Dennis Rodman

His extradeportivas adventures aroused more covers than his sporting successes, although without a doubt, he was a determining player in all the teams he played in thanks to his eminently aggressive and crazy game. Dennis Rodman was a strange case of a basketball player. An inside player who with just two meters became the best rebounder in modern NBA history, something illogical in a league where seven-foot players abound, and a tireless worker in the position of power forward, despite the fact that He did not have a precisely healthy and stable life.

Precisely, this imbalance both on and off the field, corroborated with phrases like "I love the pain of the game", was what made him a different player, far from formality and who understood rather little protocol, capable of fight each ball as if it were the last, even if he had to fly over the audience to achieve it, and capable of starring tanganas with consecrated players bigger and stronger than him like Barkley, O'Neal, Ewing or Malone, with whom he maintained duels that They brushed against violence. He always wanted to make it clear that he would never wrinkle before anything and anyone. A mentality that made him almighty in sports because he always wanted to be more than his rivals, but a time bomb for everything

THE 'BAD BOY' RECALLS IN THE 'BAD BOYS'
As if it were a premonition, the bad guy in the NBA of the 90s was selected in the second round by the Detroit Pistons, the so-called "Bad Boys", a team that Rodman came to like a glove as they based their game in the hardness taken to the extreme. Few could imagine that this boy would reach such a high when at 17 he was only 1.75 and worked in a supermarket in Dallas, although his growth of 27 centimeters in a year made him rethink his dedication to basketball. His game moved away for miles of technique and fundamentals, although what was necessary to put into practice on a scale: fight, claw, aggressiveness and a point of madness, it was already inside.
In this way, he called the attention of the fans, who were perplexed before a type of unique player that David Stern, head of the NBA, feared, and that his rivals hated. In his first year he went unnoticed in a team with great figures like Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars or Bill Laimbeer, although he began to gain popularity after the great defense he made in a match with the star of the moment Larry Bird, which made him start be known as a real prey dog.

Over the years in Detroit his wild character became increasingly evident, but at the same time his contribution to the team was 'in crescendo', which was crucial for the "Bad Boys" to get the titles of 1989 and 1990 It was proven that this second-round player had been one of the biggest drafts in the 1986 draft.
individually, both in 1990 and 1991, he was named best defender of the year, although his real specialty was the rebounds, averaging the incredible average of more than 18 per game in 1992, taking his first award as the league's top rebounder. . In the war for the rebound, he always came out victorious, and for the next six years that award was not far from his hands, an achievement that nobody has managed to match. His unlikely ability to capture any ball that had no owner, which led him to get 34 sacks in a match, was something inexplicable for someone two meters.

It was true that he had an imposing athletic ability, but what made him different in that section was his intuition, together with his incessant fight for each ball, which in many cases made his rivals desperate. The controversial power forward opted to simplify a topic that he saw as follows: "I'm hungrier than many", "each rebound is a personal challenge" or "the only thing I do that others do is jump three or four times for a bounce. " The great Andrés Montes guessed correctly: "Guess who's coming tonight". His rivals knew that playing against him was very uncomfortable and even irritating because in certain aspects he was insurmountable and if you entered his game the battle against him was practically lost. Rodman never gave up and above all he never satisfied himself.

1992, THE YEAR THAT MARKED YOU FOR LIFE
The year 1992, apart from his achievements, was decisive personally for "the worm", as his mother nicknamed him when he was small, as he hit bottom due to two reasons. The first was that his wife left him taking her daughter with her to Sacramento and the second was that his coach, Chuck Daly, whom he considered as the father he never really had, left the Pistons to enroll in the Nets of deceased Petrovic. At that moment, Rodman fell into a deep depression, and a strange event occurred. Members of the club found him in his van in the parking lot of the Pistons' pavilion with a loaded shotgun. The case was treated as a suicide attempt by the player, although he simply claimed that he had killed old Dennis to let the new one go.

From then on, those who know him admitted that he had radically changed for the better, although without doubt, his sanity was in question. Like other players who reached the top, he was not exempt from personal problems. When he was very young, his father left them abandoned. With serious economic problems, at age seven he had to travel the suburbs of Dallas just to get some money. Later, he acknowledged that all his childhood was looking for an escape. When he found her older, he was already an unmanageable animal.
In 1993, the new Dennis was transferred to the San Antonio Spurs. The ex-State University of South Oklahoma contributed from the first day a large dose of energy to a campus, which with his arrival improved significantly. David Robinson, leader of that team, was delighted to have a player like him at his side, to free him from the dirty game, and in turn did not subtract pitches, and prominence in the end. The career of the 'worm' was in good port, but at the same time, he was responsible for demonstrating that the old Dennis had not died at all, either for lack of discipline or extra-sports issues

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