San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
BLOND DEMOLITION
How Rodman forced his way out of S.A. and into ‘The Last Dance’
The guest of honor was late. This would become a recurring theme.
He also was dressed somewhat inappropriately for the occasion. This too, would soon become familiar.
Nearly 27 years ago, the shortlived Dennis Rodman era began in San Antonio with a shock — of blond hair.
It was Oct. 14, 1993, two weeks after the Spurs had landed the talented but head-scratching Rodman in a trade with Detroit. His first workout with his new team also was scheduled to be Fan Appreciation Day at the newly opened Alamodome.
Rodman, an hour tardy, grabbed a microphone to promise fans he soon would “get things poppin’,” then took off a ball cap to reveal the dyed flaxen coiffure that soon would become his trademark.
“At the time, that kind of thing wasn’t all that common,” recalled Jay Howard, the longtime Spurs radio broadcaster. “It was, ‘Holy cow, what is this?’ ”
It wouldn’t be the last time someone would utter that phrase or something similar during Rodman’s ill-fated two-season stint with the Spurs.
For hard-up NBA fans, the television event of this pandemic spring was “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 10-part series recounting Michael Jordan’s final championship season in Chicago in 1997-98.
A key subplot to that documenta
ry — the arrival of the mercurial Rodman into Jordan’s orbit — would not have been possible had the All-Star forward not so thoroughly napalmed all bridges in San Antonio.
“I actually liked Dennis,” said former Spurs forward Sean Elliott, who was dealt to Detroit in the Rodman deal. “Did I agree with everything he did? No. But he played hard.”
By the time Rodman departed the Alamo City in October 1995, he had become a household name even among nonbasketball watchers. He also left behind a wake of frustrated Spurs coaches, teammates and fans.
‘He simply went nuts’
Elliott’s initial response to the news he had been shipped to Detroit was not positive.
He was 24 years old, had played four seasons with the Spurs, and was coming off his first All-Star campaign.
“I liked it here,” Elliott said. “I thought it was home.”
But the Spurs had hit something of a wall in pursuit of the franchise’s first championship.
With David Robinson’s arrival in 1989-90, the Spurs had emerged as one of the top teams in the Western Conference — during the regular season.
The team could not get past the second round of the playoffs in any of Robinson’s first four seasons. After the Spurs lost to Charles Barkley and the Phoenix Suns in the 1993 conference semifinals, general manager Bob Bass decided the missing ingredient was toughness.
To get it, Bass shipped the popular Elliott to Detroit for Rodman, a gritty defender and two-time NBA champion described by the Los Angeles Times even then as “the NBA leader in rebounds and problems.”
“I didn’t know if it would be the right fit,” Howard said. “He hadn’t dyed his hair yellow yet, but the guy was found in his truck at the Palace with a shotgun. There was something up.”
Indeed, eight months before the trade to San Antonio, Rodman had been discovered in his vehicle in the parking lot of the Palace of Auburn Hills with a loaded rifle.
There had been reports of a suicide note.
Rodman also had been fined twice for insubordination by the Pistons that season, and he drew the club’s ire by taking off his shoes and reading a magazine on the bench after being removed from a game at Washington.
On the court, there was no denying Rodman could help a team in unorthodox ways.
He had averaged better than 18 rebounds per game in each of the previous two seasons, and he had made five NBA All-Defensive teams.
He was an All-Star in 1990 and 1992 despite averaging less than nine points.
“The Spurs made a big deal of the fact that he would help the team with his tenacity,” Howard said. “And there was some truth to the fact the Spurs weren’t the
toughest team on the planet.”
As San Antonio soon learned, the NBA’s most efficient rebounding machine also could become a circus sideshow.
“As the season went on, it became clear Rodman was doing whatever he wanted to do and there was no controlling him,” Howard said. “He simply went nuts.”
Bad or misunderstood?
Rodman came to San Antonio at least promising to try to live right.
“People who work their (butts) off to make $200 a week are going to appreciate some guy making $2 million if he works his (butt) off, too,” Rodman told the Express-News during his first Spurs training camp. “The way I play, the fans can’t help but be behind me.”
Rodman, meanwhile, could not seem to get out of his own way.
When he was on the floor, Rodman played with unbridled energy. He averaged 17.1 rebounds in his two seasons with the Spurs, and almost as many vaults into the crowd after loose balls.
For a certain segment of Spurs fans, Rodman represented exactly what the team needed. He was blue-collar. He was tough. He was nasty. He was unafraid.
Nicknamed “The Worm,”
Rodman seemed to have a supernatural ability to decipher where a rebound was headed and wiggle his way there.
“He brought it every time he was on the court,” said Elliott, who returned to the Spurs in 1994-95 after his one-season sabbatical in Detroit. “You knew he was going to make it hard on whoever he was guarding. He never took a night off.”
Except the many times he did.
Rodman’s tenure in San Antonio became a litany of late arrivals, skipped practices, missed flights, fines and ejections.
At the end of his first season with the Spurs, Rodman missed a playoff practice because he couldn’t get a flight out of Los Angeles in time. He had been in Hollywood taping a television special.
He was ejected from Game 2 of that first-round series against Utah, then served an automatic suspension in Game 3. He watched it from a bar in Salt Lake City with Madonna, who he was dating at the time.
Rodman’s bad boy ways did not exactly mesh with those of Robinson, an outspoken Christian and family man.
“He’s an easy guy to like because he has a good heart,” Robinson said earlier this month on the Chicago-based Bulls Talk podcast. “He wants to play hard. He wants to do the right things.
But man, as far as a team goes, he was so destructive to a team perspective. … There was nothing you could do to make him get out of his comfort zone.”
Rodman was not unaware of his spiritual disconnect with the Spurs’ top star.
“(Robinson) didn’t know what to think of me,” Rodman told USA Today in 2019. “But as long as we were winning and successful, we thought it would blow over. But it never did blow over.”
A rebounding enigma
There is no question Rodman was a complicated soul, with moods to match his ever-changing hair colors.
“He could be quite disarming,” Howard said.
Howard remembers a moment on the team plane when Rodman left the players’ section and plopped down beside him in the back.
Rodman wanted to debate who should be ranked No. 1 in college football.
Howard made an argument for Nebraska or UCLA. Rodman stumped for Michigan.
“He has all his facts right,” Howard said. “He laid it out articulately. He made his case, and then got up and left.”
Another conversation Howard shared with Rodman on the plane was not as innocent.
On one flight to Phoenix,
Howard recalls, he ended up being seated with Rodman by default.
“All the way to Phoenix, he’s telling me about his exploits with Madonna,” Howard said. “I would relate it to being in the seventh grade and talking with your friends at lunch.”
Worse were the times when Rodman simply wouldn’t say anything at all.
“He’s a hard guy to figure out because he’ll come into the locker room and he might not speak for months,” Robinson said on Bulls Talk. “Like literally not say a thing for months. Then he’d say something and you’d be like, ‘Uh, OK. Don’t say anything else.’ It just comes out of left field.”
When Rodman came to San Antonio in the fall of 1993, he moved into the North Side house Elliott vacated upon heading to Detroit.
When Elliott returned a year later to rejoin the Spurs, there were oil stains on the living room carpet. Rodman apparently had been tinkering with his motorcycles there.
The social scene at that address was also different when Rodman was there.
“I’m sure the parties Dennis threw in there were different than Sean handing out candy to trick-or-treaters,” Howard said with a chuckle.
Pop and the Worm
After the Spurs flamed out against the Jazz in the 1994 playoffs, it set in motion a housecleaning that went beyond Elliott’s living room rug.
John Lucas was ousted as coach, replaced by Bob Hill. A former assistant coach named Gregg Popovich returned to the staff as general manager and vice president of basketball operations.
The changes made relations with the team’s erratic forward worse, not better.
On Oct. 6, Rodman missed the bus to Kerrville for the start of Hill’s first training camp. Two weeks later, he was fined $15,000 when he no-showed for a preseason game against Milwaukee.
On Oct. 31, Rodman angrily tossed an ice bag in the direction of his new coach and a referee in the preseason finale against Charlotte. The next day, he was suspended indefinitely.
Rodman did not play his first regular-season game that season until Dec. 12.
When Rodman was elected to the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2011, Popovich was gracious in congratulating the Spurs’ former problem child.
“He’s one of the top rebounders we ever had, and the rest of his game was probably even better than we all thought,” Popovich told the Express-News at the time. “He’s been important to teams winning championships. In that sense, he deserves it.”
In December 1993, however, Popovich had a different perspective of Rodman’s antics.
“A royal pain in the neck,” Popovich called Rodman then.
Rodman’s final Spurs season came to a head in the 1995 playoffs. At 62-20, the Spurs had posted the best record in the
NBA during the regular season. Hopes were high.
In Game 3 of the Spurs’ second-round series against the Los Angeles Lakers, Rodman protested a lack of playing time by lying down at the end of the bench with his head propped on towels.
Hill benched him entirely for Game 4, leading Rodman to complain to the press.
“He’s treating me like a piece of (expletive),” Rodman said.
The Spurs dispatched the Lakers in six games, setting up their first conference finals appearances in 12 years.
The day before a pivotal
Game 5 against Houston, with the series tied 2-2, Rodman was 35 minutes late for practice.
On game day, he showed up even later.
When Houston finally bounced the Spurs in Game 6, Rodman did not fly with the team on the charter flight home. He did not make the final team meeting the next day.
His time with the Spurs was effectively done.
“It was a personality thing,” Elliott recalled. “He wasn’t getting along with Bob Hill. It was only a matter of time.”
On Oct. 3, 1995, Popovich dealt Rodman to the Bulls for journeyman center Will Perdue.
“This is a team sport, and I want to blend the personalities,” Hill said at the time. “The team won with and without Dennis last year, and hopefully the Spurs will now be known as the Spurs.”
All’s well that ends well
The epilogue to Rodman’s bewildering two seasons in San Antonio is now NBA history.
In Chicago, Rodman joined forces with Jordan and Scottie Pippen to restart a Bulls dynasty put on hiatus during Jordan’s season-and-a-half foray into professional baseball.
“Michael was an alpha. He was The Alpha in the league,” Elliott said. “If anybody was going to keep Dennis in check, it would be him.”
Rodman, who arrived in 1993 musing about helping to bring a championship to San Antonio, left two years later glad that he had not.
In Chicago, Rodman not only won more titles but playing next to Jordan, he had the platform he needed to become a rock star.
“I thank my lucky stars,” Rodman told USA Today last year. “Because if I would have won a championship with San Antonio, I still would have been there. I would have never made it to the Chicago Bulls.”
Things eventually worked out for the Spurs as well.
Two years after Rodman’s departure, the Spurs made a senior from Wake Forest named Tim Duncan the NBA’s No. 1 overall draft pick.
The Duncan era brought five NBA championships to San Antonio, only one fewer than Jordan brought Chicago.
“Nobody’s crying here in San Antonio,” Robinson said on
Bulls Talk. “It worked out very well.”