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In today’s edition…

In high school, he was so small that he got cut from almost every team he tried out for.

After graduation, he worked nights as an airport janitor.

Back then, no one would’ve guessed he’d end up in the Hall of Fame.

Let’s dive in 👇

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In a world where most future NBA players have a spot on an elite travel team by the time they’re 10 years old, have skills trainers, recruiting profiles, and YouTube reels with millions of viewers, Dennis Rodman made himself into one of the greatest players in pro basketball history without any of that.

But as we all know, Rodman is far from normal, as was his journey to the NBA. 

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1961, Dennis Keith Rodman is the eldest of Shirley and Philander Rodman Jr.’s three children.

After relocating to Oak Cliff in Dallas County, Texas, he grew up in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. If that wasn’t hard enough, Rodman’s father left him and his two older sisters to be raised by their mother.

“I never had a father,” he said in his Hall of Fame speech.

“My father left me when I was five years old. He has 47 kids in the Philippines, and I’m the oldest one. He wrote a book about me and made a lot of money, but he never came and said hello to me. That didn’t stop me from persevering.”

An undersized “momma’s boy” growing up, Dennis took a backseat when it came to the three children receiving attention. His two sisters, Debra and Kim, were better athletes who both went on to become college All-Americans.

In addition to working multiple jobs in order to care for the family, Rodman felt left alone in his own household.

Although he tried out for the South Oak Golden Bears, it was more to do with the fact that his sisters had left a legacy than because he was interested or talented enough to play.

As a 5’6” high school freshman, he reportedly “couldn't make a layup right."

The closest he ever came to playing high school basketball was sitting on the bench for half a season before he quit.

"He was devastated by that," his mom, Shirley, said. "He went to pieces, stayed in his room for days."

After graduation, he started working as an overnight janitor at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.

His job was to mop, sweep, and clean up, but he ended up doing a bit more than that.

One day, he got the idea to steal a bunch of watches to give to his friends. He ended up getting arrested for stealing 50 watches from the airport’s gift shop.

Luckily for him, he only spent 18 hours in jail. The charges didn’t stick because he convinced his friends to give the watches back.

It was around that time that he hit probably the most insane growth spurt in human history.

Over two years, he went from 5’9″ to about 6’8″.  According to Sports Illustrated, he “refused to leave the house because he felt so odd”.

Back then, he said, the way he was going, he would’ve ended up in jail for good.

That’s when he got a wake-up call. His mom got so tired of him bumming around that she kicked him out of the house.

“She changed the locks,” Rodman said in a 2020 interview. “I had, like, a garbage bag full of clothes. I left the house, and I just sat on the steps down at the apartment complex with nowhere to go. I went to my friend’s house. He said, ‘You can stay in the backyard, on the couch.’”

“Every day when I wake up, I go to the car wash, try to make some extra money. Or I go to the 7-Eleven, try to fold boxes, throw bottles away, stuff like that, for five bucks a day.”

Entering his early 20s, Dennis didn’t have a steady job or any kind of vision for his future. But word slowly spread about his crazy growth spurt.

Thanks to a family friend who had connections with the head coach at Cooke County College in Gainesville, Texas, Rodman got a chance to take the game from the park to the hardwood, playing organized, structured basketball for the first time.

At the age of 21, Rodman, who had never run a proper offense or practiced drills, found himself on a college team.

“I was just there to play ball,” he said. “I didn’t know drills or layups, no stuff like that. In the projects, I used to leave my house every day, I’d run down to the park, jump the fence, then put my shoes on, and start playing ball. That’s how I learned to play.”

While he showed surprising success on the court, averaging 17.6 points and 13.3 rebounds, he lasted just one semester before flunking out.

Then, something clicked.

The next season, he found himself playing at Southeastern Oklahoma State University after an assistant coach saw Rodman practice.

For the next three years, Dennis dominated the NAIA ranks. Averaging 25.7 points and 15.7 rebounds, he’d transformed himself into an All-American.

It was during the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament pre-draft camp that he found himself in legitimate contention for the 1986 NBA Draft.

Coming from a small public college that few scouts ever paid attention to, he found himself competing with legitimate Division I talent, including names like Jeff Hornacek and Johnny Newman.

At the age of 25, with roughly four years of organized ball under his belt, Rodman was selected with the 27th pick by the Detroit Pistons.

He later wrote in his book, “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be an NBA player…I was just a kid from the projects who was always too skinny or too funny looking to be taken seriously.”

Of the 26 players chosen before Rodman, only Brad Daugherty and Mark Price would make an All-Star Team. While Arvydas Sabonis would make the Hall of Fame, it was more due to his international play than his NBA career.

Joining a team that finished 46-36 with a first-round playoff loss to the Atlanta Hawks, Dennis came off the bench to play an average of 15 minutes per night in 77 games. Not bad for a young man who grew up without a dream of ever playing in the NBA.

He continued to earn the trust of coach Chuck Daly in his second season, playing more meaningful minutes as a defensive energizer off the bench. What Daly saw in Rodman and vice versa was more than just basketball.

“Dennis kind of grew up with us. The Pistons were Dennis’s first professional family, and he really liked what the team stood for…It was a family to him,” Daly noted.

That turned out to be the only season of his career in which he averaged double digits in points (11.6).

Leaning into the team’s “Bad Boys” image, Rodman established himself as the team’s best defender and rebounder and a player willing to do whatever the team needed to succeed.

Yes, he could put the ball in the bucket, but so could many others on the team. In 1989 and 1990, Rodman helped the Pistons capture back-to-back NBA titles and earned a pair of Defensive Player of the Year awards in 1990 and 1991.

Figuring out that his meal ticket was stopping the ball and protecting his basket, he went on to earn eight All-Defensive Team honors and seven straight rebounding titles from 1992 to 1998.

For those unfamiliar with Rodman’s game, realize that this was a 6’7”, 210-pound guy who outrebounded players up to five inches taller and 50 pounds heavier.

For ten straight seasons, he gobbled up double-digit rebounds, including a career high of 18.7 in 1991-92.

But off the court, his life took a dark turn. One that played out in front of the entire world: missed practices, a divorce from his first wife, and being found in the Palace of Auburn Hills parking lot with a loaded rifle.

The man most fans knew as a blue-collar, hard-working player would transform into a completely different person.

“I decided that instead [of killing myself] I was gonna kill the imposter that was leading Dennis Rodman to a place he didn’t want to go…So I just said, I’m going to live my life the way I want to live it and be happy doing it.”

Colorful hair, tattoos, earrings, and flamboyant outfits would soon follow a trade to the San Antonio Spurs. Add in relationships with some of the biggest names in the entertainment world, and it seemed like Rodman was more interested in being a character than he was a basketball player.

The two seasons he played in San Antonio were filled with suspensions, arrests, and more issues than the Spurs wanted to deal with.

Ironically, it would be a trade to the Chicago Bulls that helped turn Rodman’s life around…or at least as much as one could.

“[Phil Jackson] asked me, ‘Would you like to be a Chicago Bull?’...my exact words were, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ And Phil Jackson said, ‘Welcome to the Chicago Bulls.’”

After being public enemy #1 as a member of the Pistons during their legendary rivalry with the Bulls, Rodman was exactly the player that Chicago needed to remain among the NBA’s elite.

With Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen making all of the highlight reels, the team needed a grit-and-grind individual who didn’t mind doing all of the things others didn’t want to do. A role Dennis Rodman was all too familiar with.

“His dresses don’t bother me, his hair doesn’t bother me,” Jordan said. “Sure, he’s gonna go whacko every now and then, but we’ve come to live with that, we’ve come to accept that. But you can’t find another player on the basketball court that works just as hard as Dennis Rodman.”

Leave it to the “Zen Master” Phil Jackson to not only find a way to smooth things over between Rodman, Jordan, and Pippen, but also accept and deal with what Dennis chose to do away from the game.

Suspensions, missed practices, and questionable off-court behavior continued. But when Rodman was on the court, he did everything the Bulls needed him to do in order to three-peat as champions for a second time.

Following the Bulls' “Last Dance”, Dennis finished his career playing 23 games with the LA Lakers and a dozen games with the Dallas Mavericks.

Although he continued to play professional basketball at various other levels from 2003 to 2006, his NBA career came to an end.

In 2011, Dennis Rodman was rightfully inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

For all of the negativity and attention he had drawn over the years for his questionable behavior, the NBA did the right thing by honoring one of its greatest defensive players of all time.

For a guy who was never supposed to amount to much, Rodman’s journey from nothing to becoming a player and an individual that few will ever forget is truly one of the great underdog stories in sports history.

"You know, I could have been anywhere in the world,” he said.

“I could have been dead. I could have been a drug dealer. I could have been homeless…I was homeless. And a lot of you guys here that's been here and a lot of you guys here in the Hall of Fame know what I'm talking about; living in the projects and trying to get out of the projects and…I did that. But, but it took a lot of work and a lot of…bumps in the road."

🐶

Today’s story was written by our friend in the north, Steve Lee.

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Til next time,
Tyler

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👀 In case you missed it: He got cut 3 out of 4 years in high school. But it didn’t stop him. Armed with borderline irrational self-confidence, he “bugged” his way to the big leagues.

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