Don’t worry. Dennis Rodman is just trying to save the world.
DENNIS RODMAN’S FASCINATION WITH NORTH KOREA ANOTHER WEIRD BOUNCE IN TRUE ECCENTRIC’S JOURNEY
De nnis Rodman has clung to celebrity, or at least his sketchy notion of it, for nearly two decades since his basketball career ended.
“Anyone with the right combination of flair, talent, drive and luck can become important in America,” Rodman wrote in 1997, in the third of his four — count ’ em, four — memoirs, Walk on The Wild Side.
If importance is still what he’s after, he holds a broad and naive view of it. Rodman is walking 1990s nostalgia. The subversive vibes he projected as a player today come across as behaviour that resembles the way a small, rebellious child might imagine a cool adult.
Rodman, 56, a hall of famer whose genius sense for rebounding helped him win five NBA titles and become perhaps the greatest defensive player in history, resurfaced this month when he took his fifth trip to North Korea to visit Kim Jong Un, the Stalinist leader whom he befriended in 2013. The latest trip, which Rodman called a “mission,” was funded by potcoin.com, a company that peddles cryptocurrency for buying and selling marijuana.
“The main thing we’re doing is trying to open doors between both countries,” Rod- man said in a video on his Twitter account before he departed, walking next to Chris Volo, part of his marketing team. “Wish us luck.”
When Rodman returned, he hawked T- shirts on his Twitter feed. They showed a cartoon image of himself spinning a basketball with one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other, sandwiched by the words “Ambassador Rodman.” By last Tuesday, he had settled in New York. A night earlier, Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student held in North Korea for more than a year and released June 13 in a coma, died at home in Ohio.
In an interview Friday on ABC’s Good Morning America, Rodman and Volo insisted his visit to North Korea helped lead to Warmbier’s release. A U. S. Department of State official said he had nothing to do with it.
Rodman offered “prayer and l ove” to Warmbier’s family, adding, “I didn’t know he was sick.”
“As always, I advised him not to go, but he doesn’t listen to anyone,” said Elaine Lancaster, a Miami actress who befriended Rodman in the early 1990s. “Dennis is one of the sweetest, most approachable people you’d ever want to know. He does this stuff to stir up publicity a little bit, but Dennis is nothing but pure love.”
Those close to Rodman believe he travels to North Korea with sincere, if naive, intentions.
“He genuinely thinks he’s trying to change the world,” Lancaster said.
But having befriended Kim Jong Un, a basketball fanatic who reportedly admired Rodman as a player, he seems, even to some friends, wilfully ignorant of the dictator’s brutality.
“I said, Dennis, you realize they have gulags and they have oppressive regimes, right?” Lancaster said. “He said, ‘ Yeah, but I haven’t seen it.’ Of course you haven’t seen it!”
Rodman told ABC “if you actually talk to” Kim, people would see a friendly person. He said they’ve sung karaoke and ridden horses together.
Aside from his trips to North Korea, Rodman’s post-basketball life can be distilled into a string of legal troubles, voluminous alcohol consumption and trading off Blist fame. In 2012, he allegedly owed more than US$800,000 to his ex-wife and the mother of two of his three children. In legal filings, his representatives claimed he was broke and unable to pay, his alcoholism having sapped his marketing opportunities.
Over the years, drinking and parties led to runins with police. “His former oceanfront home in Newport Beach could have been mistaken for a police substation,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2012.
Rodman went into rehab following a doomed “basketball diplomacy” trip to North Korea in 2014, only to emerge and proclaim he wasn’t an alcoholic. This February, a judge sentenced him to three years of probation after he faced misdemeanour charges for driving the wrong way up a highway entrance ramp after midnight one July night, causing another motorist to veer into a side wall on the I-5 in Santa Ana, Calif.
Through turbulence, Rodman engenders warmth.
“I love Dennis Rodman like a brother,” said John Salley, a former Pistons and Bulls teammate. “I really mean that.”
The political naivete he shows in his North Korean dealings materialize elsewhere in his life as innocence. His generosity, mixed with apparent indifference toward material good, both worries and charms friends.
“He rarely has money, but when he does he has big wads of cash,” Lancaster said. “I’ve seen him give $ 100 bills to homeless people. I say ‘ Dennis, what the hell are you doing?’ ‘ I’m just going to give it to strippers, anyway.’ ”
Rodman keeps a small stable of advisers who double as friends, and he felt deep hurt when one of them, a presumed financial adviser, had been stealing from him for years.
Peggy Fulford, a 58- yearold who went by several aliases, was arrested in December after an FBI investigation and charged with defrauding f ormer NFL running back Ricky Williams and three other professional athletes, including Rodman, who, according to basketball- reference. com, earned US$26.97 million during his playing career.
Rodman grew up without a father in Texas and worked part- time as a janitor after high school, during which time he grew nine inches. He played organized basketball for the first time at a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics school in Oklahoma. In his mid-20s with the Detroit Pistons, head coach Chuck Daly became the closest thing he had to a male authority figure. When the Pistons forced out Daly, Rodman changed. He said he “killed the old Dennis” and crafted a new persona.
In the latter half of his playing career, Rodman wielded his unruly streak as a marketing weapon. Despite a playing style reliant on hustle and subtlety, he achieved fame — a Rolling Stone cover, celebrity flings with Madonna and Carmen Electra, to whom he was married for five months — beyond that reserved even for the sport’s greatest scorers. Playing alongside Michael Jordan for the Bulls, his dyed hair and embrace of the LBGTQ community were utterly alien to professional sports.
“He was the one who started it,” Salley said. “Now, you can’t get in the NBA without a tattoo.”
As the l i melight f rom basketball faded, he latched on to fame in forms available to oddball stars: professional wrestling, two turns on Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice, autograph signings, paid appearances. Dr. Phil.
He makes a living now on the outer reaches of celebrity, booking gigs as an MC at clubs in Europe. Products offered on his website include action figures, T-shirts, fantasy sports games and personalized voice-mail messages at $500 a pop.
“In the past couple years, he’s made a living because people still love Dennis,” Cohen said. “Everybody loved his hustle. Everybody loved his persona. Especially in Europe, he’s like a huge star.”
The appearances seem to have given Rodman a warped sense of his place in culture. “If you ranked the 10 most identifiable people on the planet, I’d be No. 5,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2013. “I’d come in right after God, Jesus, Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama.”
Rodman’s deluded notions provide a theory as to why he continues to travel to North Korea, beyond the fact fringe companies pay him to do so.
Rod man supported Trump’s presidential campaign and knows him from his two appearances on his reality show. He was not interviewed for this story. Messages left with his agent were not returned.
Before leaving Beijing for the North Korean capital last Tuesday, Rodman told reporters trailing him he hoped to do “something that’s pretty positive” during his visit.
Colin Offland, a British filmmaker, shadowed Rodman with a film crew on a 2014 trip to North Korea, the basis of the documentary Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang. The trip turned into a disaster. Rodman took a team of ex- NBA players to play against a North Korean team as a birthday present to Kim Jong Un. He drank heavily, sang Happy Birthday to Kim before the game and gave a drunken, unhinged interview on CNN admonishing Kenneth Bae, an American then imprisoned in a North Korean labour camp. Several players, including Vin Baker, later said they regretted attending.
Despite Rodman’s unsettling behaviour, Offland could not help but like him.
“He became someone I really admired by the end of it,” Offland said. “He had a vulnerability about him … He genuinely saw an opportunity to do something. I don’t want to sound naive saying this: He believed he could make a difference.”