“My only point with this column was that Rodman’s persona gets misinterpreted a lot. It wasn’t something he created to make himself into a bigger star. It was organic, legitimately sprouting out of pain, angst, unhappiness, etc.”

I guess I’d add some words to the list of reasons his wild persona sprouted, like that he was financially secure for the first time in his families American existence and he felt a sense of freedom that most people will never know.  Once you realize that you can paint your head pink and people will still open doors for you and pay for your entire dinner party, you have tapped into some pretty liberating energy. I can see how the fact that he started embracing this wild and crazy side in his mid 20′s and not when he was thirteen supports the idea that it was more of an emotional outlet kind of thing.  What I’m saying is, you may be totally correct, but I hope that you’re not and it’s just that he started hanging out with some really artsy cats and felt liberated enough and secure enough with his talents and finances to just let it all hang out. Literally.  

Hey, it’s possible that Detroit is what changed him.  After all, it’s the home of Parliament/Funkadelic.  And that is a good thing.  Always.

I love this clip so much. The look on Brickowski’s face is priceless. If Rodman ever appears on ‘This is your life’ then Brickowski definitely must make an appearance.

My only point with this column was that Rodman’s persona gets misinterpreted a lot. It wasn’t something he created to make himself into a bigger star. It was organic, legitimately sprouting out of pain, angst, unhappiness, etc.

The first time he dyed his hair wasn’t even to get attention. He liked the movie Demolition Man and got the blonde Mohawk that Wesley Snipes had in the movie during his first season in San Antonio.

Rodman’s pre-basketball life is obviously tragic. But he sank into a really deep professional unhappiness as well. His final season in Detroit, he didn’t have Chuck Daly. His first marriage failed and his ex wife and daughter moved away. He was traded to San Antonio and quickly grew to detest that organization. The Spurs are conservative, they are the only game in town in their market and they wanted Rodman to conform, to do things that frankly he wasn’t asked to do in Detroit. And on top of that, he thought his experience winning championships made him better equipped to tell the Spurs what they should be doing rather than the other way around. So the hair colors, the tattoos, the piercings, those things all came about as a result of him thumbing his nose at an organization he hated.

The Spurs damaged his reputation as a basketball player. The Bulls rebuilt it, proved that Rodman was a team guy, proved that he still knew how to win. And on top of that, arriving in a big market in Chicago playing next to the biggest star in sports, the hair, the individualism, the style … those things were embraced even more by non-basketball media that became more likely to pay attention to him in Chicago than they did in San Antonio or even Detroit.

Like I said in the post, Rodman is complex. But I do think his individuality and his style are, to some extent, shaped by how he coped with tragedies or unhappiness or whatever in his life. I was just trying to point out that underneath all that, he’s always been the same vulnerable dude. There’s a perception among a lot of the square sports media that you mentioned that Rodman somehow “changed” after Detroit. He didn’t. He became more colorful, certainly, and he became a bigger star aided by playing for arguably the greatest team in NBA history. But the emotion, the loss, the seemingly endless inner search he’s had for why he is where he is … those are all things you could see in him from the moment he stepped into the NBA.

I’ve heard there are a lot of of Rodman-Salley popping up in random places all over Detroit when they played here.