King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Terrell Owens vs. Dennis Rodman. OK, Rodman fans, let's really compare them.
Read more: Sports, Dennis Rodman, NBA, Football, NFL, King Kaufman, Terrell Owens, Sports Daily
Sept. 28, 2006 | In Wednesday's column about Terrell Owens' reported suicide attempt, which he says was a reaction to painkillers, not an attempt to hurt himself, I compared Owens' persona with that of Dennis Rodman and made what I thought was an offhand comment that Owens is "a much better football player than Rodman was a basketball player."
Imagine my surprise when several letter writers, both on the site and in my in box, took exception to that idea, arguing that Rodman was, in fact, better than Owens.
I love this sort of argument, and since I don't feel like writing about the boring baseball pennant races, the stumbling of not-even-mediocre teams toward the last few National League playoff spots, that's what we're going to talk about today.
I shouldn't have been surprised. This has come up before, when I ridiculed the trio of economics professors who wrote a book called "The Wages of Wins" for asserting that Dennis Rodman was a more valuable basketball player than Michael Jordan. The authors actually backed away from that assertion by simply claiming they'd never made it, though they had.
Rodman was one of the best rebounders of all time because that's all he did. He was a liability on offense. He was certainly an element of teams that won championships, and I'd agree he was a key element of the Pistons' title teams. That was before he became a specialist and actually played the entire game. But would the Bulls have won those three late titles in 1996-98 without him? Well, they won three without him in the early '90s. This letter argues, I think disingenuously, "Though it's true that Rodman was never a complete player -- at his best, he was a defensive specialist who also rebounded, and was never a scorer -- no football player is really expected to be a complete player. People don't criticize Terrell Owens for his inability to rush the passer." Using the same logic, I'm more valuable to society than a brain surgeon because I write about several different sports, but a brain surgeon just operates on brains.