Dennis Rodman returning to North Korea next week?

As a sports fan, an NBA fan, a Chicago Bulls fan, and a Dennis Rodman fan, I was already feeling like Rodman’s reputation had taken a hit this morning, after his friend Kim Jong Un slipped a bit further into the world of paranoid political psychosis usually found only in the pages of Machiavelli and Tacitus.

And now Rodman is going back? (HERE.)

Rodman has always been filled with surprises, of course, and not just the obvious ones (such as rainbow-colored hairstyles).

One of my favorite NBA stories (told on this blog before) involves Rodman and Jerry Krause, the widely loathed (and highly successful) former General Manager of the Bulls. It was evident after Michael Jordan’s return from retirement in spring 1995 that the Bulls needed a good power forward; former Bulls star Horace Grant had eaten them alive while playing in an Orlando uniform, leading to Chicago’s elimination from the playoffs.

We all know what happened– they picked up the troubled Rodman from San Antonio, and despite some erratic behavior, Rodman helped the Bulls win their fourth, fifth, and sixth championships. But the funny thing is that another of Chicago’s power forward targets, Jayson Williams of New Jersey, said the following at the time: “The Bulls called me in for three days of psychological tests. The next day, they signed Dennis Rodman.”

A hilarious statement when it was made. Jayson Williams was always a comedian, probably just a half-cut below Charles Barkley in witty quotability. And whereas Rodman was an erratic/eccentric disciplinary problem child who had nearly shot himself to death in an arena parking lot a few years earlier, Williams simply seemed a bit mouthy and irreverent, but otherwise quite stable. It certainly did look like Jerry Krause’s psychological tests were a waste of time if he ended up acquiring Rodman anyway– ostensibly the player with the worst psychological makeup in the league.

So, what happened in the ensuing years? Williams was charged (deservedly) with manslaughter and imprisoned on a lesser charge, with the trial bringing out that he often threatened others with guns and even killed his own dog by gunshot for no good reason. He was tasered by police after a hotel rampage, destroyed numerous trees in New York in a drunk driving accident, and punched a man in the face in a North Carolina bar fight. I’d love to get ahold of Krause’s psychological tests now. It would be fascinating to see how Rodman’s results compared with those of Jayson Williams, but obviously Krause chose the better citizen of the two.

In the meantime, Rodman’s expected “tragic” post-NBA life never really materialized. The only incident I remember is one where he was cited for excessive noise at a house party after his California neighbors complained.

And now Rodman reappears, on the stage of geopolitics. WTF? And it is likely that Kim Jong Un would have done even more poorly on Krause’s psychological tests than Jayson Williams did.

But I must admit, it always seemed as if Krause gave those psychological tests at least in part as a power trip. He once called in the harmless and lovable Pete Myers to “see where he stands mentally,” about which Myers reported: “I didn’t get that part. They know who I am. I’m Pete.”

There were also stories about Krause making players nervous in interviews with questions such as “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” He seemed to be having far too much fun with these tests, and I never took them seriously. But then he totally nailed it on the Rodman/Williams decision, when all of the rest of us would have blown it based on our mere prejudices about the respective psychologies of the two. Amazing.

from Weimar

Lorenz Engell with a nice paper at the conference this morning (inside Goethe’s House) on the concept of ontography in my work and Ian Bogost’s, in relation to Bergson and Pasolini. Not sure whether he plans to publish it in either German or English.