Dennis Rodman has spent decades cultivating one of the most outrageous public personas in sports history. But according to a man who shared a locker room with him during one of basketball’s greatest dynasties, the real Rodman looked nothing like the character the world came to know.
Robert Parish on Dennis Rodman: ‘The Opposite of the Persona He Tries to Live Up To’
The excerpts come from The Chief, a new memoir by Hall of Fame center Robert Parish, written alongside Jake Uitti.
In it, Parish reflects on his remarkable final season in the NBA, the 1996-97 campaign with the Chicago Bulls. He was 43 when he joined Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Phil Jackson, and Rodman on a team chasing its fifth championship. The season ended with a 69-13 regular season record and another title. For Parish, it was ring number four. For Rodman, it was another year leading the league in rebounds.
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But it is what Parish saw behind the scenes that makes for the most compelling reading.
“Dennis was one of the nicest people you will ever meet on this planet,” Parish writes. “He’s just the opposite of the persona that he tries to live up to, like he’s crazy and deranged. He’s the best self-promoter since Muhammad Ali and Madonna. He finds more ways to keep himself in the spotlight than anyone. But he’s a sweetheart of a person. If he was crazy, he was crazy like a fox.”
Coming from someone as measured and reserved as Parish, that assessment carries real weight. The Boston Celtics legend was not a man given to empty praise. He had spent his career as the quiet enforcer, letting his play do the talking across 21 seasons in the league. He had seen elite competitors up close: Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and a young Michael Jordan. He obviously understood the difference between performance and character.
His verdict on Rodman is unambiguous. Beneath the hair, the tattoos, the impromptu Vegas trips, the wedding dress photoshoots, and the relentless tabloid presence was a man Parish describes as fundamentally warm.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Parish also opens up about the one moment that practice got genuinely heated during that championship run, and it had nothing to do with Rodman.
“Thinking back on the team, there’s only one day that comes to mind when things got a little heated in practice. It was between MJ and me. I started talking s**t. For some reason, my last year in the league, I came out of my shell a bit. I’d never got my mouth running in any other season.”
Two Dynasties, One Witness
What makes Parish’s perspective so uniquely valuable is the vantage point it comes from. He was a cornerstone of the Celtics dynasty of the 1980s. A three-time champion who formed what many consider the greatest frontcourt in NBA history alongside Bird and McHale. When he arrived in Chicago in September 1996, he brought with him a frame of reference that almost no one else in basketball possessed.
The contrast between the two franchises was stark. The Celtics ran on structure, repetition, and veteran hierarchy. Chicago, under Jackson’s triangle system and his unconventional psychological approach, thrived within what Parish describes as organized chaos.
Rodman was the embodiment of that chaos. He was a man who could arrive at practice looking disheveled and then log 40 minutes of elite defensive basketball without breaking a sweat. In the 1996-97 season alone, he averaged 16.1 rebounds per game at 35 years old, leading the league for the sixth consecutive year.
Parish played just 43 games that season and averaged limited minutes, but he didn’t need the floor time. The younger players on the Bulls, who were navigating the edges of greatness for the first time, gravitated toward him for guidance.
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He became, as he puts it, something of a living link between dynasties. Jordan led. Pippen executed. Rodman rebounded and disrupted. And Parish, in his quiet way, held it all together from the margins.
His memoir makes clear that the Bulls’ greatness was never just about talent. It was about accepting people for exactly who they were, with their wildcard tendencies and all. And by that measure, Dennis Rodman, sweetheart, made perfect sense.
