| In today’s FOX Sports Insider: “The Last Dance” turns its spotlight to Dennis Rodman, to all of our excitement … a Super Bowl champion takes to the front lines in the battle against COVID-19 … and the city of Durham is about to get a billboard it definitely does not want. We don’t have athletes like Dennis Rodman in professional sports these days — but, if truth be told, we never did. There were never a bunch of athletes “like” Rodman. The wild, weird, wonderfully non-conformist and eternally entertaining outlier of the Chicago Bulls’ final surge towards immortality wasn’t the leader of a generation of over-the-top stars who did, said and wore what they liked. He was just Rodman. One man on an island, maker of his own reality; one filled with enough imagination, craziness and yes, booze, to form the ultimate reality show before those even became a thing. “The Last Dance” docuseries would have been woefully incomplete without a proper treatment being given to Rodman, and thankfully it came early, with the first part of Sunday’s doubleheader revolving heavily around the chameleon-haired rebounding warrior and the way he made a team stacked with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen even better. A confession here: if there is one athlete that makes me wish my career had happened a decade earlier, it is Rodman. I’d have loved to watch Pele play soccer or Muhammad Ali box live, but there are grainy old videos on YouTube to give a passing imitation of what that must have been like. As a journalist, it is about more than just seeing the greats play. The opportunity to observe Rodman at close quarters, to try to figure out what may be an impossible question — what makes this guy tick? — would have been something close to reporting nirvana for me. For Rodman is the ultimate paradox. A quiet and reserved man who clad himself in wedding dresses, wigs, full make-up and outrageous clothing. A shy character who blew off steam with parties for the ages. A guy who left his team to go wild in Las Vegas but who cared so much about winning to throw his body into nightly warfare. A lone wolf who couldn’t be tamed yet somehow fit into the dynamic of perhaps the greatest team in American sports history. By the time he retired, I was just starting to finish journalism school. By the time I arrived in the United States in 2007, he’d even finished his global trot around various minor leagues in Mexico, the Philippines, England and Finland. There is a lot of corporate speak in sports now, just as there was back then. It is far safer, and perhaps smarter, for players to toe the line and talk in clichés, either skirting around their true feelings or burying them. Not Rodman, who shot from the lip when he felt like it with unabashed bluntness and cared nothing for conformity. You never knew what he was going to do next. For any coach except Phil Jackson, such unpredictability could be a nightmare. For a writer … a treasure trove. I told Rodman this once, briefly and opportunistically. Three years ago, a friend was celebrating graduation from medical school and had rented a house in Newport Beach, California. Late into the night, our group were finishing up at a little drinking spot on the Newport peninsula when a tall figure ambled in and pulled up a corner seat by the bar. There was no grand entrance and zero entourage. Rodman had already hit his mid-50s, after all. The regulars are used to him there. Everyone leaves him be. The action was going on elsewhere. A wealthy middle-aged businessman was urging his much younger girlfriend to chat up other women to join them in, er, conversation. A tray of shots was being passed around. A loud but generally good-natured argument about something or other was taking place in the corner. The pool tables were seeing some action. Rodman sat quietly, taking it in, sipping his drink. As our group made to leave, I told him what I’ve just written here. That I’d have loved to write about him. That I respected his approach and realness. That I could write until I’m 90 and still not cover anyone like him. He was softly spoken and warm spirited. He said he appreciated the sentiment and muttered something about “just being me.” He asked what our group’s celebration was for. He wore a cap from that bar — the Class of ’47 — for his interview for The Last Dance. It is a cozy place, close to the ferry terminal linking the peninsula to Balboa Island, one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. The bar is beloved by locals and unchanged for years. It is not a dive, but it isn’t remotely fancy and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is a bit of a contradiction, an unassuming and understated drinking hole amid a sea of extreme wealth, boats and sports cars and beachside McMansions. It’s not what you’d expect. You can see why Rodman likes it. The Last Dance will inevitably spark a wave of fresh nostalgia for 1990s basketball and the way things were. Those Bulls were a phenomenon that we may never see the likes of again, athletically and culturally. Jordan made them great, Pippen made them tick, Jackson made them a step ahead, always. And Rodman, because he’s Rodman, made them unique. Here’s what others have said … Jason Hehir, director of “The Last Dance”: “Interviewing Dennis Rodman is like interviewing a feral cat. He’s not looking in the same place, he’s got those big shades on. Every other sentence was coming back to Kim-Jong Un and how he’s going to be in the history books. I’m like, ‘No. We’re talking about the Pistons. No Korea! No! Stay with me.’ We chased him for months and months and months. He shows up two hours late, he gets out of the car, he walks over, I felt like a ghost, he walks right past me, looks like he just woke up. He says, ‘What’s this for again?’ I say, ‘It’s a 10-hour doc about your Bulls team.’ ‘He’s like, ‘10 hours, huh? All right. I’ll give you 10 minutes.’ So he sits down, I’m just shooting the (expletive) with him, and he says, ‘I need a tuna sub from Subway and some chamomile tea.’ It was like Chapelle sending the guys for a sugar cookie. ‘Unless you pass this test, you cannot do this interview.’” Chris Broussard, FOX Sports: “We see guys who are geniuses at different parts of the game. Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant — they are geniuses at scoring the ball. Stephen Curry, Reggie Miller — they are geniuses at moving without the basketball. Magic Johnson, LeBron James — they are geniuses at seeing the whole court, passing the ball, and getting everybody involved. There are certain guys who are geniuses at certain aspects of this game, and Dennis Rodman was a rebounding genius, period. I didn’t say phenomenal rebounder. I didn’t say elite rebounder. I said, ‘genius.’” Monte Poole, NBC Sports Bay Area: “[Chris] Mullin recalls the night in the early 1990s, when he was with the Warriors and Rodman was with the Spurs, that resulted in a brief but memorable car ride. Hanging around the home locker room at the Oakland Arena, Rodman asked Mullin if he could hitch a ride to the team hotel, the Oakland Airport Hilton. No problem, according to Mullin, who lived in Alameda at the time. One more thing. Rodman wondered if it was okay for a couple of his ‘buddies’ to ride along. ‘I had young kids then, so I had to move a couple car seats,’ Mullin recalls. ‘No big deal. So, all these little white guys pile into my car. I’m like, whatever. It’s a five-minute ride. I was going to Alameda, so it was a short ride. Later, on, I find out it was Pearl Jam. At the time, they were called Mookie Blaylock. It was that group. They were (Rodman’s) boys back then.’” |
