Basketball: Letter From Los Angeles - Rodman one-man volcano

Basketball eccentric Dennis Rodman has moved to the Los Angeles Lakers. The question is, while he is ready for LA, is the city of LA ready for him?

DENNIS RODMAN is not a man to do things the straightforward way. Which might explain why, with important news to impart about his basketball career, he held an impromptu news conference at the beginning of last week at the Beverly Hills branch of Planet Hollywood.

It is not exactly your standard basketball venue. But then Rodman - a man more famous for his cross-dressing, his extravagant body-piercing and his love affair with Madonna than for his considerable skills as a rebounder - is not your average basketball star.

He turned up half an hour late, sporting just a couple of diamond-studded ear-rings on his nose and lip, strode in with his glamour-puss wife, the former Baywatch star Carmen Electra, his agent and his sister, and said he had an important announcement to make. The assembled sportswriters knew well in advance what this announcement would be: that Rodman had decided to sign up with the Los Angeles Lakers, to try to recreate with Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant some of the magic he generated over the past three seasons alongside Scottie Pippen and the legendary Michael Jordan at the championship- topping Chicago Bulls.

Yes, Rodman confirmed. "Hopefully I'll be playing this week and, hopefully, the Lakers and the people of California will accept me for who I am and what I do," he said. He even specified which number he would wear on his shirt, cracking a feeble joke about his favourite sexual position with his wife while he was about it. But then, just moments later, he didn't sound so sure, saying he had a long way to go in negotiating an adequate contract and was not all that optimistic he and the Lakers boss Jerry Buss could come to terms.

So was he signing or wasn't he? The journalists grew impatient. If this was an official announcement, how come nobody from the Lakers was present? Rodman grew defensive, and then emotional. "I'm never going to win," he wailed, "no matter what I do for this league, for the game of basketball, I'm never going to win." And with that he burst into tears, mumbled something about having very little money, and stormed out of the room.

As it turned out, the man known in the business as "The Worm" was indeed back. The Lakers signed him the very next day and, by Friday, he was in action, putting in a creditable performance in a breezy little game against the low-ranking LA Clippers which the Lakers won 99- 83. A clutch of Rodman's Hollywood friends, including Ed Norton, Ben Stiller and the director Penny Marshall, turned up to cheer him, as did the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a big fan from his Chicago days.

So was this the Dennis Rodman that Dennis Rodman likes to depict - a compulsive attention-seeker, prankster and general pain about town off court, but a consummate professional when the game is at stake? Well, actually, no. There can rarely have been so tumultuous an arrival of any major ball-player, or a team so divided over the wisdom of its new signing.

A week before the deal was done another basketball legend, the Lakers vice-president and part owner Magic Johnson, made clear on public television he thought signing Rodman would be a disaster. Then, the day before Rodman's debut, the Lakers coach, Del Harris, was fired. Ostensibly this was Harris's punishment for allowing a string of recent near-victories to slip away in the final quarter. But the timing of his dismissal was surely no coincidence: the Lakers' top brass, notably Buss and O'Neal, decided Harris was the problem and Rodman the solution, and there was never going to be room for the two of them.

It's a risky strategy for the Lakers to take. After all, Rodman is a man with a reputation for sitting at home eating cereal instead of coming to practice. He is currently being sued for harassment by a waitress who says he shoved a $100 bill down her blouse and tried to grab her breasts. And that's not to mention such antics as head-butting a referee, insulting the Mormons of Utah, and vanishing from the professional circuit to make action movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme. As Tim Kawakami wrote in the Los Angeles Times last week: "Rodman isn't merely a disruption, he's the disruption - a walking, cursing, Las Vegas strip-clubbing nightmare."

Rodman, of course, will feel right at home in LA, a city that plays to all his showbiz instincts. Whether LA will feel at home with him is another matter.

Andrew Gumbel