It is worth remembering that less than two years ago, Dennis Rodman was just a fresher brand of NBA head case, a short-fused power forward for the San Antonio Spurs whose coach naively insisted that Rodman play by the same rules as everybody else and ended up getting knocked out of the playoffs largely because of it.
At 78 inches tall, multicolored and seemingly on the verge of psychological implosion, Rodman was a minor curiosity. He was becoming recognized enough that Madonna summoned him for the business meeting/mutual image sniffing/ego-charged dalliance that he has been milking ever since. But he was still a provincial, one whose desperate plays for attention–tattoos and tutti-frutti toppings and genuinely hateful on-court boorishness–took place on a smallish stage before a largely scornful audience.
Then came two factors: Michael Jordan and the most calculated androgyny since David Bowie vamped his way through the mid-1970s.
Through the good luck of Jordan’s championship-bound Chicago Bulls being the outfit most willing to risk taking on Rodman and his psychedelic head, and with the complicity of media that see that the power forward has no clothes and, instead of explaining that, turn it into a sweeps-month “news” series, Rodman is suddenly celebrated, remade into a sort of postmodern Pan.
He slips into a feather boa or wedding gown now and again, lingers too long at the Marshall Field’s makeup counter, gets the national exposure of winning an NBA title, and–shazam!–he is viewable not just in short pants on SportsChannel, where most of the Bulls games are televised, but as a semi-regular co-host of an ostensible sports highlight show on the local NBC affiliate, as a guest star on network sitcoms, as the cheap-and-easy symbol of Chicago for visiting talk-show hosts, and now as the host of a desultory weekly series on America’s teen network, MTV.
A half-page newspaper ad a couple of weeks ago even offered Rodman watches, six different permutations featuring Rodman and a parrot and “warranteed (sic) against defects in parts, workmanship and or movement until midnight, December 21, 2012, which is the predicted date for the end of the world according to the ancient Mayan calendar.”
Now it is Madonna–remember when people thought she mattered?–who may soon be telling anyone who will listen that she once embarked on a biology field trip with Dennis Rodman.
The trouble with all of this is that Rodman the persona–a persona, it should be noted, borrowed from the gay nightclub scene–is more interesting than Rodman the personality. Just as putting him on a team less secure in itself would reveal him to be, still, a disruptive force, putting him on TV reveals him to be all actions, little talk.
Rodman is significant for daring not to be macho in a milieu that has demanded it, but if he has something of note to say about anything other than basketball, the world awaits. In his appearances as occasional co-host of WMAQ-Ch. 5’s “Sports Sunday” wrapup show (10:30 p.m.), and in his new “Rodman World Tour” series (premiering at 9 p.m. Sunday on MTV), he seems to view his role as to alternately insist on how wild he is–through his ennui-inducing veil of ennui–and to try to inject any situation with a dose of junior high school sexual innuendo.
Dennis on Dennis
Rodman, draped over the edge of the bed in a hotel-room interview this week to promote the MTV show, says he sees his TV work as “something that’s entertaining, something that most athletes can’t do.”
As for his explosion of fame, Dennis Rodman says that it occurred because “people realize Dennis Rodman’s not a phony. Dennis Rodman’s not a makeup artist. Dennis Rodman is real. Dennis Rodman is what a lot of people like to be, very independent and very carefree, very ’60s, ’70s, very Woodstock. Walk around with the nature of love on your shoulder, you know.”
Dennis Rodman likes this last phrase so much he repeats it for the benefit of the three-person entourage also in the room. No one asks how being “carefree” jibes with Dennis Rodman’s elaborate world weariness, an air that makes Sartre seem like a pep squadder.
The “Sports Sunday” show, in particular, has devolved from a highlight show into a particularly randy church service for the Cult of Dennis. For Rodman’s three appearances during November sweeps (he is scheduled to return to the show after football season, but may do so sooner), it was broadcast live from Chicago’s Planet Hollywood, another dubious marketing phenomenon.
Dennis comes out wearing a nurse’s uniform and the crowd hoots and hollers as if it were still novel for Rodman–or, indeed, any man after Milton Berle–to wear a dress. Dennis tells a self-described sports widow to “after the game is over, jump his bones, darlin’,” and the crowd whoops as if it had just heard Dorothy Parker reincarnate. Dennis walks around pushing his stethoscope into women’s breasts–he’s a medical professional checking their hearts, don’t you know–and the crowd cheers for what would get one of these women’s co-workers a black eye, a pink slip and a visit from flashing blue lights.
In this atmosphere, even those who know better descend to sub-belt level. Jerry from Gurnee, coach of his preteen daughter’s basketball team, asks Rodman how to teach the girls teamwork. Rodman’s response–host a slumber party for them dressed as a maid–is creepy enough. But then the man is inspired to play Beavis to the power forward’s Butt-head. Jerry says, snickering suggestively, “That sounds like jail time; these are 7th graders.”
Even Channel 5 sports anchor Jon Kelley, the host of the show who normally alternates between unctuously buttering Rodman up and stepping in just a little too late to tone him down, can’t resist making NC-17 comments. During the nursing show, Kelley tells Rodman (and Chicagoland) that the rebounder’s knees look “actually kind of scabby there, but we won’t get into that.”
Oops. Just did.
Remember: This is not cable. Rodman has also this fall said the F-word on air and shared his nickname for a personal part.
The mystery is that people seem to be eating this up. During November sweeps “Sports Sunday” averaged more than 1 1/2 times the ratings of its less outre rivals, including WBBM-Ch. 2’s show featuring Bears coach Dave Wannstedt, who you get the feeling would rather wear a hungry boa constrictor than a feather boa.
But it is interesting only in the way that standing at a dangerous on-ramp is interesting: What, you wonder, will the wreck look like this time? That someone else is willing to follow the Howard Stern Outrageousness Path, and that not everybody seems to have tired of the act yet, in no way makes it good television.
Lost amid the crudities is that when Rodman moves his conversation from the locker room to the playing surface, he’s actually revealing, an athlete like Charles Barkley who missed the sessions in group-speak and cliche-spout.
Rodman talks of the Bulls being bored during games, dismisses the Vancouver Grizzlies as a “high school team,” acknowledges the NBA hierarchy by pointing out, in response to one highlight, that teammate Scottie Pippen got away with an obvious travel because “we’re the Bulls.”
Each of these statements has the air of unvarnished truth, and none would be made by another player except, perhaps, Barkley.
But the 13-episode “Rodman World Tour” show, mostly filmed over the summer as Rodman was turning his newfound fame into cash, is set up without the mooring of sports.
Meanwhile, on MTV
The idea of “Rodman World Tour,” to gather from two preview episodes MTV sent out, is a variation on the music-video network’s sagging “The Real World” series. Rodman is inserted alongside various celebrities, activities are embarked upon (tennis with Jon Lovitz; a poolside poker party with Kelsey Grammer, Laura Leighton and a guy from Foo Fighters), and the tape is edited to leave the saucy bits in.
Afterward, as in “Real World,” participants are debriefed one-on-one so they can describe how they felt when, for instance, Rodman asked “Melrose Place’s” Leighton if she was wearing a bra and how her sex life was. “Uncomfortable,” is the response of Pat Smear, from Foo Fighters.
There is some edge to the half-hour, as when Rodman, violating the celebrity code, refers to the substance-troubled Grammer as “Betty Ford.”
The producers even reveal an ambivalent attitude toward their star, letting it be clear that Rodman thinks about little besides Rodman and sex, and letting Smear’s comments point out that Rodman was not the perfect host.
But the poker party looks like an absolute bummer, four people with nothing in common at the outset discovering that they still have nothing in common, except names big enough to get them on TV.
You wonder if the people behind the show really believe it when they let Rodman sum up with: “When you’re hangin’ with Dennis Rodman, you do the freakiest things.”
If you consider freaky to be Kelsey Grammer with his shirt off in a hot tub, then he’s got a point. Otherwise, it was tamer than a Siegfried & Roy tiger.
Give him credit
This is not to take away from the real accomplishments of Rodman. On court, he can be, in the moments he’s not demonstrating how tedious he finds the games that earn him $77,000 each, an awesome force, a rebounder whose dogged energy can break an opponent’s spirit.
Somewhere, too, beneath all the reflexive innuendo and self inflation, a sense of a shy, kind of sweet guy wafts through, like a bachelor librarian caught peeping through the curtains at a porno theater. This hint of sweetness is probably what convinces so many people to forgive Rodman so many trespasses.
And off court, he is an important symbol, if an ambiguous one, the first male athlete to gain fame for his willingness to break professional sports’ macho code. Anybody who thinks this is not a valuable contribution should review the violence-laden rap sheets that now go hand in hand with big-time college athletics.
It is not so much the dress or the nail polish the kids are responding to as the thumb in the eye to convention they represent, of course. And Rodman has it right when he says in the interview that kids see him as a “very real animated cartoon.”
But the idea that the nation’s cul-de-sacs are populated by prepubescent boys who now idolize, for whatever reasons, a sometime drag queen is both amusing and a relief to those who believe we ought to get going on that testosterone temperance plan.
And if Rodman–who has said he fantasizes about having sex with a man and who says in the interview that if he were gay he would be gay and proud–does anything to increase our meager societal tolerance of homosexuals, then there, too, he is performing a valuable service.
But he jeopardizes these accomplishments when he staggers across the TV screen like a sniggering adolescent in hormonal overdrive.
He says he sees television as his post-basketball life, but if these early outings are any indication, then the watch is ticking hard and fast on the phenomenon of Dennis Rodman, TV star. It doesn’t take an ancient Mayan to foresee the end of this world.
