By Dennis Rodman with Tim Keown
Chapter One: New and Improved
One Night, One Gun, One Decision
On an April night in 1993 I sat in the cab of my pickup truck with a rifle in my lap, deciding whether to kill myself. I was in the parking lot of The Palace of Auburn Hills, the site of many of my greatest moments as a professional basketball player for the Detroit Pistons. As I sat in the truck, looking out over the endless asphalt and the huge empty building, I discovered I was ready to check out of this life if it meant I could keep from being the man I was becoming.
I had two championship rings and was on my way to my second straight rebounding title. I had played in two All-Star Games and was the NBA Defensive Player of the Year twice. I was wildly popular in Detroit, the blue-collar workingman in a blue-collar workingman's town. I was the guy on the front line, taking the bullets for the troops, clearing the way for everyone else to get the glory. It was a role I loved, and a role the people loved to see me play.
I had all the material things everybody wants: a big house, a Ferrari, name recognition. I was a huge success story, a made-for-TV special in the living flesh. I had risen above a tough childhood, poor education, trouble with the law, and a stretch of homelessness. I was a black kid from the Oak Cliff project in Dallas who had been shown another side of life during college by a white Oklahoma farm family. My story read like fiction.
From the outside I had everything I could want. From the inside I had nothing but an empty soul and a gun in my lap.
Earlier that night I wrote a note to a friend of mine, Sheldon Steele, explaining how I was feeling at the time. I drove over to his house late that night, dropped off the note, and drove to the arena.
I don't remember exactly what the note said, but I was letting him know I wasn't sure I could continue on my current path. The note was personal, but it wasn't meant to be a suicide note. Later, it was reported to be one, but that wasn't my plan when I sat down and put the pen on the paper.
The rest of that night is crystal clear in my mind, and will be forever.
It wasn't unusual for me to drive out to the arena on nights when we didn't have a game. The arena is out in the middle of nowhere, with this huge parking lot that seems to go on forever. I would sometimes drive out there late at night or early in the morning and do some target shooting. Other times I went out there to work out in the Pistons' weight room.
I don't live my life by anybody else's clock. If I feel like doing something, I don't care what time it is. I just do it. Unless I absolutely have to be somewhere, time isn't a big factor for me. I don't wear a watch, I don't worry about what time it is and I don't like to waste time sleeping. I know night and day, and that's about it. It was late when I left Sheldon's house, probably two or three in the morning, and I decided to go drive out to The Palace and get in a workout. I thought I could work some of the anxiety and pain out of my body by throwing some weights around and cranking Pearl Jam.
This happened near the end of my seventh and last season with the Pistons, and the team was going downhill fast. We ended up sixth in our division that season, with a 40-42 record, and we didn't even make the playoffs. That's pathetic when you consider we were world champions just three years before that. Our great team was being taken apart, piece by piece, and I felt like my life was being taken apart right with it.
There was nobody around when I got to the arena and let myself in. I worked out hard. I was working my body to the bone, lifting and listening to Pearl Jam. There was nobody else around, just me and the weights and the music. The place was like a fucking tomb. I tried to take those weights and throw everything at them, all the pain and sorrow that was running through my body.
When I listen to Pearl Jam, the music releases everything that's bound up inside me. It's hard for me to explain, but their music is so real, it makes me think about everything in my life. At that point I didn't need much encouragement. I was thinking enough already.
I was thinking a lot about how fucked up my life was, how much bullshit I was going through at the time, and WONDERING HOW MUCH MORE I COULD TAKE. I must have worked out for two hours before I closed the place, completely exhausted, and went back to the truck.
As I was walking out I thought, Fuck it. The gun's in the truck. It was that simple. The whole time I was thinking that I shouldn't be doing this. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be an NBA player. This is all some fantasy world that I have no right to live in. I was just a kid from the projects who was always too skinny or too funny looking to be taken seriously. I was the kid they called the "Worm" because of the way I wiggled when I played pinball. Me, living this life, with women and money and attention everywhere? It didn't seem real.
The rifle was in the truck, under the seat. I turned Pearl Jam on the stereo and reached under the seat and grabbed the gun, wondering if I could do it. I knew right then I could; I could take that rifle and blow my fucking head off. There was that much pain. The life that might have looked so good from the outside was caving in on itself because I couldn't continue to be the person everyone wanted me to be.
I couldn't be what society wanted an athlete to be. I couldn't be the good soldier and the happy teammate and the good man off the court. I tried, and I failed. I tried marriage for the good of my child and had it blow up in my face. I tried to be loyal to my team and my teammates and had that explode when the organization began to tear the team apart. I tried to do all those things, all the right things, and I got nothing but pain and suffering in return.
Everyone was gone. My teammates were gone. My child was gone. My coach was gone. I was alone, bro, all alone. I was out there, exposed and hurt. It would seem to have been the lowest point in my life, but it didn't really feel that way. It felt to me like a standstill point. I felt stuck, paralyzed. I knew I could get the fame and the money, but how do you learn to deal with all the bullshit that comes with it? They don't teach you that part of it. You have to find it out for yourself, and that's what I was trying to do.
A lot of people say they wish they were dead, but how many of them really believe it? How many of them are really willing to act on it? Most of the time people are looking for pity or sympathy. I wasn't into that. I wouldn't have been sitting in the middle of a huge, empty parking lot at three in the morning if I was looking for attention. That was the last place I was going to get any attention.
I didn't want anybody else around. This was a battle with myself. Nobody else mattered. I just kept thinking, This isn't me. This isn't Dennis Rodman. You're looking at somebody who's living somebody else's life. I was sitting there wishing I could go to sleep and wake up in Dallas, back home--a normal, grind-it-out, nine-to-five guy, just like I was before any of this lightning struck in my life. I was burning a big hole in my soul, and for what? I had everything I wanted, but I was trying to be somebody I wasn't.
The life I was leading had changed me into somebody I didn't even know.
As I sat there, I thought about my whole life, and how I was ready to cash it all in. Just pull the trigger, bro, and give it to somebody else. Pass on all those problems. There was some real pain there. I didn't know who I was or where I was going, and nobody seemed to understand that but me.
I thought about my father--the aptly named Philander Rodman--who left us when I was three years old and never came back. My mother says I used to walk around the house after he left, asking when Daddy was coming home. She knew the answer--never--but she always tried to keep me from being hurt by that truth.
I thought about my mother, Shirley, who raised me and my two younger sisters all by herself in the Oak Cliff projects in Dallas. There were times when we were hungry, many times, but she worked two and sometimes three jobs to keep us going.
I thought of a girl from Dallas named Lorita Westbrook, one of sisters' friends, who convinced me to try out for the basketball team at Cooke County Junior College. I was twenty-one years old, working a part-time job cleaning cars at an Oldsmobile dealership. Six months earlier I'd been fired form my job as a graveyard-shift janitor at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport for stealing fifty watches from an airport gift shop.
But things were happening to me. Strange things. Things that don't happen to anybody else. I had just grown an incredible amount--nine inches in the two years since I'd graduated from high school--but I still didn't think of myself as a basketball player.
I went from five foot eleven to six foot eight, and the more ball I played, the more I caught on to the game. I never had such confidence in anything before in my life--not schoolwork, not girls, not any other sport. All of a sudden I could do things on the basketball court that I'd never dreamed of doing. My sisters were always the ones with the basketball talent: Debra was an all-American at Louisiana Tech, Kim was an all-American at Stephen F. Austin. I was the runt of the family, living in their shadows, following them around until my hormones went crazy. It was like I had a new body that knew how to do all this shit the old one didn't.
There was a lot of pain and suffering in my childhood, but when I lay down in bed at night in that Oak Cliff project, I always had the same thought: There's something big waiting out there for DENNIS RODMAN. This wasn't logical thinking. I was a goofy kid who was so shy, I sometimes hid behind my mom in the grocery store. It didn't seem that anything major would ever happen to me, but I didn't think I was just kidding myself. I didn't think it was foolish kid stuff. I put reason aside and honestly believed I would be famous someday.
But I never thought of basketball as an outlet for me until I started growing and Lorita Westbrook saw me play and arranged that tryout at that little school in Gainesville, Texas, about an hour's drive from the projects.
Something made me go to that tryout. Maybe it had to do with those childhood dreams, but something pulled me to that school. For some reason I believed her. I guess somewhere inside me there was a part of me that believed in myself. I took it from there, with a few bumps in between, and made myself into an NBA player. I can honestly say I never had anything handed to me on my way to the NBA. I came out of nowhere, like I do when I fly in for a rebound. Nobody made me; I made myself.
But as I sat in the pickup, my confidence was gone. I wasn't sure of anything anymore. I was a guy with a gun in an empty parking lot. I thought a lot about how I got where I was, and how I wouldn't care if I had to go back. I wanted to be normal. The NBA life of adulation, money, and women was wearing me down. At that point I could have done without fame and money. As I sat in that pickup, I honestly thought I would have been happier back at that fucking airport, pushing a broom for $6.50 an hour.
I had a beautiful daughter who was four years old at the time--a daughter I rarely saw because of the nasty shit that followed my divorce from my ex-wife, Annie. The marriage was a mistake in the first place; it lasted only eighty-two days and created a lot,of pain and suffering that I still feel. I got burned, in a bad way.
Basketball was always my release from those problems. We won the NBA Finals two years in a row with the Pistons, and we were still a pretty young team after our second title. We were the "Bad Boys" and we lived up to our name. Some guts were getting older, but the core - Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer, John Sally, me - were still young enough to have a few good years together. I thought we were set for a while - I thought I could stay there my whole career, really - but that went away, too. First, Rick Mahorn left. Then Vinnie Johnson and James Edwards and Salley. Laimbeer wasn't playing very much, and all of a sudden the team was falling apart. and there weren't enough guys around to pick up the slack. I looked around and figured, Okay, I'm next in line to leave--and I was right. By then, the "Bad Boys" were like something from a history book.
When we were winning championships, Chuck Daly used to sit us down and say, "Remember these times. It'll never get any better." He was right. Man, was he ever right. Those teams had everything: power, finesse, brains. We could beat the ugly shit out of the other team or be pretty about it. It didn't matter, bro: you pick how you want to lose, because we didn't care how we beat you.
Those times were gone. When Daly left after the 1991--92 season, he took the heart of the team with him. That man had taught me more than anyone in the world about basketball, and what it took to win in the NBA. When he left Detroit, it was like they pulled my anchor out of the water.
All of this was running through my mind--personal problems, professional problems, everything. I was two people: ONE PERSON ON THE INSIDE, another person on the outside. The person I wanted to kill was the person on the outside. The guy on the inside was fine, he just wasn't getting out much. The guy on the inside was normal, even though he had a lot of money and fame. The guy on the outside was all fucked up, not knowing what he wanted.
I came up with an idea: Fuck the gun. Why not just kill the guy on the outside and let the other one keep living? I already knew I could pull the trigger if I wanted. If that was some kind of test, I'd already passed it in my mind. I was searching for a way to come to grips with that person I didn't want to be. I wanted to get that part out of my life and let the other one out to breathe.
And if I got rid of that life, what options did I have? I could have gone off and been a nine-to-have guy who would have been happier and would have had fewer problems. My bank account would have suffered, but I would have been able to walk the streets as a normal person. That's all I was looking for. The other option I considered was to keep doing what I was doing and try to fool people into believing I was something that I wasn't.
Then I thought of a third option: Live a normal life, stay true to myself, and stay exactly where I am.
I sat in that pickup and had a duel with myself. I didn't need the gun; it all took place in my mind. I walked one way and I walked the other way. At ten paces I turned and shot the impostor. I killed the Dennis Rodman that had tried to conform to what everybody wanted him to be.
The choice I had to make was this: Did I want to be like almost everyone else in the NBA and be used and treated as a product for other people's profit and enjoyment? Or did I want to be my own person, be true to myself and let the person inside me be free to do what he wanted to do, no matter what anybody else said or thought?
In that parking lot I realized I could do both things at once. I could be a successful and prominent basketball player and stay true to myself. This was a huge turning point in my life. At that point I could have gone through with it. I could have pulled the trigger, but that would have been the easy way, the cheap way. Instead, I dealt with it and solved the problem.
When I realized I could turn my back on everything teammates say and coaches say and society says, I felt free. It was like I came out from under the water and took a deep breath.
After that I went to sleep. Everything after that is something of a blur. I woke up with a couple police officers at my window; Sheldon had called the police, thinking I was really going to kill myself. Those guys were wondering what the hell was going on. The gun was on the seat next to me, and I was sleeping like a tired dog.
Once it was over, it wasn't a big deal to me. I'd had my crisis come to my conclusions and gone to sleep. But the Pistons thought differently. They wanted to put me in the hospital. They wanted to give me some time off. They thought I'd gone way off the deep end.
When they told me about going to the hospital, I said, "Nah. I'm cool, bro. It was no big deal."
They said they at least wanted me to see a psychiatrist, so I did that. Right away, that morning. We talked about what I had done and why I'd done it. We talked about the things that were running through my head, and why I thought this life was pulling me apart. I told him the whole story and how I took care of it.
This went on for a while, and finally the psychiatrist looked up at me and said, "There's nothing wrong with you."
"I know that," I said. "There's nothing wrong with me at all."
Death has always had a prominent place in my mind. I've thought about killing myself, and there are times when I think somebody might kill me. That's part of fame--dealing with the reality that somebody might dislike you enough to come after you. It's a wild notion, but I think everybody in my position feels the same thing, to one degree or another. With me it's more of a factor because I live so hard, and I live so open. I'm not afraid of death. I'm not going to stop doing the things I do--going out to clubs, riding my motorcycle, going out on my power boat--just because there might be a risk involved.
But if I had killed myself that night, I know what would have happened. People would have thought I had been sending out all these warning signals, that I was deranged and needed help. They would have said they'd seen it coming a mile away that I was nothing more than a basketball-playing time bomb. There would have been speculation that I was on drugs, even though I'm the most antidrug guy who ever stepped onto an NBA court.
When a high-profile personality lives like I do, always looking for a new experience or a new challenge, everybody thinks that person is fated to die young.
What I did that night in The Palace parking lot--the choice I made and the way I made it--allowed me to break out and become the person I am today. I made the decision that night: Follow your own brain. Because of that night the Dennis Rodman you see now is a prototype, THE ONE YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN SEEING ALL ALONG.
© 1996 Dennis Rodman
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