Dennis Rodman had many epic battles on the court with some of the greats of the game during his Hall of Fame career. So, when Rodman was asked to name his biggest rival in the NBA during an appearance on N3on’s stream, he had a lot of options to choose from, but he went left field.
“My biggest rival?” Rodman asked. “Dennis Rodman… I had to defeat myself to earn my way to be in the NBA. I had to. I depend on me to make it… When you make it back in the day, you making like 75,000. You still gotta go to work summertime. You still poor. So, first three years of my life, like most people back then, you have to go to work.”
Rodman grew up in poverty, and he didn’t have a father figure to guide him either. His father, Philander, left the family when he was a child, which led to his mother, Shirley, being forced to take on many odd jobs.
Rodman’s childhood proved to be quite troubling, and as tends to be the case, that led to him having issues as an adult. He would end up battling depression and alcoholism and became quite an unstable individual who was prone to erratic behavior.
Despite all that, Rodman had a basketball career that he could be very proud of. Not many would have seen that coming when the Detroit Pistons selected him with the 27th pick in the second round of the 1986 NBA Draft. It didn’t take him long, though, to show that he had the potential to become a special player.
Rodman made the All-Defensive First Team in just his third season in the NBA. He would follow that up by winning back-to-back Defensive Player of the Year awards in 1990 and 1991. Then, after that 1990-91 season, Rodman began a remarkable run that saw him win seven straight rebounding titles from 1992 to 1998.
Keep in mind, there was no shortage of great big men in the NBA in the 1990s. It’s just that none of them was as good as Rodman, who stood at 6’7″, on the glass. He had just mastered that art scientifically.
Rodman was contributing to a winning cause, too. He won back-to-back titles with the Pistons in 1989 and 1990. Rodman would later end up on the Chicago Bulls in 1995 and led them to a three-peat from 1996 to 1998 along with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
Rodman’s NBA career ended in 2000, and he walked away with career averages of 7.3 points, 13.1 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 0.7 steals, and 0.6 blocks per game. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2011 and was later named to the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team in 2021.
