When it came to being a Detroit “Bad Boy,” I played second fiddle to Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, and Rick Mahorn. While I had my crazy moments, mostly surrounding the breakup with my first wife and separation from daughter Alexis, I didn’t really begin racking up my own bad-boy credentials until my first season with the San Antonio Spurs in 1993-94. Off-court, the rainbow hair and the fling with Madonna got the media’s attention. On-court, in the space of about two months, I head-butted Stacey King of the Chicago Bulls and John Stockton of the Utah Jazz, and before the year was over, I had been fined over $30,000, suspended three times by the NBA, and ejected from six games. “Dennis the Menace” had arrived.
After my move to Chicago, my on-court and off-court images would become one. While I kept up my on-court antics during the 1996-97 season—head-butting a referee, receiving a nice collection of suspensions, fines, and technicals—I picked up the pace off-court with my gender-bender book signings in New York and Chicago and the non-stop partying. Dennis Rodman was now a bad boy 24/7. For every head-butted referee there was a fondled cocktail waitress. Final evidence that I had crossed over to off-court, mainstream celebrity came in 1997, when I headed Mr. Blackwell’s “37th Annual Worst-Dressed Women’s List.” Yeah, that’s women’s list. Now what I did off-court was as likely—if not more likely—to make news as anything I did on court. The dress-wearing, rainbow-haired, never-saw-a-boob-he-didn’t-want-to-fondle, bad-boy stereotype was born, and with it the stock, fill-in-the-blanks “Dennis Rodman Story.” A reporter with a set of facts now had a guidebook on what to leave in and what to leave out.
Rodman is drunk and showing his ass? Leave it in.
Rodman gives a wad of cash to a homeless man?—which insiders will tell you I’m known for doing. Leave it out.
Rodman is speeding through Colorado in a $250,000-plus Lamborghini? In.
Rodman’s obeying the Colorado speed limit in a used, pastel minivan sporting a “What Would Jesus Do?” bumper sticker? Out.
It’s not like I’m the first guy to get pigeon-holed by the media—happens all the time. Poor old Dan Quayle was hammered when he was vice president. “Remember any stories about him doing something smart?” asked one writer, during a riff on media stereotypes. This is no big scoop. Journalists routinely take a set of facts and pound them into submission, making them fit off-the-rack, stock stories or pre-packaged angles. And it not only happens at The NewYork Times and ESPN, but in your hometown rag as well.
Say a white cop in your city shoots and kills a black bank robber. Once the reporter gets the basic facts, he starts running through the list of stock stories to see if one will match up. Did the cop conform to the local “fleeing felon law” or is this a possible case of “police brutality?” Is racism involved? It goes on and on. But whether the subject is crime, politics, or Dennis Rodman, stock stories are the bread and butter of news organizations everywhere.
And if the facts don’t fit? Try another angle.
Oh, I don’t know, why don’t we start with the police report filed by “peace officer,” James Gunter?
Warning: The following is rated X for violence.
“On June 7, 1998, at approximately 9:00 a.m., the body of a black male, minus the head and right arm, was discovered on Huff Creek Road in Jasper County, Texas.”
The missing body parts would turn up in a ditch about a mile away.
“Officers attempted to compare the photograph on [the victim’s] identification card to the head located on Huff Creek Road,” officer Gunter’s affidavit continued. “However, a positive identification could not be made.”
A “torx [sic] wrench set inscribed with ‘Berry’” was found near the body. The cops soon picked up one Shawn Allen Berry, 23, who confessed, naming two accomplices, James William King, 23, and Lawrence Russell Brewer, 31, in the brutal murder of a 49-year-old black man named James Byrd Jr.
“Three … riders came straight out of hell,” said the prosecutor at the trial, according to Salon. “Instead of a rope, they used a chain; and instead of horses, they had a pick-up truck.”
After the men beat up Byrd, they took that chain, wrapped it around his ankles, attached it to the bumper of Berry’s primer-gray, 1982 Ford pickup, and dragged the man three miles down a paved country road.
King was watching out the back window. “That fucker’s bouncing all over the place,” he said, according to the police report.
Byrd’s ordeal ended when “a culvert ripped his head and shoulders off his body,” reported Salon.
Byrd’s sin? He was black.
The story attracted international attention. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton came to town for the funeral, as did a contingent from the KKK. Meanwhile, I stepped up. Now I’m not known as a guy who gets involved in social issues, civil rights or otherwise. Maybe that’s why the coverage of my PETA billboard was more about Dennis Rodman being nude than my opposition to people wearing fur. In a standard “Dennis Rodman Story,” I’m posing naked, not taking some kind of stand. But the murder of James Byrd Jr. by a trio of racist motherfuckers from hell was beyond sickening. After some of my experiences dating white girls in college, I had a “There-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I” feeling. So I stepped up and donated $25,000 to the family to help pay for the funeral and establish a family trust fund. That seed money, along with other donations, would eventually lead to the establishment of the James Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing.
I’m thinking much of this is probably news to you. While it’s likely that you’ve heard about the murder of James Byrd Jr., it’s unlikely you’ve heard about my part in that tragedy. In the lists of Dennis Rodman exploits found in stories over the years, you’ll almost always see mentions of me wearing the wedding dress, dying my hair, kicking the photographer, this, that, but not the donation to the Byrd family. The reason? It’s simply not a “Dennis Rodman Story.” Bad boys aren’t supposed to give a shit.
So when I Google “Dennis Rodman,” “James Byrd,” I get only 65 hits—but when I Google “Dennis Rodman,” “Bullrun,” I get over 500. The difference, of course, is that Bullrun is your classic “Dennis Rodman Story.” My fans would expect the “outrageous,” “notorious,”“freakish,”“hot-tempered” bad boy, as various reporters put it, to break the speed limit, drive recklessly, and run people off the road in my “flashy,”“high-class,”“exotic,” car and to be involved in the kind of shenanigans that Nevada Highway Patrol Lieutenant Paul Hinen described to the Associated Press.
“As they got close to Reno, the reports were about them slowing down and blocking traffic and then speeding up,” Hinen said. “Two cars running side by side, someone trying to jump from one car to another, passing beer bottles between cars, and throwing beer bottles at other cars.”
I tell you, officer, I am shocked by such antics, not that I actually saw any of it. But if it did happen, I’ll have to admit it does sound just like something “Dennis Rodman” might do.
The story angle from the Bullrun road rally that got the most play, of course, was my “stealing” the cowboy hat and not paying for gas at the Tomahawk Auto Truck Plaza in Glenwood Springs. What you probably didn’t hear was that a week or so later, some mystery woman walked in off the street and paid my gas bill. At about the same time, my Bullrun sponsor, GoldenPalace.com, offered to give $1,000 to the truck-stop owner’s favorite children’s charity. You didn’t hear about it, because these aren’t “Dennis Rodman Stories.” They sound more like something to do with Tiger Woods. He’s a good guy. I’m a bad boy. Of course, he’s just as trapped and stereotyped as I am, but that’s a story for another day.
The media doesn’t know what to do with a Dennis Rodman who donates money to the family of James Byrd Jr., takes a stand against wearing fur, gives money to charity—wears a white hat. A stock, Dennis Rodman bad-boy story writes itself.
Dennis Rodman—good guy? Too much work.
Thank God. If word ever gets out that I’m a soft-hearted, sushi-eating, gentle giant, I’ll never work again. People only want to hear the bad news about the bad boy. Of course, there is a line that you can’t cross if you want to be marketable.
Take Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and that B.T.K. guy: you’re not going to see them on a cereal box anytime soon. That’s pure make-the-devil-look-like-a-sissy shit. Michael Jackson and O.J. are probably finished forever, at least in the U.S. Get back to me in a few years on Robert Blake. On the other hand,Tonya Harding, the Olympic skater who was involved in the cover-up of an idiotic attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan in 1994, ended up getting a contract with No Excuses jeans and is still getting work—Celebrity Boxing, skating gigs, this, that—because of her bad-girl image. The same goes for Monica Lewinsky, the woman Bill Clinton didn’t have sex with. They are examples of how far you can take it and still be asked to host your own reality show. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
I’ve had a lot of hits and misses with the news dudes over the years. That’s to be expected with all the thousands and thousands of media contacts I’ve had. I still average more than a dozen appearances a week—talk shows, reality shows, newscasts, radio,TV, newspapers. I mean the media are always around—always, always, always—and you win some, you lose some. The New York book signing in the wedding dress was a home run, Rodman on the Rebound an embarrassment. PETA was a winner, but the brawl with Carmen in Miami was a real low point. The Stephen Rodrick New York Times Magazine article sucked.
So why do I keep putting myself at risk? Why not just tell the media to fuck off?
It’s all in the numbers.
Say you were invited to appear at Super Bowl 2005 at ALLTEL Stadium in Jacksonville. You’ve done something cool, and they want to walk you out to midfield during the pregame ceremony for a nice pat on the ass. They announce your name over the public address system, and 73,000 cheer. That’s a ton of people, right?
That’s nothing.
Remember that Super Bowl commercial I appeared in that year, which ran right before halftime? It was seen by about 86 million people—that’s over twice the population of California. So if you make a living as a celebrity, you’ve got to get in front of those TV cameras.
On a much smaller scale, remember that grand opening I attended for Magic’s fitness center in Sherman Oaks? I don’t know how many people were there, several hundred. Who cares? Whether it’s a political rally, an opening—whatever—all you need are enough people to be a nice backdrop, what looks like a “good crowd.” After that, the real question is whether the TV cameras and newspaper reporters show up. If they do, suddenly your exposure changes from several hundred people to several hundred thousand. And it’s the media that delivers that crowd, at first creating and then maintaining your celebrity.
It was the media in New York that took a book signing for Bad As I Wanna Be attended by several thousand people and made it into a media event seen and read about by millions. And in the A-list celebrity business, it’s the millions that count. The media delivers those millions, and after you’ve become an established celebrity, you deliver the media—hand in glove. That’s how the celebrity-rep business works.
So today, I’m hired precisely because the reporters and cameras are willing to follow me around. That coverage will get the commercial message I am delivering out to the masses free of charge, and the message is more believable than advertising because it’s coming from what’s supposed to be a reliable source—the news media. The bottom line is: I can’t make a living without the media. Without them there is no “Dennis Rodman.”
So on a given day, I park myself between the bassinette and the mountain lion and pet like hell, hoping to keep the damn thing away from the baby. It’s a scene much like the one Stephen Rodrick described in the opening paragraphs of his story in The New York Times Magazine.
“Welcome to Rodman’s Reef,” I shouted to him. “Welcome to my crazy world. Put your tape recorder away, have a beer, and write anything you want.”
I paused and then added seriously, “Just please don’t say I’m an idiot.”
Reality Check: Sometimes you have to feed the hand that bites you.
