A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum
Showtime has given way to burlesque here in Los Angeles, and you know what? The people seem to like it. No more Decorum at the Forum these days. The Lakers are all nose rings and funny hats, sudden coaching changes, tear-stained press conferences and front-office intrigues. They're a total entertainment package, a tabloid team for today's fan, the one who might stand by a freeway to cheer a white Bronco or program his VCR to tape the Jerry Springer Show.
These aren't your father's L.A. Lakers, let's put it that way. But owner Jerry Buss, the aging blue-jeaned satyr who has taken a sharp interest in his team as it lumbers toward the new millennium, may know his changing fan base best. Responding less to a 6-6 start from a supposedly contending team than to the boredom it seemed to be casting over his clientele, Buss grabbed the franchise by the throat last week and gave it a good shaking. Result? By Friday, Forum operators were answering the phones with that near-forgotten mantra: "I'm sorry, tonight's game is sold out."
Nothing, apparently, plays like chaos, scripted or not. What today's customer wants, if a championship team is unavailable, is cartoon confusion, and lots of it. Boy, did Buss and his guys deliver.
They began by romancing a cross-dressing power forward who kept scheduling public appearances to announce that he couldn't decide whether to play for the Lakers. They followed up by firing their ordained minister-coach, a white-haired benchmark of decency in this outfit who had rejected feelers to leave the Lakers last year (even when the team, tellingly, declined to extend his contract). As Del Harris, getting a little choked up, said at his going-away press conference on Feb. 24, he had hoped to dedicate this season to the memory of his recently deceased parents.
Only hours earlier the Lakers had finally signed the cross-dressing power forward, who, at a Planet Hollywood press conference he had set up apparently to prolong the process, broke down in tears after he was hectored by an incredulous and furious press corps into announcing his decision to play basketball again. "No matter what I do," Dennis Rodman said, tears leaking from behind a pair of shades, "I'm never going to win."
Then management bungled the coaching change by announcing a quick decision that turned out to be not so quick, with Buss unexpectedly showing up in the locker room after the Lakers' game last Thursday and entertaining the idea of Phil Jackson as coach. "Everything's possible," said the 66-year-old owner while his young date gently stroked his cheek. This just hours after he and the front office had agreed to promote one of Harris's assistants.
This kind of day-by-day soap opera, some of which actually appeared on daytime television (live and—a big apology to all you parents out there who had to explain masturbation to your children—uncensored), was in sorry contrast to the old Lakers style, which relied more on the development of championship-caliber teams than on the advancement of story lines. But neither basketball nor popular culture is what it was 11 years ago, when this marquee franchise last won an NBA title, and now pandering pays better than contending. Feather boas all around, boys! And man those turnstiles!
And so it was last Friday that Rodman appeared at the Forum for his first game as a Laker (and, on a minor note, for Kurt Rambis's first game as a head coach) and simultaneously lifted ticket sales and lowered standards of propriety. The times being what they are, there wasn't a Lakers player or fan who wasn't a little breathless in anticipation, although not for the usual reasons. Would Rodman wear a full-length gown? Would he slink from the bench for a spontaneous gambling outing to Las Vegas? Would he kick a photographer? Cry?
Or, for about $250,000 after taxes (minus another $100,000 of his salary that he has earmarked for charity), would this 37-year-old veteran of five championship teams save a floundering and underachieving franchise? You wouldn't want to have to decide one way or the other on the basis of Friday's 99-83 win over the Los Angeles Clippers or even Sunday's 106-90 victory over the somewhat more challenging Houston Rockets. As the Lakers themselves must admit, even a short season with a volatile personality like Rodman is going to be one long held breath. "We're rolling the dice here," says Mitch Kupchak, the team's general manager.
But, as even the franchise's critics must admit, Lakers basketball looked kind of fun again. The team that was desultory in losses earlier last week to the Denver Nuggets and the Vancouver Grizzlies—Goodbye, Del!—was, while Rodman was on the floor anyway, positively frenetic. Suddenly the Lakers were playing full-court basketball, running for their lives as Rodman scraped off rebounds with his signature scissors kick and fired off floor-length passes. Shaquille O'Neal, who had been agitating for Rodman's acquisition ("I need a thug in my life," he said of a guy he had once dismissed as a bum), spoke for teammates and fans alike after Friday's game, in which Rodman grabbed 11 rebounds and had six assists: "I've been waiting for this for a long time."
That game was a reminder that contrary to his public persona as a sad doofus, Rodman is a sort of basketball genius. As much as he cultivates and refines his singularity, he is the ultimate team player, doing everybody else's dirty work. Of course, contradiction is basically his reason to live. While everybody was anticipating the ways in which Rodman would disrupt this young team, he spent his first practice learning the system by helping the rookies with their plays. "Don't get me wrong," said Rambis. "Our playbook doesn't give you instructions on performing a lobotomy. It's only basketball. But still.... " He was a little surprised.
And what bigger surprise was there than Rodman's electrifying performance in his first game back, after an eight-month layoff that was highlighted, physical conditioning-wise, by his Las Vegas marriage to Hyperion Bay babe Carmen Electra? Friday's victims were the winless Clippers, but Sunday afternoon against the Lineup of Legends Rockets, Rodman was just as amped up. Coming off the bench again, he grabbed 10 rebounds against Houston, which had Charles Barkley back in uniform. Shaq again: "This is a pretty fun team to play on right now."
And it's fun to watch. The fans loved Rodman even more than Shaq did, keening for his entrance, roaring at every reckless rebound, cheering for him to shoot, on their feet for each of his loose-ball scrambles. It's been a while since crowds at the Forum were excited enough to do something like wear socks with button eyes on their hands, holding them aloft in homage to the Worm.
All this came to pass without Rodman's doing anything more seditious than arrive 15 minutes late for a Saturday practice. The Lakers didn't see or hear much from him except when he was playing basketball. Attended by two bodyguards (the same ex-cops he employed in Chicago), he dressed in a room apart from the team. Rodman may become even more invisible to his fellow Lakers: He asked for an exercise bike he can ride during the game, somewhere off the court, to keep himself energized until he enters the fray.
Interestingly, his teammates didn't seem to mind this double standard one bit. They seemed excited by the prospect of having such an exotic in their midst. "It's going to be bananas," said 20-year-old swingman Kobe Bryant, happily. "Dresses! Trips to Vegas!"
Veteran point guard Derek Harper was also looking forward to living the Rodman experience. "Face it," Harper said, "a lot of people wish they had the cojones to do and say what he does."
Even team leader Shaq, a military kid whose idea of discipline might differ from Rodman's on key points, was prepared for the Worm's act. Perhaps even admiring of it. "What he does," says O'Neal, himself a multimedia impresario, "is what I call homeboy marketing. He is very good at getting free telecommunications from you guys." Shaq's own purple fedora was off to Rodman.
By the way, when it comes to hats, there is a new sheriff in town. Rodman's skimmers, of which there appear to be many, seem to be out of the Dr. Seuss catalog. And one more thing while we're updating Rodman: No Laker dare play catch-up with him when it comes to nose rings. Rodman has enough iron in his face that in a medical emergency, the docs will have to go at him with a bolt cutter.
For now the Lakers are prepared to accept him as an act whose entertainment value is nice but wholly beside the point. Rodman rebounds, gets loose balls—"Rookies trying to make the team don't dive for loose balls these days," says Lakers forward Robert Horry—and dresses funny. Of course, that's what his supporters have been saying all along: that he's not a dangerous personality at all but just someone who discovered how much fun it is to irritate all of us decent folk.
"He's not insane," says Barkley, "he's just playing with everybody. Like crying at his press conference. Everybody fell for it! This guy cries on request, I'm telling you. I've seen him do it on Oprah. He plays everybody like fiddles, which is almost too bad, because it keeps him from getting the credit he deserves."
So far, in fact, Rodman has been a model of mental health compared with the rest of the Lakers' organization. The front office, which for 17 years has been guided by the wisdom and authority of executive vice president Jerry West, looked to be in disarray last week as even West was overtaken by events. It got so bad that when it came time to announce Rambis's appointment as the new coach, West wasn't even up to attending the press conference. "He asked for the day off," says Kupchak.
Although Kupchak says everybody in management was on the same
page throughout the week, the facts suggest they weren't even
reading the same book. Rodman clearly was Buss's idea, while
West's and Kupchak's emotions were mixed. "Is Dr. Buss as
concerned with the distractions that Dennis might pose as we
are?" Kupchak asked diplomatically. "I don't think so."
The overall implication was that Buss, who had left decisions on players to West in the past, was feeling his oats. However, it is likely that West himself decided to make the coaching change, although Buss kept the confusion quotient high. West, who saw in Harris a wonderful person and a dear friend, had hoped to ease him out with dignity after last season, which ended with another embarrassing playoff loss to the Utah Jazz. Harris, after four full seasons, had lost the team. Bryant admitted that some players had "tuned him out" from Day One and that as much as he himself liked the "old school" technician, he too tuned him out from time to time. But Buss preferred to see how this season began before making a move.
It began badly, so there was no question that Harris was gone. Given the Lakers' philosophy of hiring from within, there wasn't much question throughout the organization that the job would go to either Rambis or fellow assistant Larry Drew. But that apparently couldn't happen before Buss raised the possibility that Jackson, the former Chicago Bulls coach and Rodman caretaker, might replace Harris. Kupchak insists that Jackson's name never came up, so he was a little surprised, he says, to pick up the newspaper the day Rambis's promotion was going to be announced and read that his boss had said the job was still open. "It was like, Is there something we don't know about?" Kupchak remembers asking West.
In the end Rambis, who was solicited for the Clippers' head job in the off-season, appears to be the ideal coach for this team. In a way, he was the Rodman of his time, picking up loose balls for Magic Johnson's championship teams in the '80s and looking a little eccentric himself. Anybody remember those thick black glasses, all taped together? Think of those as the nose rings of a decade ago. Rambis certainly has a better chance of communicating with Rodman than Harris had. When Rambis asked Rodman last Friday how many minutes he would like to play, Rodman said, "Yes." Rambis seemed to know what he meant.
Of course, the whole thing could go south in a second. A rookie coach, a high-energy misfit who favors mascara over after-shave, and an increasingly impatient owner—these are not the ingredients of a dynasty. Whether the Lakers win an NBA championship this year or end up in ruins, it's not going to be boring. People will pay money to see this, you just watch.