Never Out of Bounds : No One Can Rebound Like the Pistons’ Dennis Rodman,Who Uses His Desire and Quickness to Get the Ball

S chwing!!?

Cha-ching!?

If it’s 1992 and you’re running across nonsense words, you’re probably watching TV with your kids or looking at the back of Dennis Rodman’s head.

Like hieroglyphics on a pyramid, these messages Rodman has had painstakingly carved into his haircut must tell us something about the nature of the being inside.

But what?

Cha-ching! is from a commercial for a convenience store.

Schwing!! is from “Wayne’s World,” another of your teen-agers’ favorites.

Here’s our first conclusion: We’re dealing with a relative innocent.

Or as someone who knows Rodman says: “He’s 29 going on 15.”

Welcome to Worm’s World.

We’re also dealing with one of the genuine phenomena of our age, right up there with men whose exploits defy description, like Nolan Ryan and Jerry Brown.

At 6-feet-8 and 210 pounds--officially but not really--Rodman, also known as “Worm,” is pound-for-pound, minute-for-minute the greatest rebounder who ever lived.

His 18-plus rebound average hasn’t been matched in 20 years.

Since Christmas, he’s averaged more than 20 a game. At that pace, he’ll finish at 19-plus which hasn’t been matched since Wilt Chamberlain in 1969.

Factoring in the changes in the game--fewer shots taken, a higher percentage made, leaving fewer rebounds available--it has never been matched.

In 1961, Chamberlain set the NBA record, averaging 27.2 rebounds--36% of his team’s total.

Rodman is currently taking down 41% of his team’s total.

“It’s amazing,” says Gene Shue, Philadelphia 76er general manager whose NBA service extends back to 1954. “Absolutely amazing.

“If you compare him to anybody--you can’t compare him to anybody. For the most part, rebounders are usually guys who aren’t leapers but they must have quickness to the ball. They usually have big bodies. I don’t know what they have him listed at but that’s real light for a rebounder. I mean, he’s different.”

As long ago as the ‘60s, players like Wes Unseld began demonstrating that height wasn’t all-important, or even very important, in rebounding.

Unseld, a center in the guise of a sumo wrestler, was listed at 6-7, 240. Now coach of the Bullets, he says he was really 6-5 3/4, 260 and can prove it. Seeking an exemption from the military draft, he missed the ceiling height of 6-6 and had to join a reserve unit.

In recent years, such 6-5 players as Charles Barkley and Larry Johnson have been prodigious rebounders.

But both are squatty-bodied 250-pounders. Rodman is a mesomorph, an ordinary 6-7--he claims to be 6-6, actually--210-pounder, the average size for all NBA players.

Rodman relies on quickness but more than that, the strength and courage to battle bigger men and, most of all, the desire to conquer them.

There are a lot of hard workers but there’s only one Worm.

Who else can average 42 minutes since Christmas, climb on an exercise bike after games and go for another 45 minutes?

Who else could decide that isn’t enough and carry hand weights as he pedals?

“I rely a lot on emotion,” Rodman said after a recent game against the Lakers, speaking the same way he plays, the words gushing out in a torrent.

“I rely a lot on desire. It’s like when you see a little point guard, 5-foot-1, a jitterbug that people say, ‘I don’t want to face him’--I’m the same way. I’m out there giving 110% and giving you every bit of energy that I have on the court. And people say, ‘God, I don’t want to go out and play that guy. I’ve got to run with him and box him out on every play, that’s going to take away from me.’

“I just want to keep going and going and going.

“A lot of people don’t realize it takes a lot of guts to go in there and get a basketball. A lot of people say it’s amazing, what I’m doing. I just go out there and do my job, is what I tell ‘em.

“I think I have the same ability everybody in the

league has but I have the sense to keep going--to keep reaching for it, to keep wanting more and more and more and just wanting to keep after it. That’s all.”

As a public figure, Rodman is more like a deer transfixed in your headlights.

He’s pleasant but shy and wary of strangers. He spurned repeated requests by the Piston publicity department to return a telephone call for this story. Approached before a recent game at the Forum, he said he doesn’t talk before games. Afterward he was gracious, if brief.

Rodman grew up poor, in a broken home in Dallas. A small, run-of-the mill high school player, he managed to get a scholarship to Southeastern Oklahoma State. Only then did he pop up to his full height.

Anonymous or not, pro scouts were onto him. He became a sensation on the pre-draft circuit in 1986.

If briefly.

“He was the MVP of the Portsmouth (Va.) tournament,” Piston General Manager Jack McCloskey said. “I saw him and I called back and told our coaches, ‘There’s a kid here who’s absolutely sensational, who’s got to go in the top 10.’

“Then he got invited to Hawaii (the Aloha Classic) and did not play well at all. His stock dropped. Everyone started getting off him.

“He went to Chicago (to the NBA’s pre-draft camp) and played terrible. I used to send our trainer, Mike Abdenour, to Chicago every year. He told me, ‘This kid shouldn’t even be playing. He has an asthmatic condition so bad, he can’t even breathe.’ ”

Recognizing Rodman’s stock was down to a penny on the dollar, the Pistons drafted John Salley in the first round, gambling that Rodman would be there in the second.

He was.

At first, he was known only for running, jumping and the raw emotion that made him a crowd favorite--in Detroit. Everywhere else, his finger-pointing routine was considered unconscionable hotdogging.

One thing about Rodman, he never changed.

He did get better, though. By 1989, he had become a fixture on the all-defensive first team and for the last two seasons, he has been defensive player of the year. He may be the greatest defender who ever lived, too, able to give anyone trouble, from a big guard to Patrick Ewing.

Rodman, though, never learned to shoot, at least the way anyone else does.

He will now drop the occasional three-pointer--he’s shooting a remarkable 32%--but he won’t take anything between a layup and a trey.

At 30, he’s a perennial All-Star and so established that Chicago Coach Phil Jackson said recently that his quickness gives him a physical advantage as a rebounder over Atlanta’s 7-0, 240-pound Kevin Willis.

Rodman is still highly emotional. When he sprained an ankle in training camp in 1990, he worried that it would end his career. He didn’t miss a game and took a career-high 1,026 rebounds.

In familiar surroundings, he is warm-hearted with a deep sense of charity. He spends every Christmas Eve at a shelter for the homeless near Detroit.

He is married with a daughter. His courtship with Annie Bakes, a model from Sacramento, was turbulent, with Bakes publicly threatening him with a paternity suit before they married.

Let’s just say it hasn’t turned out to be an average life.

“I think I’m still an average player,” Rodman says. “But I’m in a situation where we’ve won two championships . . . and it’s like I’ve stepped in the spotlight. Not in the same area with these great players but in a different area. Like, ‘He plays great defense, he does the dirty work. He rebounds. He does all the things you want him to do.’

“And people look at me as an All-Star. I just look at myself as a player, just like anybody else.”

Sure, if anybody else could keep going and going and going.

Maybe one day he’ll go all the way to the Hall of Fame and a special niche: the greatest average player who ever was.

How They Rate * WILT CHAMBERLAIN: In 1961, Chamberlain set the NBA record, averaging 27.2 rebounds--36% of his team’s total. He led the NBA in rebounding 11 times.

* DENNIS RODMAN: He is currently taking down 41% of his team’s rebounding total. He’s on pace to finish with an average of more than 19 a game, which hasn’t been matched since Chamberlain in 1971-72.