Hoop diplomacy lures Rodman back to North
NEW YORK - Dennis Rodman is going back to North Korea, and bringing a team of former NBA players with him.Days after returning from his second trip to visit Kim Jong-un - in which he said he became the first foreigner to hold the leader’s newborn daughter - Rodman announced plans Monday to stage two exhibition games in North Korea in January.
The first will be on Jan. 8 - Kim’s birthday - with another to follow two days later.
Rodman’s friendship with the autocratic leader has been criticized and led to a couple of testy exchanges during a Manhattan news conference. But Rodman insists Kim is a good person, wants to have better relations with the United States and that he’s the one who can help make it happen with his plan for “basketball diplomacy.”
“Why North Korea? It’ll open doors,” Rodman said.
Touting his friendship with Kim and taunting President Barack Obama for not talking to him, Rodman said he will go back to North Korea for a week in December to help select local players for the game. He hopes to lure U.S. stars such as his former Chicago teammate Scottie Pippen and Karl Malone.
“Michael Jordan, he won’t do it, because he’s Michael Jordan,” Rodman said.
Rodman, holding a cigar and wearing the shirt of a vodka company and a hat of a betting company that is funding the event, said Kim had asked him to train his players to compete in the 2016 Olympics and offered to allow the Hall of Famer to write a book about him.
Though looking like a billboard, Rodman said he’s not doing the event for money. He said the Irish betting company Paddy Power would put up $3.5 million. Power later said finances hadn’t been determined.
And Rodman, who joked that he hadn’t drawn such a crowd in New York since he wore a wedding dress to a book signing, was adamant that this venture was serious - “groundbreaking,” in his words.
He rarely referred to Kim by name, frequently calling him “the marshal.” Rodman first met Kim, a basketball fan, when traveling to North Korea in February for a film project.
Though saying he didn’t want to discuss politics, Rodman raised his voice when answering a questioner about Kim’s human rights record and portrayed himself as the person who could make outsiders see the young leader as different than his father and grandfather.
“He has to do his job, but he’s a very good guy,” Rodman said. “If he wanted to bomb anybody in the world, he would have done it.”
He talked around a question about the American citizen and Christian activist Kenneth Bae, who is imprisoned in the North, saying lobbying for the release of a prisoner wasn’t his job. AP
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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