We were backstage at the Century Plaza Hotel, following the men in black suits down a narrow, institutional hall. No red carpet here. We pass a head-high rack filled with dozens of silver candelabra and arrive at what looks like a kitchen staging area. There was a pause, and then the suits pushed through the door; and we walked out into a huge banquet hall filled with round, linen-draped tables for ten: must’ve been 100 of them. There was a stage on the right with a backdrop of billboard-sized video screens showing the Cedars-Sinai “Sports Spectacular 2005” logo. The five of us—Darren and Symone, Thaer, the reporter and I—were led single-file through the crowd, weaving our way to a back table.
We got to our table and a bunch of fresh-faced little white boys lined up for autographs. I signed a program, this ugly purple-and-green basketball, another program, another ugly basketball—where did they get these things?—and the boys disappeared. Later, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stopped by, and I stood up to say hello. We talked a little bit, and then the reporter spotted Kareem. I could tell he was about to piss in his pants. He was trying to get up, I guess to introduce himself, knees hitting the bottom of the table, fumbling around, but before he could get on his feet, Kareem was gone. For the rest of his life, he’ll be telling people, “I almost met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”
John Salley, my old Detroit teammate, swung by. He would be co-hosting this thing with his Best Damn Sports Show Period buddy, Tom Arnold. Then Ron Artest, David Stern’s latest headache, came over to say hello. He’s the guy from the Pacers who waded into the stands during the brawl at Detroit last season. Before it was over he had cold-cocked some fan. Artest ended up sitting out the rest of the season. ESPN.com reported that the suspension cost him about five million big ones.
“We have to make a point that there are boundaries in our games,” David Stern told ESPN. “One of our boundaries, that has always been immutable, is the boundary that separates the fans from the court. Players cannot lose control and move into the stands.”
Artest’s antics have led some people to start mentioning him and Dennis Rodman in the same breath. Nah. Artest’s 73-game suspension ranks number one all time. The best I could ever do was 11 games (for kicking the TV photographer), bringing me in at number six. Latrell Sprewell ranks second, suspended for 68 games in 1997 after choking coach P.J. Carlesimo. Let’s see, cold-cocking an asshole fan, choking a coach? Add clothes-lining David Stern to the list, and for some folk (not Dennis Rodman, mind you), you’d have three of an NBA player’s top-five basketball fantasies.
I spotted Kobe Bryant on the other side of the banquet hall and started to think everybody who was anybody in California sports was at the Cedars-Sinai benefit. And as folks started digging into their salads, I checked out the people at our table. Paul Westphal, an All-Star NBA player from the seventies was sitting a couple of seats to the right with his wife. He grew up in California, was a two-time All-American at USC before being drafted by the Celtics in 1972. Drew Gooden, now with the Cleveland Cavaliers, was on my left, the other side of Thaer, with a beautiful Asian girl—could have been his wife. I don’t know. Gooden played his high school ball at El Cerrito, California (near Oakland). Another black guy I didn’t recognize and a black girl filled out the table. Gooden probably doesn’t know there was a fleeting moment last spring when it looked like we’d be teammates. It was hard to believe this freshfaced kid was in the league. He looked like a baby to me.
My ass is getting old.
If you counted me, at this one table, there were three generations of the NBA.Westphal played from 1973 to 1984, I played from 1987 to 2000, and Gooden has been in the league since 2002. Add one more guy, say Wilt Chamberlain, and you pretty much have the whole modern history of the league covered. Of course, I am an important part of that history. Not that I’ve gotten my due.
Not yet.
Charley Rosen of FOXSports.net described me as one of the five most underrated players of all time. Well, it’s too soon to call me underrated. Give it a few more years. My fans bitch because I was never on an Olympic Dream Team, didn’t make the list of the 50-greatest NBA players of all time back in 1996, and I’m not in the Hall of Fame. There are three reasons for all that: timing, timing, and timing.
When the first two Dream Teams were put together for the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, I was known to be damn good, but I had not yet established myself as a superstar. And for that first Dream Team, players who were not bona fide superstars needed not apply. That was the team with Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone—it goes on and on. Looking back now, the original Dream Team could have easily have been dubbed the “Legends Team.” All but two of the players on that roster would go on to make the list of the NBA’s 50 greatest. No wonder they won all eight of their games with an average winning margin of 44 points before taking home the Olympic gold medal in Barcelona.
When the next Olympics rolled around in 1996, I still hadn’t peaked, and there was a new issue to deal with: public relations. At the 1994 World Basketball Championship in Toronto, some of the guys on what at the time was billed as a kind of off-year, “Dream Team,” showed their collective asses with “taunts, crotch-grabbing, and other demonstrations of boorish behavior,” as Phil Taylor put it in Sports Illustrated. Suddenly the “Dream Team” was the “Ugly American Team.”
“Some of the behavior that might be acceptable when you’re playing pickup with your friends,” Bible-thumping, 1996 Olympic team member David Robinson told SI, “isn’t acceptable when you’re playing in international competition in front of the world.”
So when it came time to pick players for the ’96 Olympics, the selection committee went for Tom Sawyer, not Huckleberry Finn.
Sports Illustrated quoted C.M. Newton, then president of U.S.A. Basketball, as saying the U.S. would be selecting a team with “character, not characters.”
I’m guessing that, at that point, if anyone in the league qualified as a “character,” that would have been me. So I probably would have been odd man out no matter how good I was on the court. While I think I am an outstanding example of what America, freedom, is all about; others aren’t so sure. Even my mother, in a sound bite in Beyond the Glory, my video bio, said I “went totally ballistic” when I was in San Antonio.
After I peaked in 1997-98, winning that seventh rebounding title, I looked like a possible contender for the 2000 games, but as it turned out, I wouldn’t even be in the league. Come Dream Team IV in 2004, I had been out of the NBA two years. Not that they couldn’t have used me. That dream turned into a nightmare, as the team only managed a third-place finish in Athens.
As for not being on the list of the 50 Greatest Players in the NBA at Fifty, it’s the same basic deal: timing. Some of my fans give in to the paranoia, pointing out there is a message and a full-page picture of David Stern peeking out from behind a basketball on the very first page of the damn book, even before the title. Stern, they say, made sure Dennis Rodman was left off the list. I tell them to turn the page to the two-page spread of Michael Jordan, Shawn Kemp, and me going for a rebound—not quite equal billing with Stern, but close. So forget about Stern. The reason I didn’t make the top 50 is because the book was published in October of 1996, meaning the voting was done months and months before by what was called a “panel of 50 experts”—coaches, players, team executives, and media guys like Kareem, Marv Albert, Larry Bird, Red Auerbach, and Oscar Robinson. (Players couldn’t vote for themselves.) So the voting took place before I had peaked, winning my fifth championship and seventh rebounding title in 1997. It’s never too late, though. In April of 2004, Lacy J. Banks, a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times suggested a few revisions for the list. She tossed 12 players out and added 12 new ones including me and Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, and Kevin Garnett. Not bad company.
Even before Lacy J. Banks came along to give me a promotion, I liked to think of myself as the 51st greatest. My ass is all over the NBA at Fifty. It’s kind of like the editor had everything ready to go for a “Dennis Rodman” spread, and I didn’t get the votes. I still appear in eight pictures, half of them shot above the basket looking down on me jockeying for a rebound; and there’s one, full page, extra close-up of me facing a forest of microphones wearing shades, a red jacket, and a matching shapeless cap that’s looks like it was made out of discarded scraps of sofa upholstery. As for mentions, when rebounding comes up, I get mentioned. So while I might not have made the cut for the “50 Greatest Players” list, I sure made the cut for the NBA at Fifty book. Again, I am all over that son of a bitch.
Finally, my fans gripe that I’m not in the Hall of Fame. That, too, is premature. I just became eligible, and we have yet to submit the paperwork. So for those who say I’ve been underrated; again, I say get back to me.
Anything that gets voted on, like the Hall of Fame, is political and, of course, subjective. Not that I did that badly in the popularity contests over the years. Even at my wildest, I made the NBA All-Defensive first team seven times and was named Defensive Player of the Year twice. Of course, I only made the All-NBA team twice in 1990 and 1992, and was actually left out during my peak years at Chicago.
Unreal.
But when you get down to it, the real deal is not votes, but stats. It’s like what Bill Russell said in the NBA at Fifty about winning and losing: “There are no politics, only numbers … and there is nothing subjective about that.”
Well, Bill Russell piled up some numbers in his day, and so did Dennis Rodman.