1 The Lingerie Bowl Rodman’s main passions — sport and semi-naked women — were neatly combined last year when he was named as commissioner of the Lingerie Football League (LFL), a pay-per-view television sport in which models play, in the loosest possible definition of the word, gridiron in their underwear. The final game of the LFL season will take place during half-time of the Super Bowl on February 5, giving American couch potatoes an alternative to the Rolling Stones, who will be headlining the official show. “The Lingerie Bowl is an entertaining alternative to Super Bowl’s boring and conservative half-time shows,” said Rodman, whose exact role as commissioner is unclear but who will be supported in it by William “The Refrigerator” Perry, the giant former Chicago Bear and another ceaseless publicity hound. “With my guidance and rule changes, Lingerie Bowl III will be the biggest Super Bowl party in the world!” Who could possibly doubt him?
2 The Madonna mercy mission Rodman dated Madonna in the early 1990s and claims he was playing craps in Las Vegas when he received a desperate “booty call” from the singer back in New York. He explains: “It was like the ‘somebody died call’. I picked up the phone and Madonna was like, ‘I’m ovulating, I’m ovulating. Get your ass up here’. So I left my chips on the table, flew five hours to New York and did my thing. We got done and she was standing on her head in an attempt to promote conception — just like any girl trying to get pregnant. I flew back to Las Vegas and picked up my game where I left off.” Alas it was all in vain: Madonna remained unpregnant.
3 The coffin You have a new book to promote. It’s called I Should Be Dead By Now. How else do you promote it but to arrive at a book signing in one of the largest coffins the world has ever seen? Your own coffin — the actual one you will ultimately be buried in (or at least so you claim). It’s all in a day’s work for Rodman, who also used the occasion to promote another of his high-profile sponsors, GoldenPalace.com, an American online casino that will be looking after the coffin for him until the day comes when he needs it again.
4 The rap sheet In 1979, during a stint as a janitor at Dallas-Fort Worth airport before making the big time in basketball, Rodman was charged with felony burglary for allegedly stealing two watches from a shop. The case was never proved, but it opened a lengthy rap sheet. Future cases involved accusations of assault, knowingly infecting a dancer with herpes, shoving a $100 bill down a woman’s shirt to feel her breasts, and exceeding the Newport harbour speed limit in a boat called Sexual Chocolate. While working at the airport, Rodman, who had never played organised basketball, decided to take advantage of his 6ft 8in height and take up the sport properly with a junior college team.
5 The rebounder It is easy to forget that Rodman was an outstanding player in his chosen sport, winning five NBA titles during his career. Having featured as a low-key presence on two championship-winning teams with the Detroit Pistons in 1989 and 1990, Rodman became a star in his own right during the 1991-92 campaign when he averaged 18.7 rebounds per game, the closest anybody had come to matching the 19.2 mark set by the legendary Wilt Chamberlain. His emergence as the game’s greatest rebounder (an unglamorous yet much-coveted skill) was soon matched by a transformation off it, the nondescript personality turning quickly into an outsized character. For seven consecutive seasons he led the NBA in rebounding, tattoos, piercings and changes of hair colour and was a key cog in the Chicago Bulls team headed by the legendary Michael Jordan, winning a further three championship rings with them.
6 Marrying himself In 1996, Rodman appeared naked astride a motorbike on the cover of his Bad As I Wanna Be autobiography. Inside he told of his bisexuality, his refusal to perform oral sex on Madonna and his dislike for many NBA players. During his book tour, he revealed he was about to marry a beautiful, intelligent woman. The next day he turned up at a New York bookstore in a horse-drawn carriage, wearing a wedding dress and a wig and claiming he was marrying himself.
7 The wife’s biography Within months of Rodman’s book coming out, his former wife, Anicka, offered a more sinister take on the star. Her Worse Than He Says He Is (Or White Girls Don’t Bounce) had a similar cover but far less humorous content. Her complaints about their five-month marriage included accounts of how he gave her sexually transmitted diseases and his performance in bed. “I had great expectations,” she wrote of the first time they made love. “They were not met. There were still about 10sec left on the 24sec shot clock . . .” Ouch.
8 Celebrity Big Brother Chantelle might be the non-famous “fake” in this year’s nightly display of celebrity strangeness, but Rodman knows what he sees in her: a potential conquest. Already our man has, not to put too fine a point on it, cracked onto the Essex girl, wooing her by showing off his tattoos and piercings and engaging in a hand-holding session in the bedroom. Wonderfully, he thinks her name is “Champagne”. Quite what he thought he was getting into entering the house is anyone’s guess.
9 The 10-day marriage In November 1998, at the Little Chapel of the Flowers in Las Vegas, Rodman married the former Playboy pin-up and Baywatch actress Carmen Electra. Although the couple had been dating for a while, Rodman’s agent Dwight Manley immediately questioned the legality of the nuptials, alleging that his client had been intoxicated during the ceremony. Despite publicly professing his undying love for his new bride, the couple filed for an annulment just 10 days into the marriage. An on-off relationship ensued for a couple of years before the “lovebirds” finally completed the paperwork and separated for good. Proving that maths is not necessarily a Playboy model’s strong point, Electra later described their marriage as “the best eight (sic) days of my life”.
10 The wrestling In the final minute of the fourth game of the 1998 NBA finals, Rodman forced Karl Malone of the Utah Jazz to foul him and then sank both the free throws to clinch a 86-82 victory for the Chicago Bulls, giving them a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series. Rodman’s performance was all the more remarkable because he had skipped a Bulls training session during the build-up to the game to take part in a wrestling match in Detroit. For choosing to pair up with Hulk Hogan rather than work out with Michael Jordan, Rodman was fined $20,000, not even a tenth of what he was paid for, among other things, breaking a chair over an opponent in the ring.
