Dennis Rodman landed in North Korea on Thursday to begin his "basketball diplomacy" trip, where he will coach a team of Pyongyang ballers and bring in 12 former NBA players for a Jan. 8 game.
The game, which has tentatively been named "The Big Bang in Pyongyang," is slated to take place on leader Kim Jong-Un's birthday.
Rodman's trip comes in the wake of North Korea's execution of Jang Song Thaek, a political figure whose disappearance caused analysts to speculate about the Kim regime's fate, the Associated Press reported.
But Rodman told the media during a short question and answer session at his hotel in Pyongyang that the recent events didn't faze him.
"I can't control what they do with their government, I can't control what they say or how they do things here," he told AP. "I'm just trying to come here as a sports figure and try to hope I can open the door for a lot of people in the country."
Rodman, who has become friendly with Kim in the recent past, said last week that he will help train a team of basketball players from the DPRK in preparation for a game against 12 ex-NBA players named "Dennis' Dream Team."
A spokesperson from Paddy Power, an online gambling site that's paying for Rodman's trip to Pyongyang, said last week that, "taking a pragmatic view, we have spoken to many experts familiar with recent developments in the DPRK and it was the general consensus that it is safe to travel there. The purpose of this trip is not to get involved with politics, but to prove once again that sport has the power to rise above all issues. And this will be a unique sporting occasion."
The roster for the American team hasn't yet been announced, AP reported.
"North Korea has given me the opportunity to bring these players and their families over here, so people can actually see, so these players can actually see, that this country is actually not as bad as people project it to be in the media," Rodman said during the hotel interview, adding that he might meet up with Kim at some point during his several-day stay.
But the main thrust of his trip, he stated, was to provide the NBA players with an experience that would bring them home with "some really, really nice things, some really cool things about this country."
