The Bad Boy of Basketball

Dennis Rodman is staring at his crotch. "I had it done, bro," he cracks, his voice full of cocksure bravado.

"What?" I ask, trying to follow his meaning, if not his gaze.

His blonde, curvaceous girlfriend, Stacy Yarbrough, flashes a proprietary, that's-my-man grin. "His scrotum," she says, letting the word linger on her lips.

"I did!" Rodman confirms. Then he winces. "But I had to have it taken out. It got infected."

A double-fanged rattlesnake bite is his souvenir of the time when, late one night this past summer in Los Angeles, he walked into a tattoo parlor on Santa Monica Boulevard and paid to have a silver hoop stapled through the taproot of his manhood.

Being the badass of basketball takes balls. And Dennis Rodman—now forward of the Chicago Bulls, the NBA's leading rebounder, Madonna's former flame, a cross-dressing, hard-gambling, thrill-seeking poster boy for an apocalyptic era in American sports—is up to the game, and the pain that goes with it. He has pierced his nose, ears, navel and scrotum. He bleaches his hair with acid in four-hour, scalp-scalding sessions, then dyes it with shades of color that span the psychedelic rainbow. Nearly every inch of his torso has been tattooed.

Publicly displaying the raw wounds of his psyche is what the Demolition Man does for fun. He is not about to be beaten by a scrotal infection. "It's almost healed now, bro," he says. "Then I'm gonna redo it."

•

It's a Tuesday night in Dallas' gay and lesbian quarter, and Dennis Rodman, 34, is on a date: He'll get two tattoos, consume a spaghetti dinner and enjoy an all-male strip show, all of which he will narrate in his ranting style. Sprawled in the Freudian psychoanalytical position across a low-slung dentist's chair in Trilogy Tattoos, Rodman is adding a pair of blood-red dice and a Mi Vida Loco script to his ever-growing personal canvas. Outside, tight-assed boys in jackboots and teenage lesbians stream toward a gay club, where moonlighting mechanics and shop clerks do the grind with their jeans down. "This is our favorite neighborhood," he says.

In this bunker away from pro basketball, this neighborhood where he feels safe, Rodman offers insight into the deepest recesses of his brain. At present the neurons are raging, for Dennis Rodman is fighting for his life. Not on the basketball court but off.

He stares up from the stencil the tattoo artist is sketching across his deltoid. "The game on the court is too easy for me," he says. "I got the game on the court in my fucking hands!"

He shuts his big, black liquid eyes and plays air guitar, then blinks them open with a start. "I love to play basketball," he says. "But I love to play basketball under the Dennis Rodman System."

He refers to himself in the third person, as if some supernatural spirit has come to inhabit the mortal he once was. "The Dennis Rodman System is to go out there and kick somebody's ass. Live your life to the fullest—that's the way Dennis Rodman lives. That's his rule. That's my rule. I want to live life the way life should be lived."

He is crazy, no doubt about that. Craziness is Rodman's salvation. If he ever stops being crazy, if he ever conforms, then "they" will trap him. It's a weird vampireland out there, weirder than any place his pea-green-covered skull could conjure up, filled with rapacious suits, vengeful women and suck-butt fans, all seeking to drain him of his individuality, his lifeblood. "You're a piece of meat," he says about the NBA's attitude. He imagines the league's coaches and moneymen coming for him, their fangs bared, thirsty for his throat, then leaving his carcass for the past-his-prime wolves of sports anonymity: cruises, TV commentary, remaindered autobiography.

"Once you get out of the NBA, there is no more clapping, there is no more hoopla," he says.

He shakes his head, as if warding off demons. "Snay," he says, uttering his oft-employed slang for "not on your life."

"They throw you away." The landscape is littered with the remains of the fallen. O.J. Simpson? "He just went into the world of the suits. I'm not going to go into the world of the suits. That's losing it right there. All of a sudden, you're gonna be a suit?"

Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, David Robinson? All victims of what Rodman calls the Pedestal, so seduced by money and fame that they've forgotten the reason they started playing. His former teammates with the San Antonio Spurs? Rodman says they are so lost that management had to enlist motivational speaker Tony Robbins to boost self-esteem before last season's playoffs. Only Rodman stood apart, he says. "It's a bunch of bullshit!" he rages.

He spreads his arms wide, extolling the funky glory framed between them. "I have power," he declares. "Within myself. But the only power I have that people notice is when they see Dennis Rodman. The exterior ... the package. I can do anything that I want because of this right here. And the name."

This is his salvation, he figures, the one thing that will endure. The hair, the piercings, the in-your-face defiance are war paint for the long postseason ahead.

Now, at the peak of his basketball notoriety, he seeks to transfer his wild-child persona from court to camera. A cackle rumbles from deep within him. "I could do something else, but show business is what I do on the court. So that'll be my next career."

He says this as fact, not possibility, even though he's never had an acting lesson. "My dream is to just go out there and express Dennis Rodman," he says. "Be the first athlete to really do something."

"What about Shaquille?" I ask. "He's done movies." Rodman groans. "Oh, yeah," he says. "But he didn't have that many lines. All he did was go out there and dunk the damned basketball. He really didn't do anything, bro. He didn't have a role! I want a role that's more challenging. I'll go on the damned TV like I've been there all my life. Action movies. I'd rather be the bad guy."

Spending 80 percent of the 1995 off-season in Los Angeles, Rodman stoked the fire: guest spots on the TV series Courthouse with Robin Givens on CBS and Misery Loves Company on Fox, two 60-second commercials endorsing something called the ASA Psychic Network ("because I'm psychic") and his first big-screen movie role in Eddie, Whoopi Goldberg's forthcoming basketball film. But all this is a mere prelude, Rodman swears. He says that he is presently holding meetings for his own talk show, which he suggests calling The Denise Rodman Show; he would interview his guests in drag. RuPaul crossed with Arsenio Hall.

"You never see it on TV," he says excitedly. "If I get my show, you'll see that. You never know what to expect from Dennis Rodman."

Erik, the tattoo artist, hoists his needle rig. It begins to scream.

"You ready?" he asks.

"Do I have a choice?" asks Rodman. Erik flashes a lizard grin, and the silver stud in his tongue glistens. "Do you have a choice?" Erik says. "You been talking about choices for the past ten minutes!"

The needle bites into Rodman's flesh: one more dig at conformity.

•

From the sports headlines:

Spurs' Rodman is Suspended Rodman Banned Indefinitely Absent Rodman Fined

The Clock Ticks Away on Rodman's Indifference

Rodman is rebellion's role model. He calls the San Antonio Spurs' head coach Bob Hill, toward whom he once hurled a bag of ice during a game, Boner. He plays basketball like it's a contact sport, with body jabs and epithets hurled at opponents, at coaches and at the NBA brass who have warned him, to no avail, to shape up. Even the Spurs' affable, big-eared mascot, the Coyote, is fair game. Rodman once staggered him with a head butt. Sitting out huddles, flashing I-don't-give-a-damn stares, slouching on the sideline floor with his shoes off, Rodman would make a gangster proud.

When the Spurs lost their last game of the 1994 playoffs, he stalked off the floor, bounded into a limo with Madonna and was off to Las Vegas before his teammates had even undressed. And he's still angry, still running. Aggravated over high-profile rookies snaring $7-million-a-year salaries while he has stayed steady at $2.5 million, Rodman demanded $15 million for the 1996 season, the last year of his contract. Such demands may have contributed to his trade to the Bulls.

"I'll put $5 million in the bank," he says. "Just live on the interest and party my ass off."

The eyes blaze, the nostrils flare and the lips bloom into a hot-pink orchid of a smile. "Nothing they can say to Dennis Rodman, because I make them too much fucking money," he says. "I bring too much excitement to the game. Michael Jordan used to do that, but, fuck it, now it's the Dennis Rodman Show on the road, waitin' for you. I give people what they want."

Of course, nobody would put up with any of this if Dennis Rodman weren't the winner of the past four NBA rebounding titles. Absolutely fearless, he glides across the paint in crazy, almost magical motion, two steps ahead of the competition, snatching the ball and altering the game by the power of his defense alone.

But he is not simply a great rebounder. He is, as he points out to anyone who will listen, more complex than that. He was a soft, shy, painfully passive child, born to Shirley Rodman and Philander Rodman, a runaround serving in the U.S. Air Force who lived up to his name. When Dennis was three, his mother left his father for good. "My daddy is coming back," Dennis would say repeatedly. But his daddy never did. Fearful and frail, beaten up by kids who stole his lunch money, he grew up a mama's boy in the Dallas projects. Too short and too scrawny for competitive basketball, he graduated into menial jobs, including a stint as a janitor at the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport, where, on a dare, he stuck his broom handle through a gift shop grate and stole 15 watches. He was arrested, jailed for a night and released after he told the cops where the watches were, case dismissed. At home, he became a layabout, going nowhere. Soon, his mother kicked him out of the house and he was on the streets.

"I was a monkey-see, monkey-do," he says.

Women? Forget about it.

"How old were you when you lost your virginity?" I ask. Rodman doesn't hesitate. "Oh, about 21," he says.

But by then he had been rescued by his hormones. In one year he grew 11 inches, shooting up to a stick-thin 6'8". A basketball dropped from the heavens, and he played the game like a thief who steals the ball and pawns it for victory. He won a scholarship to Southeastern Oklahoma State, and, in 1983, fate once again smiled on Dennis Rodman.

Bryne Rich, 13, son of a mailman and a beautician from the Oklahoma farming community of Bokchito, had killed his best friend in a hunting accident when his gun went off as he was reloading. Wracked by depression and guilt, haunted by nightmares and loneliness, he begged his mother to adopt a baby boy. "Maybe God will hear our prayers and send a stork over," she told him. God sent Dennis Rodman, 22, shy, insecure and certain that he would fail at everything, including basketball.

They met at a summer basketball camp where Rodman coached. The two became close and eventually healed each other through their friendship. For three years, Rodman lived with the tightly knit Rich family, growing from insecure kid to college all-American to the superstar forward of the Detroit Pistons, "the Bad Boys," who were more concerned about kicking ass than making money.

Rodman found a father figure in coach Chuck Daly, who guided the Pistons to back-to-back championships during Rodman's tenure. He lived with and eventually married model Annie Bakes and had her name tattooed on his ankle (his first body art). They had a daughter, Alexis (his second tattoo), and settled into an extravagant house in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Dennis Rodman was on a roll.

But his prowess as an athlete came with a curse. The talent that made him somebody had to be displayed in an arena he would soon come to despise. He sees professional basketball as a slave market where men are bought and sold, where players compete for money more than for championships, where sports franchises launder personalities so they emerge subservient and squeaky-clean.

By 1993, Rodman's perfect world had exploded. Daly had quit, Rodman's best friend in basketball, John Salley, had been traded and, after only 82 days, his marriage ended.

"Aw, she tried to suck me down," he says of his ex-wife, to whom he claims he pays $10,000 a month in alimony and who, he says, wants more. He points to a sketch for a popular tattoo, a skunk shitting blood in the shape of a heart. It reads: A Sensitive Issue.

"You change that motherfucking heart to a dagger, and that's how it is," he says. "I'm just trying to shit that dagger out."

In late 1993, with the dagger in his bowels and a three-year contract with the San Antonio Spurs on his head, Rodman went back to Texas for the third resurrection of his soul. It was almost metaphysical. "One day I woke up, drove my truck to the woods and just sat there wondering what the hell I was gonna do besides basketball," he remembers. "And all of a sudden I started to project this image." He pulls up his T-shirt to reveal his navel ring, encircled by the tattoo of an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life.

"Yea or nay," he says. "If you're gonna do it, do it. If you ain't gonna do it, just stay as you are and be the same old Dennis Rodman you were in Detroit. Suddenly, I said, 'Hell with it,' and broke away. I tried something bold. I created something that everyone has been afraid of: the entertainer, the Dennis Rodman I was born to be."

But who did he have to entertain? His relationships with women were like his jump shots: fast and loose but rarely successful. He stares over at Stacy, his model-dancer-bassist-helicopter-pilot girlfriend. In tight shorts and cropped T-shirt, she exposes tattooed souvenirs of their relationship: a vine motif winding across her belly, a moon and sun winking from her calf.

Rodman says his deep devotion to Stacy was the inspiration for his pierced scrotum. "I did it for her, so she could play with something besides just the old gun." If he makes it big in Hollywood, he plans to secure a role on Baywatch for her.

True love and devotion aside, she wasn't all that impressed with Rodman when she first saw him dancing in a disco three years ago.

"She wouldn't date me," he declares, then shoots her an infectious smile. "Tell him why not."

Stacy laughs, rising to the bait.

"Go ahead!" he exclaims. "Makes the story better."

"I thought he was an asshole!" she screams. The tattoo parlor is silent.

"Well," she adds, "there just wasn't anything about him that jumped out and got my attention."

Uh-oh. The Demolition Man bland? A fate worse than death. He ponders this a moment, then looks up, wounded. He could tell tales that would redeem him, about how his navel ring inspired Madonna to get hers done, how their love affair demolished mattresses and inspired daily updates on Hard Copy, how, calling him "a perfect specimen," Madonna asked him to get her pregnant. And according to Jack Haley, his best friend on the Spurs, when Rodman said "Snay," Madonna eventually dumped him.

But Rodman says nothing. He stews in his shortcomings. "I wasn't down, bro," he says. "I was being a fucking almost-an-all-American guy, something like this asshole, until, one night ...."

He began playing a different game, one in which the opponent is conformity. He added more tattoos, more piercings and, stepping into K. Charles & Co., a San Antonio salon run by a longhaired, leather-clad stylist named David Chapa, he ditched the bottle-blond hair for something truly exciting. Using Manic Panic (a British dye favored by punk rockers), Chapa transformed Rodman's black hair to every color of the rainbow: flamingo pink, blue lagoon, fire-engine red, apple green, canary yellow, before turning to intricate designs such as the red AIDS ribbon atop a snow-white crown.

Then the shy guy began to speak. "I started saying certain things like, 'The NBA sucks,'" he says. "And all of a sudden, people wanted to know why I thought that." So he began the dance, an enigma wrapped in pink, his chosen color of defiance. He owns a pink Harley, a pink truck, a pink Cigarette boat. "Pink shows power, bro," he says. "Shows confidence."

"A lot of men would say, 'I'm not getting a pink car, a pink bike,'" says Stacy. '"People will think I'm a fag!'"

"But I say, 'Snay,'" says Rodman. "I love pink, bro." He not only welcomes questions about his sexual identity, he also fuels them. Dressing in drag, hanging out in gay bars, he discovered that while sex sells, unorthodox sex sells better, even though Bryne Rich says "there's no way in hell" Dennis would ever have sex with a man.

The media horde descended. Covering Rodman quickly became a journalistic strip show, with Rodman onstage, constantly inventing new poses and revealing increasingly wild fantasies—suicide, murder and playing his last NBA game buck naked—while whisking sportswriters away on impromptu trips to Vegas, to Hollywood and into the corners of his own cross-dressing, envelope-pushing life. After GQ pictured him naked from the rear and Sports Illustrated put him on the cover in semidrag, south Texas queer-bashers slashed his truck's tires and scrawled FAG on the windshield.

"The silliest show in journalism is watching people try to out-Rodman each other," wrote Mike Lupica in Newsday.

"I can sell your papers, bro!" Rodman says tonight, extending invitations to gamble in Vegas, cruise gay bars in San Antonio or bust rocks at Rodman Excavation Inc., a thriving construction company Rodman launched with Bryne Rich's brother and another partner. "I can show you things and do things that'll fuck you up. But you have to be a part of it."

Just as his affair with Madonna was cooling, he ran into Stacy in the same Dallas disco where she had repeatedly rebuffed him. He watched her leave with a date—"He was driving her car!" he remembers with horror—and followed as they turned the corner and parked in front of a nearby 7-Eleven. The couple heard a roar and saw a flash of pink steel pop the curb, carom onto the sidewalk and screech to a halt at the nose of Stacy's Corvette.

Rodman leans back and relishes the memory. "I was on my Harley-Davidson, and I drove up in Dennis Rodman's fashionable style," he says, grinning. "In yo' face and just balls out. WFO. Wide fucking open."

He must have been a sight: six feet, eight inches of rebellion, scalp screaming, tattoos like manly brands, ear bobs (text concluded on page 181)Dennis Rodman(continued from page 102) and nose ring glistening.

"Maybe I ought to go out with this guy," Stacy said to herself.

Now they have the ideal relationship: a few weeks together, a few weeks apart, free to go their own ways, with only one ironclad restriction.

"Aw, yeah, long as we don't go out and fuck somebody else," says Rodman.

In a world of star-chasing women, Dennis Rodman practices monogamy.

"We can actually do it, but the deal is, it's gotta be a mind-fuck–type deal," he says. "Other than that, you can't get it on, brother. No physical——"

"No physical connection with anyone else," Stacy interrupts. Rodman holds out his palms, such faithful road companions he's named them Monique and Judy. "Pocket pool only, bro," he says. "That's the truth."

"So," I ask, "are you mind-fucking America with your transvestite thing?"

He pounces on the question like a ball in free fall. "I'm gonna do the transvestite thing, bro!"

"He has a book deal," Stacy points out. According to Delacorte Press, the book will be a compilation of interviews and autobiographical sketches. Photos will be interspersed throughout. (A Delacorte spokesperson says, "We're very excited about it. It will be called As Bad As I Want to Be and will be Dennis' take on various subjects. It'll be out in time for the playoffs.")

Rodman can visualize it. "You know Madonna's book, Sex?" he asks. "It's gonna be more extreme. Like nothing you have ever seen an athlete do."

Rodman hasn't given much thought to the text, but he's clear about the photos."I'm gonna dress like a woman," he says. "I'm gonna walk down the main street of Las Vegas. Right in front of the Mirage."

•

Fresh tattoos stinging his flesh, spaghetti dinner filling his belly, Dennis Rodman steps into the night. Loping toward the lights, the action, the hive, he enters a gay club. Not one head turns. Not one fan rushes over. In the half-light, surrounded by cross-legged faux cowboys and perfectly painted drag queens, Dennis Rodman, whose life is lit by flashbulbs, looks downright ordinary. With Stacy on his lap, he drinks Coors Light and screams answers to a Jeopardy-style video game at the circular bar.

"Do you see how comfortable he is right now?" asks Ron Lightsey, a front-runner in the 1995 Miss Gay Texas pageant. "Gay people don't even know who Dennis Rodman is. He goes to straight bars and they start picking on him because he's with his Caucasian girlfriend. Nobody bugs him in here."

There is plenty of time for attention in the long season ahead, when Dennis Rodman, the entertainer, tries to deal with the possibility of tense contract renegotiations and his move toward Hollywood, a company town that eats its young with such a ferocity it makes the NBA look like the Welcome Wagon. Tonight, he is content to be exactly what he is: a working stiff looking for solace from deeply rooted pain.

Two husky-voiced drag queens sashay over to his barstool and whisper in his ear: "Are you into domination or S & M? We heard you are."

Dennis shakes his head no. "Not tonight, bro," he says. "Not tonight."

Dressing in drag, hanging out in gay bars, he discovered that while sex sells, unorthodox sex sells better.