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SLAM! Sports SLAM! Reviews JAM! Books COLUMNS INTERACTIVE ALSO ON SLAM!  [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
Sunday, June 9, 1996
Dennis Rodman shows his true colorsToronto Sun 
Bad As I Wanna Be
By Dennis Rodman with Tim Keown Delacorte Press, 259 pages, $31.95 The trouble with sport today is people mistakenly still think it's for kids, like some kind of Disney attraction that happens to be available most days via cable TV. It isn't. There's far too much money and power at stake, far too much violence, and at times even too much sex, for it to be a plaything of children. This is not an attempt to be glib. Sport, today, is strictly adult entertainment. It lives as much in the pages of business as it does of sports. It needs a disclaimer. And so, therefore, does Dennis Rodman. And so we have Bad as I Wanna Be. Rodman, for those who don't read the sports pages, the business pages, or the supermarket tabloids, is the cross-dressing, rainbow coiffed, rebounding machine who plays basketball in his spare time for the NBA's Chicago Bulls. He has written this book. Or, rather, he has spoken into a tape recorder and let author Tim Keown write one for him. He gets a lot off his chest. Art, it ain't. What it is, however, to quote Toronto Raptors vice-president of basketball Isiah Thomas, Rodman's former teammate, is entertaining. Read it. It'll take you a mere few hours. Big pictures. Big print. You'll learn a lot about him, if in a ham-fisted kind of way. And there, for some, is the rub. The very idea of willfully learning more about Rodman bothers some people. Those may be the same people who roll their eyes every time Rodman changes his hair color, or makes a statement about his sexual preferences. They may even be the same people who think pro sport, like a lot of other things in life, has gone to hell in a hand basket. Here's a news flash: it has. Here's another: Dennis Rodman didn't put it there. He may, however, have been created by it. The popular out when Dennis Rodman is the subject is to dismiss him as "freak," as "sideshow," as "crazy." For some, paying attention to Rodman is akin to admitting they slow down on the highway to watch a gory traffic accident. The thing is, who among us doesn't slow down to look? -- a point, by the way, that Dennis Rodman acknowledged, perfectly, the day he arrived at a signing for his book in Chicago dressed, shall we say, somewhat ambiguously. The public, the media, ate it up. And that drives people crazy. "The league can market the pretty boys," Rodman says, "but who do the people talk about when they're driving home from the arena? Dennis Rodman." Could it be that more than anything, Rodman, and his book, are about yanking chains, about rattling people's cages? About holding up a mirror and giving people the opportunity to glance at themselves, even if it's delivered as awkwardly as it is in Bad as I Wanna Be. You see, sport, like most big business -- and given the $3 billion U.S. the NBA did this season in merchandise sales alone, what do you call the league today, except that? -- is chock full of small and large C conservatives. Players, and most executives, don't speak out much about anything. They fall into line like dutiful soldiers, afraid of doing anything that will make them stand out, and are accepting of a kind of mediocrity in the process. Rare is the businessman, or player (is there a difference, today?) who will do anything that might, globally speaking, cost them, when in fact doing so is richly rewarded precisely because it is rare. Enter Dennis Rodman. Rodman does not conform. He's true -- well, sort of -- to who he is, whoever that is. Moreover, he's going to make a pot full of money from it, from the very public that dismisses him as part of the lunatic fringe. There's something refreshing in that. It couldn't be, could it, that Rodman does and says and lives the very things people, secretly, behind closed doors -- perhaps within different limits -- wish they could, too? Could it be those are the same people who dismiss him simply as crazy? Oh, it's true that Rodman lays it on a little thick. It's true that some of what he says and does is phony, confused, full of contradictions, and true that he often fails to accept responsibility for any of the things that don't turn out the way he'd like. It's probably true he's wired a little differently than the next guy. And so what? Aren't we all? But what's not compelling, universal and human about a pro athlete's reasons, for instance, for sitting in a pickup truck in the parking lot of The Palace in suburban Detroit, contemplating whether or not he should use the rifle lying in his lap to blow his brains out? Likewise, it's difficult not to be interested in Rodman's harsh assessment of his former team, the San Antonio Spurs, and their centre, David Robinson, particularly in the wake of Robinson's, and the Spurs', recent collapse in the playoffs. It's hard not to be captivated by his story of his relationship with Madonna. There's something about all of it, of all that is Dennis the Menace, that has the ring of life, life with a capital L. It may not be pretty. It may be a little premeditated. It may, for some, be out on a confused edge. However, it is entertaining. What it isn't is Disney. Welcome to pro sport in the '90s. Welcome to Dennis Rodman. |