Early in the second half of the Bulls’ season-opening game against the Charlotte Hornets last Friday, Dennis Rodman– vastly outsized by the man he was assigned to guard, seven-foot George Zidek–tried to give ground and draw an offensive foul. The bush-league scabs officiating the game in place of the striking National Basketball Association referees made no call, and Zidek scored. Rodman clearly understood this to mean he had carte blanche to stand his ground, and on the Hornets’ next possession he did just that. Zidek forced up a bad shot, and Rodman gained position under the boards and fought him off for the rebound. Rodman handed the ball to Michael Jordan, who took off lickety-split up the court. At first Rodman followed along with that distinctive prancing Lipizzan stallion gait of his, but when he saw Jordan lower his shoulders and pick up speed at half court Rodman stopped. Jordan shook, shimmied, pulled up at the three-point line, and fired in a 24-foot jump shot. By that time Rodman was already in the Bulls’ backcourt, backpedaling toward the far basket.
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When the Bulls obtained Rodman from the San Antonio Spurs last month, straight up for Will Perdue, it was probably the biggest change of stripes in the sporting world since Sal Maglie joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956. Understand, Rodman wasn’t merely a Bulls killer when he was with the Detroit Pistons; he was hated as one of the baddest and most ruthless of the Bad Boys, in much the same way Maglie was hated in Brooklyn when he was pitching–quite often high and tight–for the New York Giants. It’s one of the pleasures of sports to hate an opposing player like that, so Rodman’s sudden arrival on the Chicago scene offered an important life lesson. It wasn’t merely that the desire to win often makes for strange bedfellows; it was that an opposing player can sometimes be so hated that a fan can lose sight of him as a human being. Rodman’s presence on the Bulls made us reassess him as an athlete and as a person.
Of course, most of the local sportswriters were blind to that reassessment. They had always thought he was a good player, albeit a bit dirty, and they had come to regard him as a dirty person to boot. None of that changed. Most writers saw Rodman’s rebounding ability as the missing piece in the Bulls puzzle. And his personal life– most vividly depicted in a Sports Illustrated cover article earlier this year–they continued to object to. Rodman was called a freak, a pervert. In short, it was the traditional homophobia of the press box, but it was a surprise to see it so thinly veiled in this day and age, especially when only weeks later a lot of these same writers would be preaching about the impropriety of tribal American symbols at the World Series.
In many respects it was a typical opening-night game. Both teams had trouble getting in sync, but the rustiness showed more with the Bulls’ triangle offense, a notoriously cranky mechanism at the beginning of a season. The Hornets, to their credit, were playing shorthanded, having traded star center Alonzo Mourning to the Miami Heat that afternoon for Glen Rice in a six-player deal. The new Hornets had been unable to make it to Chicago on such short notice, and so Charlotte kept things simple, starting veteran Robert Parish alongside rookie Zidek up front and pounding the ball down low to those guys and small forward Larry Johnson. At first the Bulls had no answer to that, especially with Pippen slowed and then benched with a groin injury. The Hornets claimed a 48-40 lead at the half, and the crowd was quiet.
