb-ass moped girl said, “Yeah, we went and did shots.” I’ll say. Five or six in maybe half an hour. But it was too late to turn back.
The producers of the Best Damn Sports Show Period had done us a huge favor, scrambled together a crew at the last minute and spent like $5,000 on a helicopter to get their asses to Newport Beach on time.
So the red light comes on and things were looking good for about two seconds. Thaer had me decked out in a nice outfit, complete with shades, baseball cap, the usual. Then I opened my mouth, and it was pure liquor talking.
“John Salley! I love you, John Salley! Oh, I love you so bad. I love you so bad, John Salley!”
Thaer’s like, “Oh my God!”
Then I did this scream I do when I’m drunk. Think Tarzan with a chest cold. It was a total disaster. All this live on national television. Thaer called Darren with the news. “Your client just ruined any shot of an NBA comeback and made a complete idiot of himself,” he said. “He just did an entire interview drunk.”
So I ended up embarrassing myself, Darren, John Salley, and the Best Damn Sports Show Period and added to my rep as an unreliable flake on a downward spiral to oblivion. All in a day’s work.
Reality Check: Don’t drink and go live.
I had been up drinking all night before a meeting Darren had scheduled with a couple of producers from Celebrity Mole.
“They’re coming down to find out if they want to hire you,” Thaer reminded me. “You don’t just have this job. Nobody wants to give you a job because you’re drunk all the time.”
Nobody trusted me. Nobody wanted anything to do with me because I would commit to something and then just blow it off, like I did for the ESPYs one year, or I’d show up drunk like I did for the Best Damn Sports Show Period fiasco. So this Celebrity Mole thing was a chance to redeem myself while collecting an easy $50,000. And, like Darren said, a weekly hour in primetime on a major network for a couple of months wouldn’t hurt—you can’t buy that kind of exposure. So he was like, “Don’t blow this interview.”
Me, I was thinking it was not so much the exposure or even the money I needed as the work, something to keep me busy. I knew I did better with the partying, did a better job of keeping things in balance, when I had something to do. Not that you could tell the afternoon of the interview.
I showed up drunk, Michelle by my side, and we sat around drinking wine at Josh Slocum’s as Thaer prepped me on Celebrity Mole.
“Act like you’ve seen it,” he said.
Whatever. I flagged down a busboy and asked him to bring us some beers out on the dock. I had decided to hold the meeting out there, because it was such a beautiful setting. Sunshine on blue water. Sleek white yachts in their slips. So it would be a business meeting with beer on the side for the boys, a bottle of wine for Michelle. Life was good.
Thaer met the two producers in the parking lot out front. They were driving what he would later describe as a “piece of shit” rental car and were wearing shorts (one in denim cut-offs), T-shirts, and sneakers. They didn’t look like people anybody would take seriously. We all sat down, I offered them a beer, they accepted, and then they began this long, boring song and dance about Celebrity Mole.It was going to be shot in Yucatan. The idea was to identify the traitor, the mole, who was “sabotaging” everything. There were games. Quizzes. Stephen Baldwin, my old co-star from Cutaway, was one of the nine celebrities in the cast. Blah. Blah. Blah.
I was about to nod off when I heard a plane fly over. I looked up. “That’s a G-5,” I said. Then I started reeling off imaginary specs for the plane. The two guys looked at each other.
Thaer jumped in and steered me back into Celebrity Mole mode. The producers started yapping again. I heard a boat, looked over, made up a name for it, and ad-libbed some more imaginary specs.
“I mean he was talking out his ass to these guys,” Thaer recalled. “Complete gibberish.”
Finally one of the producers tires of all the chatter about boats and planes and cuts to the chase.
“Dennis, have you ever seen the show?” he asked.
“Fuck the show!” I said.
Thaer was thinking, “Oh shit!”
“What he means is the particular show doesn’t matter,” Thaer said. “He could do any show.”
Nice try. I figured we were fucked. Not that I really gave a shit. Now Darren, that’s a different story. He’d been trying to put this gig together for months, and he wasn’t about to let it go.
“We gotta fix this,” Darren told Thaer.
So after talking to Thaer, Darren called the casting agent. The plan was to get to her before the two producers could tell her, “This guy’s a flake,” he’s this, he’s that.
“I just talked to Dennis,” Darren told the woman. “What’s with these two guys you sent down here? Dennis thought they were pulling some kind of joke on him.”
She was like, “What?”
Then he told her how these two dudes showed up in a crummy car wearing shorts and T-shirts, were drinking beer during a business meeting, and how I thought I was being punked.
She was like, “Are you kidding?”
“No. No, I’m not,” said Darren.
Fifteen minutes later, Thaer calls her with the same story. The guys were dressed like bums, Dennis thought they were a joke, this and that.
So when the two producers got back and said, this guy’s bad news, this guy’s a drunk, whatever, she had a ready explanation. It was all a big misunderstanding. Dennis wasn’t wasted, he was just playing with you.
Yada, yada, yada.
It worked. Darren and the casting agent sealed the deal, she said she liked my “Who-gives-a-shit?” attitude, and soon Michelle and I were enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip to Mexico, which we turned into a working honeymoon.
For real.
Michelle made an honest man out of me at the Orange County Court House on my birthday, May 13, 2003, and we left the next day for the Celebrity Mole shoot in Mexico with Darren and Thaer in tow. At that time, Michelle and I had been together for about four years and had two kids. So it wasn’t like we needed a honeymoon to get the sex life up to speed or anything.
We spent two weeks south of the border and, while I did get drunk a couple of times, it was nothing major. I was working, so I didn’t drink as much. Off set, anyway.
In what would end up being in Episode 4, Mole host Ahmad Rashad gave four of us, me and these three girls, the chance to make some easy money if we would eat the worm from the bottom of a bottle of Tequila. The girls were grossed out. So I went, “Fuck it. I’ll eat the worm. I’ll eat everybody’s worm,” like I was doing them a big favor, you know? So I downed, I think it was, four Tequila shooters with worms, we made $6,000 on the deal, and the girls made me out to be this big hero. “Oh, thank you, Dennis. Thank you. Thank you.”
Me, I was just taking advantage of an opportunity to have a couple of drinks.
When the Mexican part of the shoot wrapped in late May, the production moved back to L.A. for the big finale. I holed up in Newport Beach for a few days and soon was back to my bad habits. Come the day of the finale shoot, I was upstairs in the beach-house duplex sleeping one off with the doors locked, not answering any calls. The way the house was laid out you had to go through two locked doors to get to my unit. Thaer had been through all this before—me not answering the door, hiding out, refusing to do what I was supposed to do. So he had gotten with the cleaning crew and had a couple of keys made without me knowing about it. So I was lying in bed, and I heard the key turning in the lock. No problem. I had latched the door. That didn’t stop Thaer. He knocked the fucking door down and came barreling in the room under a full head of steam.
“Get up! Get in the fucking shower!” he shouted. “You’re going to do this show!”
“Fuck it! I ain’t going,” I said, and jumped up like I wanted to fight. He pushed me back down on the bed.
“He knew by the tone of my voice I wasn’t fucking with him,” Thaer recalled. “I was gonna whip his ass, or he was gonna go to the show.”
I don’t think there was much chance of him whipping my ass, but I went along anyway. At that point, there were only two contestants left in the Celebrity Mole competition, and I had a chance to win a whole lot of money. Not that I would make it easy for Thaer or the producers.
About three hours after Thaer dropped me off at the hotel in L.A., the producers were calling him. “Where’s Dennis? Do you know where Dennis is?” Thaer called some of his spies and they got me back in time.
It was never easy with Dennis Rodman.
Long story short, I ended up winning the damn thing. I figured out who the mole was and got more right answers on the final quiz. Sound like silly horseshit? Maybe so. But the payday was good. I made $220,000. Not bad for a drunk who Mole fans slammed for not taking note one during the competition.
We wrapped the show in late spring, and the only thing left was to keep my big mouth shut until the series aired in January. Now I’m a guy who can’t keep a secret sober—forget drunk. But if I had let on who the mole was, who won the game, it would have cost me millions, or at least that’s what the contract said. So I just kept on doing what I did on the show. You know how everybody went around saying “I’m the mole, I’m the mole”? Well, I just kept that shit up for however long it was.
“I’m the mole,” I said.
“No, Dennis, really come on.”
“Yeah, I’m the mole.”
It was like that was the last leg of the competition. To really win, you had to keep your mouth shut. And I’m nothing if not a competitor. So I walk away with it all. Advantage Rodman.
For me, television has always been a crap shoot. Win some. Lose some. The Best Damn Sports Show Period interview had been a total disaster, Celebrity Mole a major triumph that proved that, partying or not, I could still focus when I had to, just like when I was in the NBA. And, to outsiders at least, it looked like I had really turned my life around. Nope.
Reality Check: Television giveth and television taketh away.