The Worm in the Machine

D-Wil at Sports on my Mind has some comments on the unfair labor charges that dropped at the end of last week. They’re worth the read. I was too busy all weekend trying to find the perfect shoes to match my new fedora. I finally decided to have a pair tailor-made, so I emailed the Field Museum in Chicago to see if my leather guy could use dinosaur skin for the soles. Should be the only cat on the red carpet with brontosaurus under my toes.

The discussion at True Hoop on Friday asked why more athletes aren’t political. The NBA has Etan Thomas, yes, but for the most part, the guys would rather be like Carmelo on defense and avoid the topic altogether.

It wasn’t that long ago, however, when Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (née Chris Jackson) protested the national anthem. For him, the red, white, and blue represented an obscenity, “a symbol of oppression”—not stars but scars and stripes. Last I heard, Abdul-Rauf serves as an imam at a mosque he helped build in Mississippi. No word on how his congregation takes to the shakes and curses.

Speaking of obscenity, the conversation about politics and the NBA has thus far avoided the ground floor, the earth matter of the issue: The Worm.

Bad-as-he-wants-to-be Dennis Rodman embodied resistance during his years under lights. Everything about the man’s game suggested struggle. He didn’t play basketball so much as he digested it. His game was all appetite and desire, all labor and profanity. The dude made Frank Brickowski and Karl Malone look like primadonnas.

Rodman feasted on the wreckage of the game, its flotsam and failures. The skills at which the Worm excelled—rebounding, defense, irritation—were all predicated on the mistakes of others: missed shots, turnovers, and offensive fouls. If Michael’s game symbolized perfection, ease, and finesse, Dennis’s incarnated impurity, inelegance, and messiness. If his Airness floated toward the rim as though Isaac Newton told lies, the Worm looked to invite the sting of gravity, slithered for loose balls, and flaunted the hustler’s stigmata of gym-burns, bruises, and sweat.

If Jordan was the corporate face of the NBA, Rodman was a pain in the league’s ass.

Part of the reason Rodman inspired antipathy no doubt had to do with the gawkiness of his play. He moved like a person under attack, a thousand elbows all out-of-sync—kicking, tripping, and flopping when he had to. Rodman was a tempest in a 94-foot teapot.

Yet, as the novelist John Edgar Wideman once put it, Rodman also played Caliban to David Stern’s Prospero, and incited ire from his celebrity antics as much as his court tactics.

But shouldn’t we keep those antics and tactics together, joined in the transgressive coupling that was the Worm? The man brought sexual dissidence, gay rights, and color to the sterile, black-and-white world of the hardwood—and that’s just talking his hair alone.

To the homophobic gala of professional sports, Rodman came dressed in drag, swapping spit with Madonna and fantasies of male lovers. While other athletes expressed discomfort about playing against Magic, Dennis embraced survivors and tattooed his support on televisions across the country. The Worm championed dis-ease in all facets of his life.

Rodman may have been more partier than poet, but a part of our conversation about politics and players he remains.