The video biography is not like having your life flash before your eyes. It is having your life flash before your eyes.
Sometimes it’s a highlight reel: “There it is! Rodman’s first career triple-double.” Sometimes not: “Police say Rodman faces a number of charges, including driving under the influence of alcohol.”
There are fond memories—Carmen and me at Planet Hollywood—and things I’d rather forget, like me exiting the paddy wagon in Miami. These flashbacks are from FOX Sports Net’s Beyond the Glory: Dennis Rodman. They shot the video in 2004, close on the heels of ESPN’s Rodman on the Rebound, which had aired earlier that year. But unlike the two-part ESPN reality series, Fox had no particular angle, producing a straight biography that ran 44 minutes and 32 seconds. (They filled out the hour with commercials.) Here’s a five-minute version, the highlights of the highlights, cobbled together by none other than Dennis Rodman himself.
Let’s begin with the Dallas childhood:
“The girls kind of overshadowed him a little bit,” my mother says.
No shit.
Cut to stills of my two sisters, the basketball stars, wearing their orange and black high school uniforms: Kim holding a trophy, Debra a ball.
Cut to Dennis Rodman, the undersized loser with very large ears.
Roll video of the six-foot-eight, skinny as hell Dennis Rodman—lucky if I weighed two hundred pounds—playing ball at Southeastern Oklahoma State.
Dissolve to video of the 1986 news conference when Chuck Daly announced that the Pistons had drafted John Salley and me.
Cut to the “bad boys” and then video of me flying over the scorer’s table, guarding Magic, dunking, blocking a shot, making a steal.
“The NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year, Dennis Rodman!”
Cut to a close-up of me crying.
Cut to pictures of Alexis and Annie, and then video of me after the cops picked me up in the parking lot at The Palace of Auburn Hills.
Roll tape of the Pistons hoisting the trophy after winning a second title, a much younger David Stern running for his life.
Cut to a sign in the stands in San Antonio: “Dennis Rodman: To Dye For.”
“I went and got my hair dyed, and that’s when my life changed completely,” I say.
“He went from a shy, unassuming kid to a megastar,” my mother says.
Cut to a close-up of Madonna in the stands and then video of David Robinson and me.
“I was the devil. He was God. He was Jesus,” I say.
Cut to a still photo of me, Michael, and Scottie.
“He plays. He does his job. He comes to practice. He keeps his mouth shut. He works hard every day. He’s never delinquent. He’s just a very easy person to have on a basketball team,” says Phil Jackson.
Cut to me wearing a Chicago, a wedding dress Rodman just kicked a photographer!”—then to video of the Bulls celebrating a third straight championship.
“When you’re flying that high, when you’re [at] like the peak of all peaks, there’s nowhere to go but down,” says Wendell.
Cut to me announcing my signing with L.A.
Roll the TV news clip.
“In handcuffs, former Baywatch star Carmen Electra steps from a police transport van. Also inside, her on-again, off-again lover, Dennis Rodman.”
Cut to Dallas. “A technical foul on Rodman. He’s been thrown out.”
Roll the voice over by FOX announcer, Chris Rydell. “His professional reputation was ruined, but the party was just getting started.”
Cut to video of the Treasures Gentleman’s Club in Vegas.
“We actually gave him an ultimatum, which was either you stop, or we’re done,” says Thaer.
“Everybody’s worried about, ‘Oh, is he gonna make the NBA.’ I could care less. To walk away from that alcohol is huge,” says Wendell.
“It’s step by step—and we work on it every day,” says Michelle.
Cut to me with a white, crinkle-permed, Don Quixote-looking hairdo playing for the Long Beach Jam.
Dissolve to the happy ending of me, Michele, and the kids in the park.
That’s the abridged version of my life on video—an overview of the overview. So what did Fox leave out? They didn’t even mention one low point: my arrest for stealing watches when I was a janitor at the Dallas airport. I was a nobody then, so there were no news cameras there, no video. If that happened today? I’d be all over SportsCenter. Leno and Letterman would be ragging my ass unmercifully. This brings us to the first really big-time thing FOX left out of the biography—Fame. They’re all over what I’m famous for—but as for what that fame means—that’s the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the living room.
Fame is what prompted FOX Sports to do my bio—what prompts them to do any bio—and it’s with me 24 hours a day. And whether the complaint is the across-the-board trust issues I’ve or personal privacy, fame is the water in already bitched about which this fish swims.
Michelle is over it.
“I just don’t want you to be ‘Dennis Rodman’ anymore,” she told me one day out of the blue.
Sometimes I feel the same way.
“We can’t go anywhere and do normal things,” she said, “And it sucks.”
Like last weekend.
“He [Dennis] took us shopping,” Michelle told a reporter. “He’s got his kids in his hands, people come up and say, ‘Hey, can we get a picture with you and our kids?’ They want him to let go of his kids so he can take a picture with them.
“And then the one time he said, ‘No, I’m with my kids,’” Michelle continued. “They called him an ‘asshole.’ And he wasn’t even rude.”
This kind of shit happens all the time. Now there are ways around it: like when we took the kids to Disneyland. I paid an escort to walk around with us to keep the people away. The cost? Two thousand dollars.
Whatever the source of fame—sports, movies, television, politics—once a person becomes a national celebrity, that very fame is a huge part of what their life is all about, dictating where they live, where they eat, where they can go and not go. Then there’s the ever-present bodyguard who, like it or not, is a part of the family. So it’s not the big house, the fancy car, the starring roles, and the championship rings that make a celebrity’s everyday life so very different from yours. It’s the fame. And FOX is a part of that.
FOX—all the media—and celebrities are, like Fred and Ginger, forever in lockstep. It’s hard to tell where one starts and the other begins. You can’t become famous and stay famous without the cameras, the reporters, the media. So even if FOX wanted to do the Dennis Rodman fame angle, I’m not sure how they’d capture it on tape. Do they shoot video of themselves shooting video? No clue.
Anybody have a number for 60 Minutes?
One last thing on fame and I will give it a rest. In the last few years, my celebrity status may have actually hurt my chances of getting back in the NBA. Whenever my name comes up, it’s all over the newspapers, and the battle lines are drawn. This guy loves Dennis. That guy hates Dennis. If some GM is considering bringing me on, he knows at some point he’s going to have to explain himself. I’m thinking a simple, “I want to win,” would get it done, but what do I know?
There’s a second way my fame has hurt my comeback. People accuse me of having my own agenda. They say I’m just trying to get back in the league to build my popularity, as some kind of publicity stunt. Well, I’m going to be famous with or without another NBA gig. Right now I can walk into any of these celebrity rat-fucks and—I don’t give a shit who’s hot—I’ll walk into that son of a bitch, and they are all over me. Bro, I’m famous in—at random— Finland, Spain, Puerto Rico, Croatia, Mexico—even China. Trust me, Dennis Rodman doesn’t need any more fame.
That’s it. I’m finally done bitching about fame. As of now, I’ve been a nationally known celebrity for more than a decade, and I’m going to be a celebrity for the rest of my damn life. Sometimes I regret it, and sometimes I don’t. Whatever. I have decided to just get over it and play the hand I was dealt.
A second big thing given short shrift in Beyond the Glory is my failed relationships. (I guess I should be thankful for that.) From my mother and sisters, to my wives, children, and girlfriends, it’s been one long fuck-up.
Not that it’s all my fault.
Back in 1999, my mother and I weren’t on the best of terms to begin with, and then, when I let my sister Debra go, the shit really hit the fan. Debra threatened to sue me, she wanted to take this, this, this. Then my mother took Debra’s side, and I’m like, “Oh wow, all I did was take care of you guys.”
Back in the day, I spent close to a million bucks buying my mother and two sisters houses next door to each other down in Texas—they still live in those houses—and, as I said before, I send my mother $4,000 every month. But as the old saying goes, “No good deed goes unpunished.” So Debra was demanding this, this, this; my mother jumped in on her side; and suddenly, I got my own family fucking me over. Welcome to my world. I resolved that one in my usual way. I cut a fucking check, just paid Debra the money, because I don’t like confrontation with anybody, much less family. But even after all that, I can honestly say, I don’t hate my sister; I don’t hate my mother; we’re just not close.
Reality Check: Business and family don’t mix.
The amateur shrinks I’m surrounded with keep on nagging me about patching up the relationship with my family, especially my mother. Well, there’s nothing to patch up. There never has been any relationship. One of my shrinks thinks that explains a lot.
“I personally think that it affects him more than anyone knows, including him,” Michelle said in Beyond the Glory. “I think that has a lot of effect on how he treats people and how he is with people and why he’s got such a wall up and not loving people. That’s just my opinion.”
Lately, Michelle and I have been talking about taking D.J. and Trinity down to Dallas so my mother can see them for the first time. This isn’t an excuse for me to hook up with her. I’m still not ready for that. Someday, I hope my mother and I can have some kind of relationship, but as far as me finding a way to love her like a normal son loves his mother, I don’t think that’s going to ever happen. I’ll keep on taking care of her every month, but that’s about as far as it’s going to go.
If you think my relationship with my mother is fucked up, that’s nothing compared with my relationships with women. It’s one of my biggest failures in life. Sure, I’ve had sex with some of the most beautiful women on the planet—and like a comedian once said, “The worst I ever had was wonderful”—but as any guy will tell you, that don’t mean shit at 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, when you just rolled over after having a go with some stranger in Bumfuck, Finland. At lunch the next day, a bar a year later, it may sound cool—“I banged Miss Fjord 2005.” But the night of? Get my ass out of here!
My biggest flaw doesn’t get much serious play in the Beyond the Glory video. They just skim the surface, pulling up the usual sensational headlines. But these were real relationships, not the cartoon parodies you see in the media. Losing Alexis almost did me in; I still wish my son Chance was in my life; my thing with Madonna was as serious as a heart attack; I was in love with Carmen—ended up with a broken heart; and I’m still struggling to make a go of it with Michelle.
“He gets caught up in a relationship. That’s more important to him than any game or anything else,” Thaer said in Beyond the Glory. “He’s succeeded at basketball already, but he’s never succeeded at a relationship.”
Too true. So how does FOX handle this major sink hole in my life? They spend 58 seconds on Annie and Alexis, 18 seconds on Madonna, 52 seconds on Carmen, and don’t even mention my son Chance and his mother. My relationship with Michelle gets 36 seconds, and she’s the only woman who’s taken seriously. They make no attempt to figure out what went wrong. Not that it’s any big secret. It’s like I said in that phone call to my mother after Michelle filed for divorce in 2004:
“I’m involved with a woman—a woman who wants a lot more than I can give her.”
That’s the story of my love life in a nutshell. What they want that I haven’t been able to give is fidelity. That was the issue with Carmen. And that is the issue with Michelle. Hell, that was the issue with the “librarian.”
“He is who he is. And he always told her [Michelle] that ‘I am who I am. I’m gonna be who I am, no matter what.’ And that’s how it went,” a friend told a reporter. “And she accepted that until she didn’t want to accept it. Then she caused problems.”
After all these years, I’m guess I’m still looking for a woman who won’t “cause problems.”
“He’s not gonna find her, either,” a friend told a reporter. “He finds ones that say they will, but they always change their minds.”
Then they leave, and I’m fucked.
“When he loves somebody and cares for people, and then they leave him, it hurts him, and he doesn’t recover as fast as most people,” my mother said in Beyond the Glory. “He doesn’t move on. He can’t move on.”
Now I’m searching for a way to have a successful relationship with Michelle. Could happen.
While Michelle was at the Sturgis motorcycle rally, I took care of Trinity, and we ended up going to church together.
“And it just happened to be that service was about marriage and vows,” Michelle told a reporter. “So it was really bizarre the one he picked—about being committed and being faithful.”
I’ll say.
Michelle took this to be a sign from God, and we are now scheduled to attend marriage counseling with the preacher. Hope springs eternal. Meanwhile it’s been over a month since I told Michelle I wanted to renew our vows and buy a house together— still no answer.
So what’s the big Dennis and Michelle wrap-up?
“That we’ll eventually live happily ever after?” said Michelle. “Dennis and I are soul mates. We’re never gonna be apart.”
I hope so. But it’s like I told the reporter: “Even though I’m with a woman who I think will give me that satisfaction, not just in bed, I still have my doubts. I’ll still always have doubts. No matter what the situation is, I’m always gonna have doubts.”