So in the midst of the basketball playoffs…Happy 62nd Birthday, Dennis Rodman!

It seems apt. And apt for the trickster theme, as no one brought trickster shizizzle to professional basketball like Rodman. His coach, Phil Jackson, believed that he would be considered by the Ponca tribe in Oklahoma, a heyoka, a backward-walking person, a sacred clown.

In Tricking Power, I write about the Trickster spirit in sports,

in particular, amongst Black athletes, with profiles of NFL end zone dances; of one of the world’s most profound personalities, Muhammad Ali; and a favorite section on Mr. Rodman. Find the excerpt below this handy button, which you can use to order the book. If you already have it, your mom would love one of her own. I mean, what mother wouldn’t be proud to have her child transform into a Raven demigod, steal the sun, and bring light to the world? That story’s in the book, too.

When it comes to immodesty, competitive juice, and confidence in one’s own athletic abilities, it’s hard to top the former star player for the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls…

Says Rodman, “You know, you got the great Michael Jordan, the great Scottie Pippen, the great Phil Jackson, but if you take me away from this team, do they still win a championship? I don’t think so.””  [2]

This signifyin(g) boast is supported by facts. A deep analysis of Rodman’s statistics proves him to be the greatest rebounder and one of the greatest defensive players of all time and, based on those stats, more valuable to his team than even Michael Jordan. [3]

Playful and Transgressive, Tricksters Just Want to have Fun.

The Weasel of Zulu folklore, the Coyote of Native America, the Bunny of Warner Brothers, all these Tricksters have at least one plaything in common: tunnels. Dennis Rodman tells a story from his childhood of very carefully walking five miles through a Dallas sewage tunnel so that he and his friends could sneak into the state fair. Straight out of folklore and cartoon hilarity, they remove the manhole cover and emerge from their stinky five-mile trek right in the middle of the fairgrounds. From the time he was fourteen, he would repeat the journey every year until college. Why go through that? In Rodman’s own words, “It was damn fun.”[4] And he uses the tunnel as metaphor to describe his entire life journey. “I walked through a lot of tunnels . . . In a lot of ways I’m still that same little kid, crawling through that tunnel on my way to the state fair.”

Transgressive for the sake of transgression might describe any number of trickster types, but such misfitting boundary-crossing  particularly fits Dennis Rodman. Trickster “happens” to people who are able to retain a good dose of childlikeness.

One of the main highways by which a person reaches the Trickster god Eshù is through that pre-moral child state. Sports Illustrated writer Michael Silver put it this way: “Dealing with Dennis is like dealing with your best friend when you’re 10 years old. There’s nobody better. You love that guy. It’s beautiful. But sometimes when you need to have an emotionally developed interaction or a logistically important interaction, it’s like, I’m dealing with my best friend when I’m 10.”

Tricksters are all about crossing boundaries.

In a 1995 Sports Illustrated article, Michael Silver writes: Rodman emerges wearing a shiny tank top, metallic hot pants and a rhinestone dog collar, his guests ooh, aah and gawk in amusement. “Dennis is in one of his transvestite moods,” says Rodman’s friend Amy Frederick, rolling her eyes. Were it not Rodman, a man who dreams of playing his last NBA game au naturel, this behavior might be a bit shocking.[5]

And in an article by Chris Ballard, Rodman’s friend Dwight Manley says: “When you’re raised without boundaries, you have to find them for yourself.”[6]

Silver concludes: “Rodman’s eyes are glistening, but he is not laughing. I ask him if he thinks about dying young. ‘Sometimes I say I’m going to play basketball and go-go-go until I drop dead,’ he says. ‘I’m not afraid of dying at all. It’s just the next boundary.’”[7]

Tricksters are loners.

So who else would Rodman marry but himself?

Tricksters disrupt the game, even when they play it.

The politics of sports are not playful, and playful trickster characters are not welcomed into the arenas of competition.

Like Ali, Rodman sought an identity beyond the game. Though he’s misfired in the political arena, he’s also played a liberating role. In 1995, he fashioned his haircut with an inset dye of an HIV/AIDS awareness ribbon.[9] This on a nationally televised playoff game in a time when homophobia was common among players.

The playfully titled article in the New Yorker, “Playing Dennis Rodman,” describes his trickster traits well:

About eccentric basketball star Dennis Rodman . . . “Unclassifiable—“the most unique player in the history of the NBA,” according to Chuck Daly, who coached Rodman’s first pro team, the Detroit Pistons, to two consecutive NBA championships. . . . Not exactly a forward, guard or center, Rodman invented a role for himself which subverts the logic of traditional positions. His helter-skelter, full-court, full-time intensity blurs the line between defense and offense. He “scores” without scoring, keeping the ball in play until one of his teammates drops it through the hoop. . . . The battle for domination of the boards is a fascinating game within the game. Rodman’s relentless, no-holds-barred, kamikaze pursuit of missed shots foregrounds rebounding and frees it from subordinate status.

Irreducible to anything else—a perpetual work in progress, compelling, outrageous, amoral. Rodman immerses himself in what he does, defines himself by it, stakes out new territory: percussive behavior so edgy it threatens to wreck the game that’s supposed to contain it . . .Cross-dressing, cross-naming himself (Denise), frequenting gay night clubs, going AWOL from his team, head-butting a referee, winning four rebounding titles in a row, painting his hair, dating Madonna, challenging the NBA commissioner to suspend him, bad-mouthing the men in suits who pay his salary . . . He dons the uniform, takes the paycheck, but doesn’t exactly go to work. . . . The game we’ve taken for real disappears, and we’re left to deal with the reality of Dennis Rodman in our faces. [10]

Rodman the rookie was described as a youth as much from rural Oklahoma (college) as the streets of Dallas (childhood in the Oak Cliff projects). Because of the playing style he’d developed, joining the rough-playing, bad boy Detroit Pistons of 1986 came naturally, like the sprouting of a seed that was in him all along. He was not going to throw away his shot. “We’re like a hockey team, everybody wanna see us fight.”[11]

Tricksters speak truth to power.

He burst into the Detroit team personality that wanted to spoil the wholesome PR fairytales painted around players like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan. Rodman’s personal psychology, no one’s business but his, nonetheless manifested in wild partying, episodes of despondency, and unpredictable choices in fashion and sex. Traded from the Pistons in 1993 and dating Madonna in 1994, Rodman lived his fantasies and made his personal choices public—in hair color, clothing, sexuality—blasting off, becoming passionately self-directed, and dancing with his trickster self.

Of course, he was a spark plug crucial to the Bulls’ championships of 1996, ’97, and ’98. He’s a student and a master of the game, but it was the game’s connection to stardom that propelled him to outrageousness. “People don’t understand, it’s just not basketball that we have to deal with on this team. It’s the pressure of the [bullshit]. You know, l’ll play the game for free, but you get paid for the [bullshit] after you leave the floor. . . . This business can kiss my ass. I don’t give a damn what they think about me.” To make his point, he took a forty-eight-hour “vacation” in the middle of the season to let off some steam and party. No NBA player does that—yet he returns, and he competes hard. He is a warrior and a trickster and a rebel, maybe not a hero.

Much is made of Rodman’s relationship and romance with Madonna, and rightly so. She was the marketing genius of the time, and coached him on a sophisticated approach to marketing and branding.

Just as importantly, Rodman’s marketing posture was based on the cardinal trickster characteristic, rule breaking.

Rodman’s transgressive tendencies have not served him as well since retiring from the NBA. Besides the scary friendship with an off-kilter, nuclear-armed dictator, Rodman has suffered from alcoholism, lost his fortune, become enmeshed in legal problems, and defaulted on child support. Hyper success can impose burdens the rest of us don’t understand and that more fragile souls like Rodman’s are not prepared to handle.

But Rodman’s jackpot was just that: a lucky trifecta of trickster personality traits, talent that is recognized by the cultural moment, and the ability to get away with crossing boundaries.

[2] The Last Dance, episodes 3 and 4, directed by Jason Hehir, aired April 26, 2020, on ESPN.

[3] Ben Morris, “The Case for Dennis Rodman, Part 1/4 (a)-Rodman v. Jordan,” Skeptical Sports Analysis (website), August 3, 2011, https://skepticalsports.com/the-case-for-dennis-rodman-part-14-a-rodman-v-jordan/.

[4] Dennis Rodman and Tim Keown, Bad as I Wanna Be (New York: Dell Publishing, 1997), 12-14.

[5]    Michael Silver, “Rodman Unchained: The Spurs No-Holds-Barred Forward Gives New Meaning to the Running Game,” Sports Illustrated, May 29, 1995, https://vault.si.com/vault/1995/05/29/rodman-unchained-the-spurs-no-holds-barred-forward-gives-new-meaning-to-the-running-game.

[6]   Chris Ballard, “Draymond Before Draymond: The Complicated Legacy of Dennis Rodman,” Sports Illustrated, June 6, 2018, https://www.si.com/nba/2018/06/06/dennis-rodman-basketball-legacy-north-korea-draymond-green-warriors.

[9]     Craig Barboza, “Remember When Dennis Rodman Put on a Wedding Dress and Claimed to Marry Himself?” CNN, November 3, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/remember-when-dennis-rodman/index.html.

[10] John Edgar Wideman, “Playing Dennis Rodman.,” The New Yorker, April 29, 1996, 94-95.

[11] The Last Dance, episodes 3 and 4, directed by Jason Hehir, aired April 26, 2020, on ESPN.