Life Caught Rodman on Rebound

“It’s amazing, I’m not going to never win in the game of basketball, right?”

--Dennis Rodman at Planet Hollywood

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Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Dennis who was born in the most humble of circumstances but grew up to be rich and famous. . . .

Dennis Rodman’s life is a fairy tale, all right, only not a happy one.

It’s the story of an outcast who becomes a star, only to find he has brought his troubles with him. Grieving at the breakup of his marriage, he affects a new persona--hard-partying, entourage-toting playboy.

Years into it, you can’t tell which is the act and which is really Rodman and maybe he can’t, either.

Last spring, when Rodman didn’t turn up for a practice with the Chicago Bulls, Coach Phil Jackson sent someone over to his apartment, which was 10 minutes away in a nondescript northwest suburb, far from the bright lights of the Loop or anything else except strip malls and the Bulls’ practice facility.

Rodman, eating a bowl of cereal, said he had lost his car keys and couldn’t make it. Jackson, his last supporter in the organization, went over himself and found Rodman and some friends in plain surroundings that didn’t suggest a celebrity making $9 million a year.

“He sleeps on the floor on a thin mattress,” Jackson said later. “His TV is as big as the wall, eight feet from him. It’s almost too big for the wall. Next to the TV were probably 150 videotapes. He always has to have something to distract him. I would say he has attention deficit disorder and he’s hyperactive.”

Mostly, Rodman’s story is about alienation and abandonment that started when he was 3 and his father split, never to come around again until his son was grown and rich.

The father, ironically named Philander, claimed to have had 27 children by several wives after he was found, years later, running a bar near a U.S. Air Force base in the Philippines. He accepted an offer from the TV show, “Extra,” to fly to Chicago to see a game and, hopefully, meet his son, in exchange for exclusive interview rights.

In Chicago, Philander was ferried to media outlets, where he announced he was working on a book, a sort of answer to Dennis’ “Bad as I Wanna Be.” Philander said his book would be, “Bad As I Was, I Love My Son.”

Unfortunately or not, he didn’t find a publisher. He never met Dennis, who stonily avoided him, and returned to the Philippines.

It has become that sort of life. . . .

Wild Nights Are Calling

Rodman grew up in Dallas, where his two sisters were prep basketball stars. He was 5-feet-10 when he left high school--he couldn’t make the team--became a janitor at the airport and was fired for stealing watches. He says his mother threw him out of the house. She says she didn’t.

He sprouted to 6-foot-7, played at a local junior college, then Southeastern Oklahoma in Enid, Okla., where he boarded with a white rancher’s family and befriended his benefactor’s teenage son. He won a following on the 1986 pre-draft circuit and went in the second round to the Detroit Pistons.

His boundless energy and unchecked emotions made him a favorite locally, an object of ridicule elsewhere. In 1990-91, the first season he played 30 minutes a game, this unremarkable 6-7, 220-pounder was second in the NBA with 12.5 rebounds a game.

In 1991-92, he led it at 18.7, the best in 19 seasons. Factoring in changes--fewer shots, better shooting, fewer misses--it could be argued it was the greatest rebounding season ever. Wilt Chamberlain’s record 27.2 in 1960-61 represented 36% of his team’s total. Rodman took down 42% of his team’s.

Coach Chuck Daly put him on anyone, from big guards like Magic Johnson to centers like Patrick Ewing. In later years, Rodman even took the 330-pound Shaquille O’Neal.

“Shaq is nothing to Dennis,” said John Salley, a teammate in Detroit and Chicago. “Let me tell you why. Our first year, we went to the All-Star break. I go back to Atlanta. You know, I’m a 22-year-old ladies’ man. He goes to Oklahoma and castrates 300 cattle.

“I say, ‘What do you mean?’

“He says, ‘I hold ‘em down while they castrate ‘em and throw alcohol on ‘em.’ I’m looking at him like, yeah, OK, I’m waiting for the punch line. He was serious as hell. . . .

“So with Shaq--doesn’t have horns--that’s no problem.”

Rodman’s real problem was dealing with who he had become.

He liked attention, all right, but he was painfully shy around the press and anyone he didn’t know.

“Twenty-five, going on 19,” said one press guy, although it might have been more like 15.

He was a loner with a heart. Every Christmas Eve, he’d visit an orphanage or a hospital and it wasn’t one of those team-sponsored-take-a-camera-crew- along exercises.

A conditioning demon, he rode an exercise bike long into the night after games, with weights on his ankles. He never drank.

He had magic legs--he pranced on the floor, as if he was so buoyant, he could barely hold himself down--but he was anything but carefree. He obsessed about injuries. The better he did, the worse it got. Friends said he had one great fear, falling back down from the heights he’d scaled.

He wasn’t someone who could handle bad times and they were coming, as Detroit’s “Bad Boys” won their titles, aged and moved on, among them Rodman’s beloved Daly.

In 1992, Rodman boycotted camp, citing Daly’s exit and his failing marriage to Annie Bakes, a flashy Sacramento model. One night, alarmed friends reported him missing, noting he had a rifle in his pickup. He was found sleeping in the truck in the parking lot at the Palace of Auburn Hills.

After a season of trouble, he forced a trade, but it was a different Rodman who showed up in San Antonio.

He went on gambling binges. Rick Telander of Sports Illustrated, who went along on one, thought Dennis was trying to throw his money away. He was blond, tattooed and pierced all over, a tribute to Annie, who affected the style.

On the floor, he was what the soft Spurs needed. Off it, he was invisible. Players told of the night at a steakhouse when Terry Cummings saw Rodman eating alone, went over and invited him to join Cummings and his family.

Rodman never looked up.

When Jack Haley, who was to become his only friend on the team, introduced himself, Rodman looked right through him. Another time, Haley got on a hotel elevator with Rodman and invited him to dinner. The elevator descended to the lobby and Rodman got out without replying.

Somehow, Haley broke through to Rodman and discovered the Dennis no one knew: sweet, devoted, even clinging.

“He’s a puppy dog,” Haley said. “It’s crazy. When we’re on the road, Dennis spends 90% of the time when we’re in the hotel sitting on the end of my bed.

“I’m like, ‘It’s time to go to sleep.’

“He’s like, ‘Fine, I’m just going to hang here for a while.’ He’s like a piece of Velcro, he’ll attach to you.”

No longer merely a basketball player, Rodman took up with Madonna and became a full-fledged cult figure.

He was suspended three times, the last for hip-checking John Stockton in the first round of the playoffs. The favored Spurs exited in four games.

“We’re in Utah, it’s the final game of the year,” Haley said. “We lose the game. The game ended, Dennis walked into the locker room, grabbed his bag, did not take his uniform off.

“Before the coaches had gotten off the floor, he and Madonna were in a limousine on their way to the airport to go to Las Vegas. Never said goodbye to anyone. Never spoke to the team. Just left.”

The next season was even worse. Rodman made a show of tuning Coach Bob Hill out during the Western Conference finals, finally arguing with him and getting benched as the Spurs came apart again.

Then it was on to new horizons.

Good Guys Hard to Find

At 34, he was a known rebel. However, the Bulls, who’d always insisted on “good people,” needed rebounding and decided to see if they couldn’t unearth a good person in there somewhere.

Rodman stayed at General Manager Jerry Krause’s home and promised to follow the rules. He did for a little while. Then the incidents started again. He head-butted a referee in 1996 and kicked a courtside cameraman in 1997.

The Bulls won three titles, but he turned their reign into a cross-dressing, Mormon-insulting, nude-posing spectacle.

Nor was there any relief from his messy private life, now that it was salable. “Bad as I Wanna Be” rocketed up the charts, followed by another book the next spring. And people he knew, like Annie, seemed to be trying to cash in on the hysteria too, publishing their own versions.

“People should look at the court documents and our divorce papers,” Annie said. “I can’t believe the people of Chicago are falling all over this guy. He pushed me down the stairs when I was pregnant in 1992 and I went on to have a miscarriage. I was going into my fifth month.”

In the finals, Rodman’s escapades almost rivaled Michael Jordan’s heroics.

In 1996, when he was still a big factor, Rodman made a project of antagonizing Seattle’s Frank Brickowski, who noted, “I wish he was as confused about his basketball as his sexuality. We’d be in better shape.”

By last season, Rodman wasn’t the same player and Jackson was coaching around him, starting Toni Kukoc. Rodman would leave the bench to ride an exercise bike in the dressing room. If Jackson wanted to put him in, he had to send the trainer to get him.

Jordan retired, the Bulls broke up and it was on to new horizons. . . .

In the long off-season, Rodman, who had long lamented turning down Madonna’s proposal, married former “Baywatch” actress Carmen Electra in Las Vegas, after a night-long outing at the Hard Rock Casino.

He thought about retiring. His agent, Dwight Manley, even announced it. Then Rodman changed his mind and Manley retired from the case, instead.

Rodman threw out lines to Orlando and Miami. They thought it over and decided, nahhh. . . .

The Lakers came knocking. It took more than two weeks of tortured negotiations, during which time Rodman unseated his International Creative Management agents, meeting Jerry Buss without them, while his sister, Debra, told the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lacy Banks she was now running things.

Rodman then went on ESPN’s “Up Close” and disavowed Banks, his most loyal defender in the Chicago press.

Then came Monday’s news conference at Planet Hollywood, where he appeared with Electra for one of the few times since their marriage, tried his sexual-outlaw shtick, engaged in sharp exchanges with reporters and finally broke down, sobbing about never winning and not being able to get away with the same stuff Jordan did, as XTRA’s supportive Vic Jacobs, who was dressed in the Rodman style with floppy hat and boa, yelled, “One love! One love!”

But here he is.

Whatever happens next, it can’t be a surprise.

Two-thirds of the participants in a Times Web site survey say Dennis Rodman will be good for the Lakers. Give your opinion at https://www.latimes.com/rodman

* RODMAN FINALLY SIGNS. PAGE 6