Sports Pundits Earn 'F' For Their Tirades on Rodman Tantrum

Web-posted: Thursday, December 12, 1996

t's hard to remember what life as a Chicago sports fan was like before there was a Dennis Rodman.

Has there ever been another paid athlete who created such controversy and drove the local sporting press to such dizzying heights of moral indignation?

I haven't kept a complete list, but since he has been employed by the Bulls, I can recall his being described by sports pundits as ''insane,'' ''loathsome,'' ''psycho,'' ''disgusting,'' ''narcissistic,'' ''shameless,'' ''selfish,'' ''a freak,'' ''a civic embarrassment,'' ''greedy'' and ''an abomination.''

It's doubtful that even ''Shoeless Joe'' Jackson, the most famous member of the 1919 White Sox who was bribed by gamblers to throw the World Series, was as vilified.

The most lasting story about Jackson is that when he came out of the courthouse after the trial, a heartbroken little boy confronted him and said: ''Say it ain't so, Joe.''

If the yarn is true, I wonder how Joe would have felt if the little boy had said: ''Joe, you insane, loathsome, disgusting, greedy, selfish, abomination of a freak. Say it ain't so, you deranged f---.''

As all of us know by now, Rodman's latest offense against humanity was his use of what the press refers to as the eff-word.

Most members of the sporting press, as well as those who write ponderous essays on war and peace and the state of the world, would probably admit that they, too, have used the eff-word on occasion.

So do many modern females; some old-fashioned ones, too; teenagers; and even tiny street urchins. We have become a society that could use some soap in our mouths.

But Dennis the Menace used it live on TV after the entire Bulls team--Michael the Great included--played a really disgustingly bad game against one of the league's more feeble teams and managed to lose.

And Dennis, who has reportedly been in a bored funk in recent games, had been ejected by one of the twitchy referees, an act that has been described by coach Phil ''Guru'' Jackson as being unjust.

So when the game ended, the sporting press rushed to Dennis and asked him to share his thoughts with us.

What he should have said was something like (take your pick):

-- ''Well, you win some and you lose some.''

-- ''It's a long season and you just have to play 'em one game at a time.''

-- ''All you can do is give it 110 percent and put it in the hands of the man upstairs.''

-- ''Hey, guys, my armpits smell awful, so do you mind if I just take a shower?''

Had he said any of these things, he would have been thought of as a good sport as well as a dullard. And he'd have $100,000 more in his checking account.

Instead, he unleashed an eff-word-filled tirade against the referees, the people who run the league and other tormentors.

And in a twinkling, all those eff-words went from his vocal cords, out of his mouth, into the microphones, through the wires, into the transmitter, through the cables to our TV sets, around and around all the little transistors, into the TV and out of the tweeters and woofers into our living rooms.

(If you think about that, it's really an amazing world we live in.)

Then, with all those eff-words hanging in the air of hundreds of thousands of living rooms, we can only imagine the terrible results.

Fragile old ladies, gasping for breath as they swooned and fell off their sofas and sprawled on the coffee tables. Their horrified husbands, stumbling across the room to find little bottles of nitro pills.

And little children--oh, the helpless little children--crying out: ''No! No! That man used the eff-word and I heard it! Now, having heard him use it, I will be condemned to use it myself. My morals have been corrupted, and I will be the most foul-mouthed little bugger in the schoolyard. Woe is me. I will probably grow up to be a street-corner loiterer, a drug dealer, an alderman or a sportswriter. From this day forth, Dennis will never again be my role model.''

So now the sports pundits' agonized cries have gone out across the land: to heck with Dennis' rebounding. To blazes with a fifth championship. Nothing is worth the constant pain of having Dennis in our midst. He must be tossed off the team, banished from this most sensitive of cities, cast into the wilderness. And children must burn their Rodman jerseys.

He must be gone to preserve the dignity of the Bulls franchise, the morality of this city and the integrity of the sporting world.

It must be done. And it must be done soon, lest some sports pundit loses his eff-ing mind.

© 1996 Chicago Tribune