Team Asking for Problems

How’d you like the honeymoon?

With $600,000 on the table and nothing else to do, Dennis Rodman put the Lakers on hold for weeks, distracted their players and made their front office crazy.

Then came Monday’s finale, when he was supposed to announce the good news in a glitzy affair his show-biz agents staged for him in Beverly Hills, and he wound up sobbing.

And that’s before he ever put on a Laker uniform.

Of course, this could work. Basketball-wise, it’s a perfect fit. It’s just emotionally that it’s a long shot, since Rodman is to emotion what gasoline is to fire.

The bigger question is why would anyone want to employ, or exploit, a man who has given off so many distress signals for so long, and never as many as now?

There really was a Dennis Rodman once, as opposed to this scene-stealing caricature he sells to the Howard Stern crowd. As late as 1993, he never drank and worked out religiously. He was a marvel, pound for pound the greatest rebounder who ever lived and, perhaps, its greatest defender ever.

Of course, he already had beaucoup problems. Then he got famous on top of it and tripped out.

At 37, he looks as if he’s on thin ice. He doesn’t seem to want to play much, or as he said Monday, “What got me over the hump was the fact I’m bored, I’m tired of not doing anything. I want to go back out and entertain the people.”

Well, you couldn’t say he didn’t do anything in the off-season.

He partied all night, ran up $100,000 gambling tabs some weekends, married actress Carmen Electra at dawn after a night at the Hard Rock Casino, filed to annul the marriage, withdrew the petition, split with agent Dwight Manley, who had pulled his finances together, told Jay Leno he’d play for Miami for $1 million, then turned to Orlando and finally the Lakers, ran off to Vegas while they waited for him to make up his mind and finally met Jerry Buss without his ICM agents, as his sister, Debra, announced she was handling things.

Then at Monday’s press conference, he embarked on his act, telling us way more than we wanted to know about him and Carmen, before what looked dangerously like real life intruded--Dennis sobbing he can’t win, wondering why people love Michael Jordan more than they love him.

Even in Chicago, the pathos never got this close to the surface. Nor did it start as ominously. But then, Rodman was a lot more lucid in 1995.

When the Bulls wanted to meet him, after his flip-out with the Spurs in the previous spring’s Western finals, he flew to Chicago, stayed at General Manager Jerry Krause’s home, promised to obey the rules and didn’t haggle over money.

They signed him. Then the fun started.

He wouldn’t even talk to Laker officials on the phone. He kept angling for $10-million side deals for movies or houses or land. As recently as Wednesday, he asked Buss if he couldn’t give him something under the table.

As Dennis said on ESPN’s “Up Close,” Buss answered he was “too popular for your own good”--suggesting Buss might have acceded if Rodman’s visibility wouldn’t have had league officials alert for hanky-panky.

The Lakers don’t already have enough problems?

They’ve been going up in smoke annually and all it took was a few penny-ante disagreements: Magic Johnson questioning Del Harris’ game plan in 1996, Nick Van Exel refusing to talk to Harris in 1997, Van Exel refusing to go back into the starting lineup last spring and making that “1-2-3 Cancun” joke Shaquille O’Neal didn’t find so funny.

Nor does this seem a particularly good moment to bring in the most disruptive force the game has ever known, even if he is its greatest rebounder.

The word that comes to mind these days, as the Lakers wait to see when, or if, the new power forward, arrives; and when, or if, the Charlotte deal goes down; and how shaky their coach is, is D-I-S-A-R-R-A-Y.

What happens if, or when, Rodman acts up? What if he does what he’s promised--tear off his uniform in his last game and walk off naked? These days, Laker tickets should come with a warning: “Please don’t bring your children to the Forum for elimination games.” On the other hand, whatever happens to the Lakers, for better or worse, it’s OK. They asked for it.