Early Life and Education
Dennis Rodman was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of Shirley and Philander Rodman, Jr., an Air Force pilot, later a veteran of the Vietnam War after Rodman's birth. When he was young, his father left his family, eventually settling in the Philippines. Rodman has many brothers and sisters: according to his father, he has either 26 or 28 siblings on his father's side; however, Rodman himself has stated that he is the oldest of a total of 47 children. After his father left, Shirley took many odd jobs — at times, four at the same time — to support her family. In his 1997 biography Bad As I Wanna Be, he expresses his disgust and hate for his father: "I haven't seen my father in more than 30 years, so what's there to miss ... I just look at it like this: Some man brought me into this world. That doesn't mean I have a father." Rodman met his father for the first time in 42 years on July 19, 2012, after an exhibition basketball game with the NBA "Alumni" team in the Philippines, where his father lives.
The impoverished Rodman and his two sisters, Debra and Kim, grew up in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, Texas, considered one of the worst areas of Dallas in those times. Rodman was so attached to his mother that he refused to move when she sent him to a nursery when he was four years old. According to Rodman, Shirley Rodman was more interested in his two sisters Debra and Kim, who were both considered more talented than he was in basketball, and made him a laughingstock whenever he tagged along with them. He felt generally "overwhelmed" by the all-female household. Debra and Kim would go on to become All-Americans at Louisiana Tech and Stephen F. Austin, respectively, as Debra would win two national titles with the Lady Techsters.
When Rodman experienced his growth spurt, he became even more withdrawn because he felt odd in his own body. Rodman was so insecure around women that he thought he was homosexual in his teens. He lost his virginity when he was 20 years old and had his first sexual experience with a prostitute; he described this as an unpleasant experience.
While attending South Oak Cliff High School, Rodman played under future Texas A&M coach Gary Blair. However, Rodman was not considered an athletic standout. According to himself, he was "unable to hit a layup" and was listed in the high school basketball teams, but was either benched or cut from the squads. Measuring only 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m) as a freshman in high school, he also failed to make the football teams and was "totally devastated". After finishing school, Rodman worked as an overnight janitor at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. He experienced a sudden growth spurt, and decided to give basketball another shot.
A family friend tipped off the head coach of Cooke County College in Gainesville, Texas. In his single semester there, he averaged 17.6 points and 13.3 rebounds, before flunking out due to poor academic performance. After his short stint in Gainesville, he transferred to Southeastern Oklahoma State University, an NAIA school. There, Rodman was a three-time NAIA All-American and led the NAIA in rebounding in both the 1984–1985 and 1985–1986 seasons. In three seasons there, 1983–1984 through 1985–1986, he averaged 25.7 points and 15.7 rebounds, led the NAIA in rebounding twice and registered a .637 field goal percentage. At the Portsmouth Invitational, a pre-draft camp for NBA hopefuls, he won Most Valuable Player honors and caught the attention of the Detroit Pistons.
During this time, Rodman worked at a summer youth basketball camp, where he befriended camper Bryne Rich, who was shy and withdrawn, following a hunting accident in which he mistakenly shot and killed his best friend. The two became almost inseparable and formed a bond. Rich invited Rodman to his rural Oklahoma home; at first, Rodman was not well-received by the Riches due to being an African-American. But, the Riches were so grateful to him for bringing their son out of his shell that they were able to set aside their prejudices. Although Rodman had severe family and personal issues himself, he "adopted" the Riches as his own in 1982 and went from the city life to "driving a tractor and messing with cows." Rodman credits the Riches as his "surrogate family" that helped him through college.
Read more about this topic: Dennis Rodman
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In the early forties and fifties almost everybody “had about enough to live on,” and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)