Reality Check: Sometimes even a blind hog finds an acorn.
It was 1998 in Chicago, my third year with the Bulls, and I was white hot. I was the second most famous player in the NBA, right behind a guy named Michael Jordan. I was getting dozens of phone calls a day from charities, promoters, producers—everyone wanting a piece of my ass. I had an agent, bodyguards, and hangerson. I had a Ferrari, a garage full of motorcycles, and even a rock star tour bus to ferry my partying friends and me from club to club after hours. I don’t even know how much money I was making—millions—and I was spending it as fast as—sometimes faster than—I made it.
Feel like going to Vegas? Rent a private jet. Want a new car? How ’bout a Bentley? Girlfriend want a new wardrobe? Jewelry? Boob job? No fucking problem. I had it all and then some.
Ever heard that phrase “wretched excess”?
I was living it.
Meanwhile I was getting more famous by the day. Shit, Barbara Walters, Barbara-fucking-Walters, had come begging my ass for an interview. How did this happen? How did this skinny ex-janitor from nowhere become the hottest thing on the planet? It all started in a parking lot in Detroit.
For those of you who came in late, early one morning back in the spring of 1993, after I’d been with the Detroit Pistons for seven years, I ended up sitting in my pickup truck in this concrete wasteland that was the parking lot of Detroit’s basketball stadium, the Palace of Auburn Hills. I had a rifle in my lap, and I was trying to decide whether I should blow my brains out.
There was a lot on my mind. Coach Chuck Daly, who had been like a father to me, was gone, shoved aside; the world championship Detroit team was being taken apart piece by piece; and my daughter, Alexis, was living a couple of thousand miles away in California. My ex-wife, from a marriage that lasted exactly 82 days, had decided she didn’t want me in their lives. While I’d fulfilled most of my dreams in the NBA—won a couple of championships, a series of rebounding and defensive honors—I was suffering from a severe case of “is-that-all-there-is?” syndrome. Somehow, it wasn’t enough, and what was worse, the real Dennis Rodman had been lost while I struggled to become an NBA poster boy. I decided that was going to change and put the rifle down. From then on, I was going to do what I wanted, when I wanted. “Dennis,” the geek from the Oak Cliff projects in Dallas, was dead, and “Dennis Rodman” was born. Not that I knew what that meant. Not then. I fell asleep in the parking lot. Come daylight, the cops arrived, hauled me off to see a shrink, who pronounced me sane, and the media did what the media does.
I asked Detroit for a trade, ended up in San Antonio, and even before the season began, the new “Dennis Rodman” reared his lovely head. The occasion was the preseason opening of the brand new Alamodome. I showed up with blond hair to a cheering crowd. It was the Spurs’ first clue that there was something seriously wrong with Dennis Rodman. Bottom line for the front-office suits: the motherfucker is crazy.
I loved it.
While I was a bit of a celebrity in Detroit, I was never the star on-court or off. “Isiah Thomas” was the name above the title, and I didn’t even get top billing as the baddest of the bad boys. That honor went to center Bill “you-best-have-major-medical” Laimbeer, a white guy who left opponents like Scottie Pippen wondering if driving to the basket was worth the risk of ending their career. But, like it or not, in San Antonio my ever-changing hair color attracted a ton of attention from the public and the NBA, and I would end up center stage, sharing the limelight with teammate David Robinson, the Naval Academy graduate with the “Mr. Clean” image.
I also got my first tattoo in San Antonio, and the NBA didn’t approve of that, either. I don’t even know how many tattoos I have now, maybe 100, up and down my arms, legs, back, chest, and neck, covering about three-quarters of my body. The “tats” pretty much tell my life story beginning with the first—a picture of my daughter Alexis on my left forearm—running through a tribute to my current wife Michelle on the right side of my neck.
The hair and tattoos were a huge issue then, but now they’re no big deal, thanks to a trailblazing Dennis Rodman. Like I told The New York Times, “Even all the boring white guys got tattoos now,” not to mention all those pretty little middle-class girls with flowers etched on their pretty little white asses.
Over the years, even the NBA has developed a sense of humor about my hair, and on its web site, under the heading “Dennis Rodman,” they actually report the Spurs 1993-94 won-loss record based on my hair color (Blond was the clear winner at 35-14). As for tattoos, a book called In the Paint: Tattoos of the NBA, reports more than two-thirds of the league is “tatted out.” Rasheed Wallace of Detroit has a fine collection. Hair? Anything goes. Ben Wallace, also of Detroit, alternates between this wild-ass fro (he says he hasn’t had a haircut in five years) and corn rows, which now are seen all over the league. I think Allen Iverson got that one going.
Back in the day, my hair and tattoos not only pissed off the NBA establishment, they were the first little steps toward moving the name of Dennis Rodman out of the cultish world of professional basketball and into the consciousness of mainstream America. Not that I cared. I wasn’t looking for fame. I was just being “Dennis.”
That first year with the Spurs, I would get a taste of national— hell, international—celebrity when I dated Madonna for like six months. If you believed the media accounts, that was more about Madonna than me—just another “boy toy” was the way it played out. But it was a whole lot more than that. Madonna wanted to have my babies.
Here’s how far it went. One time I was in Las Vegas at the craps table doing my thing, and I got this frantic, “Somebody died!” kind of phone call from New York City. I picked up the phone, and Madonna was like, “I’m ovulating! I’m ovulating! Get your ass up here!”
So I left my chips on the table, on the table, flew five hours to New York, and did my thing. We got done, and she was standing on her head trying to get the full benefit, just like any girl trying to get pregnant. I flew back to Vegas and picked up my game where I left off.
Crazy shit.
Madonna had first called the Spurs’ office out of the blue wanting to get hold of me. This was in 1993. I was, like, “Whatever.” I knew who she was and everything, but I didn’t like her music—too bubblegum—didn’t like her videos, didn’t like anything about her— her media image anyway. And I didn’t know what the hell this white megastar wanted from me.
Turned out the real Madonna was a cool individual. She had her shit together. And she wasn’t just in it for stud services. She wanted to get married—at least I think she did. She organized this intervention along with six female friends—the “Madonna Mafia” I called them. So Madonna was sitting right in the middle of this bunch, and she nodded at me and asked, “So you think I should marry this guy? He looks like a keeper.”
I felt like I was on trial. I didn’t even look at the fools. I mean nobody was asking me if I wanted to get married. Turned out the Madonna Mafia was cool with the idea, but I blew them off. I wasn’t in love with her. And anyway, if I had married Madonna, my career would have come second. Madonna was like a fucking industry. She was General Motors.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had gone through with it. Can you imagine? You’ve got the bad girl and the bad, bad boy. We would have been the hottest Hollywood couple of all time—the Hollywood couple everyone wanted to see and hear about. Paparazzi heaven. Every day it would have been like:
“What are they doing now?”
“What’s going on?”
“Who’s zoomin’ who?”
All that shit.
Madonna and Dennis, Dennis and Madonna, MaDennis, Denonna, one scandal after another. Dennis is over here doing this, and Madonna’s over there doing that, and they collide in the middle. Shit, we would have made Brad and Jen and what’s-her-face Jolie look like punks.
Maybe the strangest thing about my time with Madonna was when I realized she wasn’t any bigger than I was—on the street at least. When we would walk somewhere, maybe go to Rodeo Drive in L.A., it was as if she were with me. I wasn’t with her, okay? It was more like, “Dennis Rodman!” Then, “Oh, Madonna, whatever.” It was always like that. She was old news to the paparazzi. I was the new kid on the block.
One Detroit teammate would claim all my marketing success was a result of ideas I’d picked up while hanging around with Madonna. (Trust me, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about marketing.)
Actually, I started dying my hair about six months before I ever met the woman. The reaction to the hair thing would eventually lead some people to start calling me a marketing genius. That’s cool. But at the time, it had nothing to do with marketing.
So what was it about?
There are all kinds of amateur shrinks out there making up stuff about Dennis Rodman. One guy accused me of acting out as a way of getting a fix on how valuable I was as a player. The more shit management put up with, his theory went, the more it boosted my ego. He was like, “Think the Spurs’ management would have let some sub do the rainbow hair? Son-of-a-bitch would have been gone by nightfall.” So maybe the guy was right, but that shit’s way too deep for me.
So how do I explain it? A couple of ways. First off, ever spent any time in San Antonio? As a black man? I was bored shitless. Secondly, everything I did in San Antonio was part of creating a new, free Dennis Rodman, the total makeover I had promised myself in that parking lot in Detroit. So one day, just because I felt like it, I got the hair dyed blond. The rest is marketing history—that simple, that complicated.
Reality Check: Sometimes even a blind hog finds an acorn.
During my two years in San Antonio, management and David Robinson were determined to tame—to save—Dennis Rodman. But I didn’t cooperate. Figuring “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I kept on dying my hair, painting my fingernails, getting tattoos, hanging out with weirdoes, fine-tuning the new me. So it didn’t work out for them.
Thank God.
My first year with the Spurs, I won the league rebounding title for the third year in a row and made the NBA All-Defensive second team. Thanks to my play, David Robinson was free to concentrate on offense, and he led the NBA in scoring with almost 30 points per game. The next year, I again won the rebounding title, the Spurs had the best regular-season record in the league (62-20), and Robinson was named league MVP.
But by the end of that second year, I was in a pitched battle with the Spurs’ management, self-appointed den mothers Gregg Popovich, then the general manager, and head coach Bob Hill. It was especially bad with Popovich. We fought, cussed each other out, and just couldn’t get along. So San Antonio decided they’d had enough of the blond one—something about “distractions.” (Management had seemed particularly pissed when Madonna had shown up at games—at least when they weren’t kissing her ass.) So in one of the most lopsided trades in the history of professional sports, they swapped me to Chicago for Will Perdue, a journeyman, seven-foot center out of Vanderbilt best known for, well … nothing … nothing at all.
Not that the trade came easy.
When I became available, many teams seemed interested. Now the way the business works, teams have many options, and they keep them all open until they have a deal put together. So it’s like a guy dating four or five girls at once, telling them all, “You’re the one. We’re gonna get married soon as I get a few details ironed out.”
By the time Chicago came calling, I had already been jilted by a couple of likely suitors. So when my agent and I met Phil Jackson at the home of Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, you might say I displayed a bit of an attitude when Phil finally got around to popping the question.
“Dennis, we’ve decided we want to make a trade for you,” Phil said. “Would you like to play here?”
“I don’t give a fuck if I play here or not,” I said.
And that’s how I started the most incredible three years of my life. On court, I would be hooking up with the un-retired Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen to win three consecutive NBA championships, while off-court I would become the toast of Chicago.
While all this was going on with San Antonio and Chicago, I had been working on my autobiography with San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Tim Keown. Entitled Bad As I Wanna Be, the book hit bookshelves in the spring of 1997, and that changed everything. The transformation began in Chicago with a simple book signing that turned into a media event.