Dennis Rodman: 'I come in peace'... give us a break
Flamboyant former NBA star Dennis Rodman is heading to North Korea, to become an unlikely ambassador for sports diplomacy at a time of heightened tensions between the US and North Korea.
Rodman, three members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, and a film crew from Vice media company are visiting the communist country to shoot footage for a TV show set to air on HBO in early April, Vice told the Associated Press before the group's departure from Beijing.
It's the second high-profile US visit this year to North Korea, a country with which it remains in a state of war. The visit comes two weeks after North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test in defiance of UN bans against atomic and missile activity.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, made a surprise four-day trip in January to Pyongyang, where he met officials and toured computer labs, just weeks after North Korea launched a satellite into space on the back of a long-range rocket.
Washington, Tokyo, Seoul and others consider both the rocket launch and the nuclear test provocative acts that threaten regional security.
North Korea claims the satellite launch is a peaceful bid to explore space, but says the nuclear test was meant as a deliberate warning to Washington. Pyongyang says it needs to build nuclear weapons to defend itself against the US, and is believed to be trying to build an atomic bomb small enough to mount on a missile capable of reaching the mainland US.
Vice said the Americans hoped to engage in a little "basketball diplomacy" in North Korea by running a sports camp for children and playing games with locals - and by competing alongside North Korea's top athletes in an exhibition match they hope will be attended by leader Kim Jong-un.
"At a time when tensions between the two countries are running high, it's important to keep lines of cultural communication open, no matter how non-traditional those channels may be," said Shane Smith, the Vice founder who hosting the TV series. "It's important to show North Koreans that America is not their enemy, and playing a game we both love is a step in the right direction."
The US state department has not been contacted about travel to North Korea byVice, a senior administration official said. The official said the department does not vet US citizens' private travel to North Korea.
In a now-defunct US-North Korean agreement by which Washington had planned last year to give food aid to Pyongyang in exchange for nuclear concessions, Washington had said it was prepared to increase people-to-people exchanges with the North, including in the areas of culture, education and sports.
Promoting technology and sports are two major policy priorities of Kim Jong-un, who took power in December 2011 following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il.
But the flamboyant Rodman, with his maze of tattoos, nose studs and neon-bleached hair, seems an unlikely diplomat to be sent to a country where male fashion rarely ventures beyond military khaki and growing facial hair is forbidden.
During his heyday in the 1990s, Rodman was a poster boy for excess. He called his 1996 autobiography Bad as I Wanna Be - and showed up wearing a wedding dress to promote it.
Shown a photo of a snarling Rodman, piercings dangling from his lower lip and two massive tattoos emblazoned on his chest, one North Korean in Pyongyang recoiled and said: "He looks like a monster!"
But Rodman is also a Hall of Fame basketball player and one of the best defenders to play the game. During an often controversial career, he won five NBA championships - a feat that quickly overshadowed his antics for at least one small North Korean group of basketball fans.
Along with soccer, basketball is enormously popular in North Korea, where it is not uncommon to see basketball hoops in hotel parking lots or in school playgrounds.
North Koreans have limited exposure to US pop culture but Michael Jordan, a former teammate of Rodman when they both played for the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, is well known.
During a historic visit to North Korea in 2000, then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright presented Kim Jong-il, famously an NBA fan, with a basketball signed by Jordan that later went on display in the huge cave at Mount Myohyang that holds gifts to the leaders.
North Korea even had its own Jordan wannabe: Ri Myong Hun, a 7ft 9ins star player who is said to have renamed himself Michaelafter his favorite player and moved to Canada for a few years in the 1990s in the hope of making it into the NBA.
Source: The Associated Press
Is far from being "a humble man."