He is the man who made Dennis Rodman Dennis Rodman.
He turned Brian Williams into a multimillionaire.
He got an opportunity for Vernon Maxwell, apparently banished from the NBA, to salvage a once-promising career.
Super agent? He looks more like a chemistry major or an accountant than a fast-talking, always-scheming “Jerry McGuire” type.
Rodman considers him a friend. So does Williams. Maxwell calls him a savior.
And how does Dwight Manley, who represents Rodman, Williams and Maxwell, describe himself?
“I’m just a regular person who likes to help people help themselves,” he says matter-of-factly.
This is why, in two years, the 31-year-old Manley’s stable has grown from one potentially risky client, Rodman–who was badly in need of image rehabilitation when Manley met him at a Las Vegas craps table almost three years ago–to quite an assemblage of characters.
There’s Williams, known around the league as a flake during his stints with Orlando, Denver and the Clippers before Manley hooked him up with the Bulls late last season and helped change the course of his career. Williams signed a seven-year deal worth $45 million with the Detroit Pistons.
There’s Maxwell, who helped lead the Houston Rockets to an NBA title in 1994 but found himself blackballed from the league after a series of incidents, the most serious an attack on a fan in Portland.
Manley is trying to perform a similar career resurrection for Rumeal Robinson, who has kicked around the league with a half-dozen teams since he was Atlanta’s No. 1 draft pick out of Michigan in 1990.
And lest you think Manley’s practice is limited to wayward NBA stars, he also has Toronto’s Doug Christie, a reasonably stable sort; 31-year-old boxer Ricardo Lopez; and the Anaheim Angels’ Jim Edmonds.
Christie tells a story.
Last year he was having dinner with Williams and Manley. Just talking. Something struck Christie.
“When I met him the first time, he didn’t seem like an agent,” Christie says. “He seemed like Brian’s friend. It was like his friend was sitting there having dinner.”
So when Christie disassociated himself from his agent, Brad Marshall, earlier this month after a huge public-relations gaffe in which Marshall urged Christie to demand a trade in the wake of a slew of team changes in February, Christie called Manley.
“After the thing I went through,” Christie says, “my wife and I met him again. He came down and talked to us. Once he did that I said, `This is the guy for us.’ He just has a certain level of respect and consistency of service.”
Manley, a coin collector by trade, explains his relationship with his clients simply.
“It’s a calculated risk,” he says. “It’s like being the house in Las Vegas. You know you have a winning product and you know you’re going to win. You just want to build your casino in the right place. That’s what we did with Vernon.”
Calculated or not, Maxwell was a huge risk.
No one ever questioned the 6-foot-4-inch guard’s talent. Maxwell can score, he can defend. Michael Jordan, in fact, calls Maxwell one of the league’s best defenders–he wanted him to join the Bulls this season, which began with Maxwell out of a job and facing possible jail time for failing to comply with the terms of his probation for a Texas marijuana conviction.
The word around the league was that “Mad Max” was more trouble than he was worth. Close to broke, Maxwell met Manley.
“I went out (to Los Angeles) and spoke to him first,” Maxwell recalls. “I guess we were interviewing each other at the same time. I was telling him what I was looking for–basically, a guy to turn my image from negative to positive. That’s all I really wanted and he was like, `That’s what my business is all about.’ “
It wasn’t easy. Manley and Maxwell literally knocked on doors. Manley, while helping support Maxwell financially, tried to convince teams that Maxwell was worth the risk, that the baggage he had accumulated over the years had been left behind. Nobody–including the Bulls–wanted to take a chance.
Finally, Manley convinced the Orlando Magic, with Penny Hardaway hurting, to agree to a “no-strings-attached,” 10-day contract.
“I wanted a 10-day because I wanted to make sure both sides were 100 percent satisfied with each other before a marriage even took place,” Manley explains. “Unlike Brian (Williams), who while he was with the Bulls was trying to show off his skills, Vernon was looking for a place he could stay the rest of his career. That was our goal.”
Though things didn’t work out in Orlando, Maxwell was able to parlay his tryout into a contract with the Charlotte Hornets. He is signed for the rest of the season and is one of the reasons the Hornets are now one of the hottest teams in the league. He’s averaging 7.4 points in 16.3 minutes per game off the bench.
“For the first time in three years,” Manley says, “he isn’t thinking about anything but playing basketball. For the first time, somebody is doing the other things for him so he doesn’t have to worry about anything.”
Neither does Williams, who turned his brief stint with the Bulls into an NBA championship, which led to his lucrative deal with Detroit. Williams credits Manley, who saw to it that he signed with a team that afforded him maximum exposure. It didn’t hurt that Manley, through Rodman, had a good working relationship with Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause and coach Phil Jackson.
“Obviously, there wasn’t a whole lot of downside for the Bulls,” Williams says. “It was a huge downside for me if anything less happened than what actually happened. The biggest thing was Dwight having such a good relationship in Chicago, being a spin doctor a lot for Dennis. I could have gone other places–it wasn’t like his relationship with the Bulls was the only reason I went to Chicago. But it sure smoothed things out.”
