Unwrapping Rodman
The writer behind "Bad As I Wanna Be" talks about the many masks of the Chicago Bulls' strange superstar
By KEVIN BERGER
Dennis Rodman is a brilliant contradiction. He is a basketball star who doesn't score a lot of points, a black man who loves pasty white grunge rock, a virile heterosexual who identifies with RuPaul.His media image, glittering like fireworks in the trail of his number-one selling autobiography, "Bad As I Wanna Be," and the Bulls' imminent coronation as NBA champs, is also one of compelling contrasts. Here is an athlete from a housing project in Dallas -- clamorously supported by blue-collar basketball fans in Chicago -- who is the subject of not one but two trenchant essays in The New Yorker: the first by novelist John Edgar Wideman, the second by first-string staffer David Remnick.
Wideman and Remnick both praise Rodman for his subversion of the status quo. Through Wideman's Shakespearean lens, Rodman is a hyperreal, mutant Caliban who overturns the calculated, Prospero-like reign of professional sports and "reminds us that the games we play are only games. The Santa game. The gender game. The race game." Remnick, playing the literary critic, extols "Bad As I Wanna Be" for breaking out of the pack of sports hagiography and "getting in our collective face with an absolute, and desperate, authenticity."
Such authenticity is depressingly rare in the increasingly corporate world of professional sports. Rodman is fascinating to the media and fans because he is one of the few athletes who is neither a surly egomaniac nor a plastic entity sculpted to a Steve Garvey sheen by professional marketers.
But just who is Dennis Rodman? If anyone knows the answer to that question, it would seem to be Tim Keown, the San Francisco Chronicle sports feature writer who was chosen by Rodman to take down his life story -- and who actually wrote every word of "Bad As I Wanna Be." For Keown, whose previous book, "Skyline" (1994), was an account of a season in the life of an Oakland high school basketball team, the job was, naturally, financially attractive -- but the journalist in him was also excited.
"Dennis is one of the few guys in sports that I have real questions about," says Keown. "I wanted to find out how he had gone from being a twenty-year-old janitor with no basketball background to an international phenomenon. He is so much different from average NBA players, the guys who have been annointed as stars from the time they were in high school. None of them have lived like Dennis. Remnick touched on that when he said that Michael Jordan would never criticize the entertainment at NBA games because he's part of the corporation. Dennis is not part of the corporation. He's out there on his own wavelength."
Keown was given just two and a half months to tape record, transcribe and structure Rodman's reflections into an autobiography. He lived for a week with Rodman and his manager in Orange County.
"I had visions of sitting down for three hours at a time and talking about things," says Keown. "But it didn't take long for me to realize that Dennis didn't operate that way. Fortunately, he liked to drive, and so we were always going to L.A. and to these warehouse clubs full of Pearl Jam wannabes in Newport Beach, which were about an hour away. So the most productive time I had with him, the time I did the most interviews, was in the car."
Did Keown discover anything about Rodman not revealed in the autobiography? "Not really," he says. "I go on these radio shows and they all want me to play Freud. But I can't psychoanalyze Dennis. I didn't spend enough time with him to judge all his moods and their swings. Although we did just hang out, it was still sort of a business relationship.
"I did like him," Keown adds. "I never had a problem with him at all. He was very generous and friendly. He went out of his way to take me places and he paid for everything."
"He really is what the public sees. Before I met him, I used to take him too seriously. I used to look for signs of cultural decay in what he does. But now I find it funny when people take him so seriously."
At times, though, in the glare of the media, Rodman does seem to be acting like a clown to keep up his outcast image. "Yeah, part of what he's giving people is a mask," says Keown. "He even admits it. But it's not as if he's hiding who he really is. There's real pain in his background. I mean, here's a guy who had all this national renown and is sitting in his truck with a gun in his hand, thinking of killing himself, because he felt he had failed at everything."
Keown admits that he's getting a little parched under the media spotlight that has accompanied "Bad As I Wanna Be." "With 'Skyline,' " he says, "I wrote a book that I was really proud of that nobody's ever heard of, and I've written this one, which I can't get away from." But that doesn't mean he isn't proud that "Bad As I Wanna Be" captures its subject, weird warts and all.
"Bad As I Wanna Be" doesn't gloss over the outrageous elements in Rodman's life -- the groupies, the drinking, the wild partying, the gay club scene. Keown acknowledges that in today's leave-no-stone-unturned media climate, it's hard not to delve into matters once deemed private. "Today, you could not write a book like Mickey Mantle's autobiography, which skirted all his drinking and womanizing," Keown says. "If I had written a book like that about Dennis it would have been rightly branded a fraud. There's just so much more exposure now with radio and TV. We all know that Darryl Strawberry failed drug tests and drank too much and got in trouble with the law. We all know there were times when Kevin Mitchell didn't play, due to what I might obliquely call an entertainment-related injury."
Keown takes credit for giving the book its dramatic structure, but he admits that it's Rodman himself who lifts "Bad As I Wanna Be" above the post-Watergate slew of books that reveal every last sordid detail of a subject's life. "Dennis isn't all sweetness and light," says Keown. "But the fact that he admits it is endearing."
As for those still searching for the "real" Dennis Rodman, perhaps they should consider The Worm's advice to his fans. "Don't be like me," he warns, "because I don't even know who I am."
Kevin Berger is a San Francisco journalist.
How have Dennis Rodman and Michael Jordan transcended negritude? Read Joe Gioia's provocative essay, "Air and The Worm."