Just a Pair of Hard-to-Love Lugs

Television’s sports heroes.

Marge Schott, the cantaloupe who owns the Cincinnati Reds, isn’t one of them. For an hour Monday, Dennis Rodman was.

Schott’s take on history, as expressed Sunday to a rapt ESPN interviewer, has the multitudes wringing their hands and demanding that she again be disciplined by major league baseball for flapping her lip. She previously was suspended for making racial and ethnic slurs.

It would really be newsworthy to find that ignorance or crudeness did not exist in the tobacco-stained, chaw-juiced upper regions of the national pastime. What did make headlines, however, was Schott explaining about Adolf Hitler: “Everybody knows he was good at the beginning, but he just went too far.” She also said that Hitler helped Germany’s highways and factories--arms production will do that--before “he went nuts.”

Inevitably, this would become the week’s deafening “Schott heard around the world,” as more than one sportscaster put it. And those more familiar than she with history subsequently set her straight in TV rebuttal interviews about the absence of good works in Hitler’s record, from his brownshirts to his Berlin bunker.

Yet talk about your helium-inflated brouhahas. You would have thought that Schott had given America the Sieg Heil and sung the Horst Wessel song in lederhosen. Just why anyone on ESPN would bother surveying the cratered moonscape of her brain regarding history’s greatest villain in the first place is a deep mystery. As is why it would matter to anyone what she said about Hitler. She probably also thinks he was Japan’s emperor.

At least she got the “went nuts” part right. She was just way off on the timing. In any case, why does what this woman says about any non-baseball issue carry more weight than what your cousin Myrtle says? Is she distributing glossies of the Fuhrer or copies of “Mein Kampf” at the park? Advocating skinheads or neo-Nazism? Is she anyone’s role model? Her greatest sin in this incident appears to be stupidity, and her influence does not extend beyond her dog, Schottzie.

Of all the things to worry about, the leaden ramblings of Marge Schott the historian is not one of them. She has the same 1st Amendment right as any other idiot to impale herself on her own words. Yet why bother even to put them on the air if not for the purpose of turning her ignorance into a juicy news story that sportscasters can smirk about?

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Now that extraterrestrial Rodman, on the other hand, is someone deserving of more than smirks. And it’s not because he happens to look and sound as if he just beamed down from the “Star Wars” bar.

Rodman is the rebounding fiend in a funk who performs a circus act for the Chicago Bulls, covering his body with tattoos and wearing his hair in colors ranging from bright green to flame orange. You can catch him on TV these days in the NBA playoffs and elsewhere.

Without a book to promote, he’s the kind of silent guy who wouldn’t tell you if your hair was on fire, as his appeared to be during his Monday stint on Earth with talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, which she advertised as “his boldest interview yet.” When he removed his fur hat, you wanted to douse his head with water.

As it turned out, Rodman did have a book up his sleeve, his just-published autobiography, “Bad as I Wanna Be.”

That’s pretty bad. “The world’s biggest 2-year-old” is what NBC’s late-night josher, Jay Leno, benignly titled Rodman on Monday night. But Rodman is much more than that, as shown by his long record of tornadic behavior as a professional basketball player. He has been nearly as adroit at head-butting as rebounding.

His discipline problems range from the time in 1991 when, as a member of the Detroit Pistons, he shoved his present teammate, Scottie Pippen, into a basket upright, to last March, when he was fined and suspended for six days without pay (at a total cost of $228,000) for head-butting a referee who had ejected him from a game, and then knocking over a water cooler and shouting obscenities as he strode from the court.

That’s the red ink. Yet Rodman is someone who also knows something about the benefits that can come to those who zoom over the top, someone whose propensity for being “bad” has helped earn him a book deal and TV commercial endorsements presumably worth far more than the money lifted from him by the NBA. Volatile behavior worked for Billy Martin in baseball and for John McEnroe in tennis, and when his head-butting days are over, Rodman will probably get a fat contract as a basketball commentator on a network hoping to capitalize on his weird celebrity.

As for now, you watch the game waiting for him to lose control and go haywire, just as you did McEnroe on the tennis court, except that McEnroe wielded only his mouth, never his body as a potentially lethal weapon.

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Although performing brilliantly as an athlete, Rodman’s outbursts have earned him the wrath of his teammates and coaches in San Antonio and Chicago. Here, quite obviously, is a mentally fragile man wired to enough emotional and psychological TNT to make him far more dangerous than dopey Marge Schott.

The same man who received wild cheers and applause Monday from Winfrey’s Chicago studio audience--her own enormous charm and likability rubbing off on him--as if he were nothing more than a lovable eccentric.

And no wonder, for that’s how she treated him, skimming over the darker side of his personality. Using his book as reference, Oprah asked him about his hair and his dislike of wearing shoes. He was barefoot, and the camera zoomed in on his toes. Everyone laughed. She asked him about his cross-dressing (he’s been doing book signings in drag a la Howard Stern). “That don’t mean I’m gay,” said Rodman, although he added that he’d “thought about” being with men and saw nothing wrong with kissing them on the lips. Everyone oohed.

And of course, Oprah asked him about his dating preferences and “steamy love affair” with that other celebrated exhibitionist, Madonna. “I think that me and Madonna was fit to be together,” he said.

Yes, just a goofy guy.

Just as she had once played softball in a prime-time TV interview with Michael Jackson, however, Oprah never got around to asking Rodman about the only topic of real significance here: his outbreaks of uncontrolled violence on the court. She did briefly mention the Pippen incident at Detroit, and Rodman vowed to publicly apologize for that if the Bulls win the NBA championship this year.

But she didn’t push it. This was about selling books and Oprah’s syndicated program in a ratings sweeps period, not a psychological profile.

The show’s final segment found Oprah and Rodman joined by his admiring former Detroit coach, Chuck Daly, who told of Rodman doing good deeds for the homeless. “You love him?” Oprah asked. “Yeah, I love him,” Daly said.

The hour ended with Oprah asking Rodman whom he respected most, and his breaking down and bawling before blurting out that it was his little daughter. A father shedding tears? Who wouldn’t love such a fellow?

Until the next head-butting.