Repeat Offenders : Trouble Follows Some Guys Around

Trouble just seems to follow some guys around. Ask Dennis Rodman. Or Andre Rison. Or Dexter Manley. Or Art Schlichter.

These are guys who’ve been given chance after chance after chance, only to get in mess after mess after mess, perhaps betrayed by talent so great it’s made their bosses reluctant to crack down on them.

All four had their pasts catch up with them recently, bringing them jams ranging from suspension to jail.

Rodman is in trouble with the San Antonio Spurs, something about not following team rules. Why are the Detroit Pistons not surprised?

Rodman was a migraine headache in gym shorts during his days with the Pistons. His shenanigans made the front office so nuts that player personnel boss Billy McKinney, knowing Rodman wanted out, once threatened to keep him around, just for spite.

His escape to San Antonio, went smoothly for all of one season before a new administration got these quaint ideas about following team rules. Dye your hair any color you want. Just don’t throw ice at the coach.

“If his mind is on basketball,” teammate Avery Johnson said, “it’s a sharp mind, very intense, very good for the people around him. If not, well . . . “

Meanwhile, Rison got himself suspended by the Atlanta Falcons last week. Seems he was late for, oh, 20 or so team meetings. And he couldn’t understand why management got so bent out of shape over that.

“I think I don’t deserve being suspended,” he told Fox Sports. “I feel as though I shouldn’t have been suspended because of some of the things other players have done that are more detrimental to our team. Coaches know it and they still don’t take action. Then I’m a minute, two minutes, late to a special team meeting and you suspend me?”

Well, yes, after the 20th time.

Rison, remember, also had problems at his first NFL stop in Indianapolis. Is there a trend here?

Now here we have two extremely talented athletes. Rodman has led the NBA in rebounding for three straight years. Nobody has caught more passes in the first five years of a career than Rison.

And yet, trouble keeps following them around.

There are others, with more serious problems, who are part of the recidivist community.

Manley played in three Super Bowls and had 97 career sacks, fourth best in NFL history. He also had this nasty drug habit. Three years ago, he confessed to a setback and was suspended for the second time from the NFL.

“I am in trouble and I must renew my battle with this disease,” he said at the time. “The battle in football is a game, the battle for my life is not. I may have lost a battle, but I will win the war.”

A year later, in his autobiography, Manley wrote how he “gave up a $650,000-a-year contract for a lousy $20 worth of cocaine.”

“Drugs rob you of your credibility and your morals. They make you a liar and a cheat. It takes time to get that back. I want to show recovery can work.”

All the right words. All the proper sentiments.

Last week in Houston, Dexter Manley got busted for felony possession of crack cocaine.

Schlichter came out of Ohio State as a can’t-miss quarterback prospect. He missed. The problem: Gambling.

Schlichter, one observer suggested, would bet on which of two people would get across the street first. He’d love those dot races that ball parks use to amuse fans between innings.

After gambling finished him in football, Schlichter worked as a radio talk show host in, of all places for an addicted gambler, Las Vegas. He pleaded guilty last week to a federal charge of bank fraud--writing bad checks.

When his addiction was diagnosed, Schlichter was treated at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., where Dr. Sheila B. Blume is medical director of the alcoholism, chemical dependency and compulsive gambling unit.

“Relapsing is very much a part of addictive disorders,” she said. “That is why a single treatment, in-patient or out-patient, is never considered a cure. A very important part of treatment is that recovery is a lifelong endeavor. Once professional treatment is done, self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous are important. It’s the kind of disease that if you forget about it, it will sneak up when you’re not looking.

“For someone who is clean a year or two, relapse is less frequent.”

Dwight Gooden was clean for seven years before he started fouling testing bottles--perhaps as many as 10 times--last summer. “I had an alcoholic patient who relapsed after 14 years,” Blume said. “The condition can be arrested. It never is cured. The one bet, the one cocktail, the one hit of crack opens the door.

“It’s like riding a bicycle. Once the system learns, it never forgets.”