Eric Bischoff Had Dennis Rodman Purposely Provoke Karl Malone By Slapping His Ass During The 1998 Finals To Promote Their WCW Match
[TMZ] - "Now, what I said to Dennis, not to Karl was, 'Hey Dennis, if anything were to happen off court while there's a timeout, while there's no gameplay ... so that the feud between Karl Malone and Dennis Rodman is real, on a kind of a 360-degree basis, not just what happens on our TV show,' that wouldn't piss me off at all."
In a few short words - yeah, no shit. This is what made 90s wrestling the best (outside of Sable, Stacy Kiebler, Sunny, etc). They would go try anything and in this case we had Dennis Rodman/Hulk Hogan vs DDP and Karl Malone. Again, I can't stress how insane it was that it happened during the Bulls/Jazz and Rodman's just entire run in wrestling. He had a 48 hour trip
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The match happened at Bash at the Beach - just an unbelievable PPV name for wrestling to begin with. That took place on July 12, exactly 1 month and 1 day after the NBA Finals ended. Imagine that happening now in a world with social media. Twitter would be absolutely electric if we had like Draymond Green vs DeMarcus Cousins or some combo like that.
Rodman was perfect for wrestling too. He was obviously eccentric and didn't really care. He was a personality and one of the few personalities that went past basketball in the 90s. Everyone knew Rodman for different reasons and that was rare back in the day. Who could forget his entrance into Nitro with nWo:
And he just listened to Bischoff, no problem. This is how he would provoke Malone during the Finals:
Goddamn I wish we had Twitter around for Rodman.