Rodman calls Kim ‘my friend’
Visit to North Korea latest silly antic by clownish former NBA star
It’s rarely a good and productive thing when Dennis Rodman is back in the news, and most of the time it’s easily dismissed. He is not a serious figure, though he can be a tragic one; he is reportedly a functional alcoholic, perennially besieged by debt and lawsuits, lost in that twilight zone of novelty celebrity. He is a basketball Hall of Famer, and for a long time, it has felt like he was fading into what someone once called the strange obscurity of fame.
And then last week he went to North Korea, and everyone started talking about Dennis Rodman again.
He hung around with the country’s dynastic leader, Kim Jong-un, as part of a trip carefully arranged by VICE magazine and HBO.
Rodman and the boy king took in a basketball game, went on tours, smiled and laughed. They apparently got drunk together with Kim’s entourage. Jokes were made about it, and will continue to be made because there are always jokes.
But really, it’s not all that funny. I mean, in the global scheme of things there’s a surreal giddiness to it, like when former U.S. Secretary of State Stephen Ganyard tells ABC that “there is nobody at the CIA who could tell you more personally about Kim Jong-un than Dennis Rodman, and that in itself is scary.”
Of all the things that Dennis Rodman was ever called, or called himself, none of them were ever “intelligence asset.”
He is Dennis Rodman. He was one of the most fascinating and singular players in NBA history, a secondround pick from poverty whose body was an elastic wire, and who was never like anybody else because he tried to be unlike anybody else.
The lasting image of him was this loping kid with jug ears who would hurl himself at the ball, chase it the way a puppy chases a toy.
He played hungry, like he needed it, all the time.
He was part of two title teams in Detroit, then started with the tattoos and the bleached blond hair in San Antonio, was moved to Chicago where he was the third-best player on the Bulls team that won a record 72 games in 1995-96 and three more championships.
Along the way, he contemplated suicide — the famous shotgun-inthe-truck in the early morning hours outside The Palace of Auburn Hills — and chased attention, especially once his career ended. The piercings before it was ordinary, the wedding dress, the marriage to Carmen Electra, the outfits, Celebrity Apprentice, pro wrestling, rehab, Celebrity Rehab, all that.
As Chuck Daly, Rodman’s father figure and former Pistons coach once told The New York Times Magazine, “He’s lost himself; he can’t see where one starts and the other ends. He’s convinced he has to play up to that. I know that’s not him. The shy kid I met is who he is.”
But he became a broken man who had the cops show up to his door too many times for domestic assaults, DUIs, sexual assault charges, whatever was going on.
His Hall of Fame speech included a tearful, tortured apology for not being a good enough father, a good enough husband.
He has become the definition of the sad clown, the cautionary tale for both retired athletes but also semiretired celebrities of all stripes. Life, Dennis Rodman seemed to tell you, can grind you up.
And then, he was used as some sort of prop to get cameras into North Korea, and he came back to tell ABC’s George Stephanopoulos all about it while wearing a jacket that was made to look like it was made of dollar bills.
“I’m not a diplomat,” Rodman said.
“He loves basketball,” Rodman said. “I said Obama loves basketball. Let’s start there.”
“I love him. The guy is awesome. He was so honest,” Rodman said. “I don’t condone what he does, but as far as a person-to-person, he’s my friend.”
“He said: ‘I don’t want to do war,’ ” Rodman said. “He said that to me.”
He didn’t know about all the North Koreans who have starved, or the Orwellian controls on society, or the prison camps, or the nuclear tests. He was a dupe, a clown, a prop, only instead of spilling his guts to Dr. Drew on Celebrity Rehab he was paling
He loves basketball. I said Obama loves basketball. Let’s start there. I love him. The guy is awesome.
— Dennis Rodman
around with a 29-year-old dictator who loves basketball, and doing the talk-show rounds. And the cameras were rolling either way.
But it worked for him. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether “is it helpful when someone as high profile as Dennis Rodman goes to Pyongyang and calls Kim Jong-un a great friend, his best friend, a nice guy — doesn’t that undercut pressure from the West?” And Kerry delivered a line that some staffer had probably written for him, saying, “You know what? Dennis Rodman was a great basketball player, and as a diplomat, he was a great basketball player. And that’s where we’ll leave it.”
See? He was high-profile again. He was noticed. He had to be debriefed. He’s a crossover star in a way he never managed before. He is being condemned on the cable networks, just like the old days.
Rodman has been chasing attention and money for a long time now, and maybe this will launch him to another show, some public appearances, back into the celebrity mill for a while. Maybe he’ll make some money, and he will fade again, and the odds are none of it will be any less sad than everything that has come before.
And it was all still surreal and strange, more than ever. On Tuesday, in response to the threat of sanctions, Kim threatened to dissolve the Korean Armistice Agreement with South Korea that has stood since 1953.
And the only public intelligence that contradicts the threat in any way is the last 60 years, and the fact that he told Dennis Rodman that he does not want to do war.