ROM a purely statistical perspective, Dennis Rodman is a six-foot-eight-inch, thirty-five-year-old Chicago Bulls forward who averaged an N.B.A.-leading 14.9, 16.8, and 17.3 rebounds per game during his past three seasons. But rebounding prowess isn't what made Rodman a star beyond the basketball court. Rodman is a celebrity to people who don't know basketball from bowling because he lives like a rock star: he colors his hair, throws his clothing to the crowd, hangs out with other rock stars, and generally treats the world, including the basketball court, as a stage.Short and scrawny as a kid, Rodman grew up stone-broke in the Dallas projects. He was raised by his mother, Shirley, who had left her children's father, Philander, when he more than lived up to his name. Although Rodman's two younger sisters were basketball stars in high school, Rodman exhibited neither a talent nor an appropriate build for the game. He plodded his way through school and graduated into a series of dead-end jobs, one of which was as a janitor at the Dallas airport. On a dare, Rodman swiped fifteen watches from a closed airport gift shop, got busted, and ended up spending the night in jail. While he dodged prosecution for the theft, he lost his job and, when his mother kicked him out, his home as well.During Rodman's twentieth year, some powerful growth hormones kicked in and lengthened his formerly puny stature by an amazing eleven inches in a single year. Suddenly endowed with basketball-player proportions, Rodman enrolled at Cooke County Junior College in Texas and later won an athletic scholarship to Southeastern Oklahoma State. He excelled on the basketball court, and, in 1986, the Detroit Pistons snapped him up as a second-round N.B.A. draft pick. Rodman found a father figure in coach Chuck Daly, and, by his second season as a professional player, he had become a key contributor to the Pistons' winning streak. The team scored back-to-back N.B.A. championships in 1988 and 1989, with Rodman drawing both Defensive Player of the Year honors and a slot on the All-Star Team in 1989. In 1993, Rodman was traded to the San Antonio Spurs; he boosted that team's success rate, but never really got along with the other players or the Spurs management, and, in 1995, he joined the Chicago Bulls. The daunting triumvirate of Michael Jordan , Scottie Pippin, and Rodman formed the core of what may have been the greatest basketball team of all time; they won an unprecedented seventy-two games during the regular season, and went on to win the N.B.A. championship. Engulfed by the inevitable tide of voracious women who tail professional athletes, Rodman escaped into a marriage with model Annie Banks in 1993. Though their union lasted a scant three months (eighty-two days, to be exact), it nonetheless produced two indelible mementos: a daughter named Alexis and Rodman's first tattoos, in honor of his wife and child. After an expensive divorce, Rodman was free to date (briefly) fellow media-whore Madonna and to expand on his theme of extravagant body modification with the addition of tons of tats, dyed 'dos, and pierced parts. He grew increasingly outrageous in appearance and brazen in his statements to the press, eliciting reactions ranging from cheers of adulation to uncomfortable snickers to anti-gay vandalism of his truck. Dennis Rodman had become impossible to ignore.This new breed of sports star then began an invasion of various non-athletic channels of expression: Rodman became a favorite guest on late-night talk shows; he wrote a raucous, raunchy autobiography entitled Bad As I Wanna Be (1996) that shot to the top of the best-seller list; and he made his feature-film debut opposite Whoopi Goldberg in 1996's Eddie . Rodman recently signed a deal with MTV to develop a weekly television show set to debut in the fall of 1996. He will also co-star in Jean-Claude Van Damme 's next action flick for the princely sum of $2 million.
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