COMMENTARY : Rodman Is More Curiosity Than Celebrity

We create our own media monsters in sports, don’t think for a minute we don’t. Now we do it over and over again with the graffiti-covered Dennis Rodman, who has to have reached the point where he even gives himself the creeps.

There he is on the cover of Sports Illustrated last week, looking like a supporting actor in “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” Terence Stamp played a drag queen in that movie, which won an Academy Award for best costumes. Rodman wins the NBA award for costumes all the time, even before he gets into the dog collar and the hot pants. He just sticks his head in another vat of food coloring, sticks a few more holes in himself for various rings and tattoos, and away he goes.

Maybe SI can put Rodman and Madonna on the cover of the swimsuit issue next year. Push the envelope a little more. Be more daring. Get her side of the story on all this frantic coupling they’re supposed to have had. Inquiring readers of SI want to know.

All of a sudden, the silliest show in journalism is watching people try to out-Rodman each other. The magazine GQ had its own Rodman piece a few months ago.

Rodman wasn’t dressed in hot pants for GQ. As a matter of fact, in one photograph he was naked except for his tattoos. I frankly thought GQ had much better sex talk about Madonna, even if its story did miss out on Rodman’s homo-erotic fantasy, and the one about him blowing his brains out.

And of course it isn’t just SI trying to make a score off Rodman. It is everybody who puts a notebook or a microphone in front of him and gives him the attention he wants and treats his fool ramblings as if they matter. We all deserve what we get, and sometimes we get a flamboyant lout like Rodman.

At a time when Hakeem Olajuwon is performing at a level that only a handful of basketball players have ever known in the playoffs, at a time when Olajuwon’s Rockets are an amazing sports story, it is the Spurs’ Rodman who becomes the 34-year-old poster boy for the National Basketball Assn. In one more pose.

From the time the Rockets were behind the Jazz two games to one and facing elimination, Olajuwon has turned the playoffs into an advertisement for his genius as a player, his grace as a basketball player and as a gentleman. He has carried the Rockets to their lead over the Spurs with his basketball, and inspired them with his heart. He is not just one of the great centers of all time. He is one of the great players of all time, at any position. Rodman is a nobody compared to Olajuwon, no matter how many rebounds he gets.

Still it is Rodman who makes the headlines. It is Rodman to whom the television reporters rush after games. I thought Kevin Kiley of TNT was going to pull a hamstring getting to Rodman after one game last week. ESPN has had to position one of its reporters, Grace Lee Nikkel, in the parking lot, near Rodman’s car, just so he can’t leave without ESPN getting a SportsCenter soundbite from Rodman about taking off his basketball shoes, or sitting out a last-minute huddle, or acting disinterested while Robert Horry beats his team with a wide-open jumper.

Rodman really is the poster child for sports in this country gone wrong. Rodman is sports where the act is everything, where being different is everything. The more outrageous you are, the more attention you get. The more we rush to put your name up in lights.

“I know you’re going to think I’m crazy,” Isiah Thomas said to me at breakfast one morning during the Final Four in Seattle, “but Dennis Rodman is kind of a genius. He does everything possible to draw attention away from it, I know. But on the court, he’s a genius.”

Maybe Rodman is a basketball genius. He is one of the great rebounders in basketball history. He has championship rings from his days with the Pistons. He still acts like the buffet at a psychiatrists’ convention. Then he wants us all to believe that the joke is on us, that he is just putting us on, that we’re not hip enough to catch up with his act. Dennis Rodman isn’t smart enough for that.

I keep hearing that Rodman is misunderstood. That he can be a real good guy. He keeps telling us he is a real good team player. Then he does everything possible in big moments to sabotage his team. Last year he played like a hockey goon against the Jazz, tried to hurt Tom Chambers and tried to hurt John Stockton, and got himself suspended for a game, and the Spurs went out in the first round. There was not an ounce of remorse from Rodman about that. It must have been another time when we all weren’t hip enough to his cool act.

Now he shows up his coach in San Antonio, he shows up his teammates. They all keep trying to cover for him. They all keep saying he isn’t a distraction. They are all kidding themselves. You don’t work with Rodman on a basketball court, for all his eccentric talents. You work around him.

But he sure is a big guy on television, in the newspapers, now on the cover of SI. Roy Firestone gives Rodman the Barbara Walters treatment on ESPN. And the message here, from Rodman, is simple: If you play well enough, you can make your own rules. You can say anything and do anything. You can be treated as a colorful character for coloring your hair.

There he is again on the sideline, a magnet for the television camera. Practicing his slouch, and his pose, as if he is somehow above the action. I don’t care how many rebounds he gets. He is a celebrity, but in the way some of these grotesque rock stars are. The holes all over his body go very nicely with the holes in his head. When he is out of basketball, the sport will be better off without him.