Newport Beach, September 6, 2003. It’s amazing it took them as long as it did. Like Michelle told them, “The last three years for Dennis have been a party. Nothing but drinkin’ and drinkin’ and drinkin’.”
But we were about midway through the five-month shoot for a two-part reality show called Rodman on the Rebound, and ESPN still hadn’t caught me drunk on camera. They had missed a big opportunity on the afternoon of September 2, when the cops cited me for “public drunkenness” after spotting me, literally, falling-down drunk on the dock outside of Josh Slocum’s. ESPN would make up for it four days later.
On that balmy evening in early September, I was in the parking lot welcoming people to Josh Slocum’s, which, as the sign says, offers “seafood, fine meals, and libations.” Lots of libations. Decked out in a black T-shirt, blue baseball cap, and jeans, I tried to usher three girls inside as the ESPN camera rolled.
I give one of the girls a half-hug.
“We heard this place was fun,” she said.
“Oh, honey, it is fun,” I replied, slurring my words. And on this particular night, it was going to be a real fucking barrel of laughs.
Cut to dancing inside.
“Right now, what Dennis cares about is drinking,” said my wife Michelle on camera.
To prove it, ESPN would soon follow Michelle’s sound bite with video of the raving-drunk, “Mr. Entertainment,” Dennis Rodman. By the time this tape was shot, it was after legal drinking hours, sometime after 2:00 a.m., and the joint was empty. Just me, Thaer, Darren, and Michelle hanging out in the back, me holding court.
I sat in the middle in a blue easy chair, Darren on the right in an identical chair. Michelle was seated to his right, Thaer standing off to the left. As I raved, a lazy blue strobe light swept over the dimly lit scene, at times being picked up by the mirrors on the back wall. First, I dissed Darren.
“I don’t need you,” I said. “Seriously, I’m gonna tell you right now, I don’t need you for nothing.”
Darren was smiling, but that wouldn’t last.
Then I moved on to Thaer. “You know what, Thaer? I don’t need you. I don’t need you at all,” I said, raising my voice. “I made my career without your ass. Hello!” I gestured wildly, huge hands clawing the air.
Cut to Darren. He wasn’t smiling anymore. His client was showing his ass on videotape that would be seen by a gazillion viewers on ESPN.
“You swore to me you’d be on the court,” Thaer said, bringing up my NBA ambitions. “I think you will be on the court, but not if you keep drinkin’ like this.”
That called for a little historical perspective, and I jogged his memory, saying I had partied a lot harder in Chicago and still pulled down umpteen rebounds a game. Thaer pointed out I had been a lot younger. Then Michelle weighed in, my favorite bad girl sounding like she was auditioning for a shot on Oprah.
I sat there playing with my fingers, biting my lip, looking like an eight-year-old boy being chewed out by a grouchy school marm as my favorite drinking, smoking, tattooed, beautiful, blonde delivered a mini-lecture on “family values,” reminding me that I had a wife and kids now and needed to clean up my act.
From Michelle, ESPN cut back to me and I was crying. What brought it on, other than a river of booze, I don’t know. Anybody hip to the ways of television knows I actually could have tuned up right after Michelle’s lecture or they could have caught me on tape an hour later and put the two together in the editing room. What I’m saying is: I have no idea why I was suddenly crying.
“I know I fucked my life up. I did it,” I said, blubbering. “Everybody thinks I’m stupid. I’m not stupid, you know. I made my life what it is.”
And apparently I wasn’t real happy with the way that life turned out. ESPN closed out this segment with the camera still on me, as I, still crying, mumbled, “It’s all love. It’s all love. It’s all love.” Long, long pause. “It’s all love.”
I didn’t look like a guy who would be returning to the NBA anytime soon. I looked like a drunk on his final glide path into oblivion. Commercial break. Thank God.
Ever think you were the life of the party and then see snapshots, video, of yourself and think, “Oh shit! Who is that fool? That drunk?” That’s what watching Rodman on the Rebound was like for me.
The reality series was supposed to tell a feel-good story about Dennis Rodman’s comeback to the NBA. But what ESPN would catch on tape was not my comeback, but my downfall, arriving just in time to see me bottom out, personally and professionally.
So why did I drink?
“He can’t stand being famous. He can’t stand the fact that he can’t go anywhere without people bothering him,” Darren told a reporter. “And the only way to feel comfortable with the public is to drink.”
“When you’re drinking every day, you’re suffering inside,” Wendell told the same reporter. “Dennis is an extremely introverted person, extremely introverted. Yet he placed himself in an extroverted position, meaning a basketball superstar. So in order to deal with what that comes with, he [turned to] alcohol.”
“His image is playboy, wild man-slash-superstar athlete,” Thaer told ESPN. “And no matter what he does, he has to keep up that image, whether he wants to or not.”
So why do I think I drank? At first, I drank because I enjoyed it. I drank because I loved to have a good time. Then I drank, drank myself silly, so I didn’t have to think about all the shit that had happened to me in my career and in life in general. Shit like getting canned by the Lakers and the Mavericks, marrying and divorcing Carmen Electra, parting ways with my longtime agent/friend Dwight Manley, and firing my sister.
I gave my sister Debra the boot in early 1999.This was after she called me at this club called Gate in West Hollywood with the news that the Lakers had let me go. It wasn’t a “kill the messenger” kind of thing. She was convinced L.A. fired me because of my partying. So she tried to put her foot down. She was like, “Listen, you gotta stop. The NBA is sending you a message. They’re over your wild and crazy crap.”
I wasn’t hearing her. I was like, “You need to go,” and she went back to Dallas. So now there was no one around who had known me before I was a big shot, no one who had loved me when there was nothing in it for them. I was on my own and had no one to answer to. Dennis Rodman had a license to party, and I hung my shingle at Club 4809.
You don’t just wake up one day and you’re an alcoholic. It takes a lot of work. And by the time the ESPN cameras showed up to tape Rodman on the Rebound in the summer of 2003, I had been steady at it for about four years. Now I drank all the time. I drank all the time, every fucking day, 24 hours a day, without a care in the world, not even my kids, not anybody.
I had become a drunk, and that was the reality, the ugly reality documented on video tape by ESPN. Rodman on the Rebound had now become “Rodman on the Rehab.” If Darren, Wendell, and Thaer didn’t know that the show was a catastrophe in the making before that drunken September night, they had to know it then. ESPN had this “great footage” of a drunken Dennis Rodman losing it on camera, and they had editorial control. They and only they would decide what was going to be aired on national television.
I was fucked.
Still, on tape at least, Darren soldiered on, trying to negotiate my way back into the NBA. He was making a list and checking it twice: Indiana Pacers, Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat, Denver Nuggets, Detroit Pistons. The man gets paid to be optimistic, and he was earning his money.
Those NBA pitches would come to an abrupt halt in mid-October, after my sorry, motorcycle-wheelie-attempting ass had a close encounter with a light pole in the parking lot of the Treasures Gentleman’s Club in Vegas. After that, Darren’s attitude toward the reality show, was like, “Fuck it! Forget damage control, there is no way to put a happy face on this shit.” So he sicced the cameras on me the day after my motorcycle accident. He was thinking that while the show was going to be a public relations disaster, something good might come out of it if I “could see myself as others see me,” as the old adage goes. That might wake my ass up, he thought, get me into rehab.
So at 9:45 a.m. on October 20, 2003, ESPN showed up at my room at the Hard Rock to get some footage of what was left of Dennis Rodman. A quick recap. I was coming off a two-day drunk, and the accident had left me with 70-some stitches in my right shin, lacerations on my left, and two badly bruised and swollen knees.
I dressed up for the camera, putting on the top half of the limegreen scrubs the nurses had given me to wear home from the hospital and completed the ensemble by tying a white towel around my waist, creating what looked like a terrycloth mini-skirt. Close-ups revealed a puffy face and dark circles under my eyes. My earrings were still in place, but I was missing my left nose ring. I looked every bit of my 42 years and then some.
The camera rolled, me grimacing, as my driver swabbed the stitched-up right shin and the “beef jerky” left shin. It was not the kind of footage that was going to show up in an authorized biography. It was like, “You’ve heard the story of the downfall of Dennis Rodman, now here’s the pictures to prove it.” As for Darren’s hope that the video would wake me up, the show wouldn’t air for six weeks. In the meantime, it was the same old Dennis.
A week after the motorcycle accident, I was back in Vegas for the Radio Music Awards, ESPN hot on my trail. That was the night I got shit-faced, pinched P. Diddy on the ass while he was doing a television interview backstage, and capped off my performance by getting kicked out of the place. The good news was that on the tape shot at the awards show you couldn’t tell I was drunk. ESPN made up for it later that night after I parked my ass at this bar in the Aladdin Hotel for the second Dennis drunk-on-camera scene.
I was wearing the same outfit I wore to the Radio Music Awards: jeans with an unbuttoned, long sleeve, white shirt over a blue and white Southeastern Oklahoma State basketball jersey— number 10, baby—with “Savages” appliquéd across the chest. I topped the outfit off with a matching blue baseball cap.
Maybe it was the outfit or maybe it was because I was smoking a cigar and throwing down one Grey Goose and cranberry juice after another, getting drunker and drunker and more and more obnoxious by the minute, but I wasn’t exactly a chick magnet that night. If the cameras don’t lie, I was only able to pull in three women in about two hours.
“You want me?” I asked this blonde wearing an off-the-shoulder white blouse.
ESPN fast-forwarded the tape. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“That’s up to you,” I replied.
She gave me a playful, “Oh-you-bad-boy” slap to the thigh. “I’m not going to do anything funny,” she said.
The girl left. “She’s stupid,” I said to the bartender.
Next up, I spotted another girl. “Hello!” I shouted across the room. “Hell-ooo!”
ESPN fast-forwarded to this brunette sitting with me at the bar. It was now 1:15 a.m. She was wearing shades, a red baseball cap, a sleeveless black top, with a silver crucifix around her neck. You could tell this nervous Christian was anxious to leave, but I kept saying, “Stay, stay, stay stay,” like 10 or 15 times. She left.
“Phone! Phone!” I shouted, as another brunette joined me, her back to the camera. Guess she didn’t want her mama to see her with Dennis Rodman. My bodyguard, Wendell, showed up at 2:45 a.m. Time to go. He escorted me and four girls, including the blonde in the off-the-shoulder blouse and the brunette wearing the crucifix to my 19th floor suite. I didn’t allow the camera inside. Bad move.
The blue double doors to the suite closed, and the camera lingered outside where Wendell and Darren had a little chat about my immediate future, and the subject wasn’t basketball. Both were dressed in black. It seemed appropriate.
It had been about a week from what was supposed to have been my wake-up call, the motorcycle accident. Not only did I almost kill myself, I had ended any hopes of returning to the NBA for the foreseeable future, and my career as a celebrity whatever was in jeopardy. What’s more, everybody who cared about me—Darren, Wendell, Thaer, and Michelle—had been threatening to pull up stakes. Rock bottom, baby. No career. No family. No friends. All because of booze.
So did that stop my drinking?
Nope.
Not that everyone around me wasn’t trying to help—like Wendell. He had been my bodyguard for about three years when I first moved to Newport Beach before he quit out of sheer exhaustion.
“Working with Dennis was like getting on a rollercoaster that never stops,” he said. “The only way you can get off is you drop off. ’Cause it never stops.”
Wendell had come out of retirement to help get me straight. He didn’t need the work. One of the 38 straight men in the fashion industry, he had been happily hanging out with his family and managing his business, “Wendell Wade Williams Custom Clothing,” before Darren gave him a call—three calls actually. Now, after less than a week, he had already had it as he told Darren in the hallway outside my suite’s blue double doors.
“I have no problem sticking around to help him become healthy,” he told Darren as the ESPN camera rolled. “But our strategy right now isn’t working. And if you and I and Thaer don’t sit down and put together a new game plan, then we are just as sick as him.”
“Uh huh,” mumbled Darren, looking like a beaten man. Or maybe he was just worn out. After all, it was coming up on four o’clock in the morning.
“You can’t compete with these young kids when you’re 42 years old on two hours’ sleep and 15 hours of [bleep] Jägermeister,” Wendell continued.
The camera loves Wendell, and Wendell loves the camera. Warm, down to earth, a “philosopher from the ’hood,” someday he should get his own reality show. In the meantime, he had to settle for hijacking this one.
“Let’s have our own little reality show,”Wendell said to Darren. “Reality one: Dennis Rodman is an alcoholic. Reality two: if he keeps drinking alcohol, there’ll be no NBA.”
As of that sound bite, Rodman on the Rebound officially stopped being about a “rebounding” basketball player and started being about a “rehabbing” alcoholic.
So to sum up: at around 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, October 28, 2003, in Las-fucking-Vegas, Nevada, my fate was being decided, on camera, by two very tired men standing in a hotel corridor. In hindsight, I’m thinking it would have been better to invite the camera inside. So exactly what was going on behind my 19th-floor suite’s blue double doors? That night, I haven’t a clue. The next day? There was a gang bang, baby, as Darren, Thaer, Wendell, and ESPN combined forces to jump my bones in what they called an “intervention.”