North Korea’s exclusion from world politics does not preclude it from becoming a power — in basketball.
The nation’s interest in the sport drew worldwide attention last week, when a team of former National Basketball Association players led by retired All-Star Dennis Rodman staged an exhibition game for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang. It was Rodman’s fourth visit to the country.
While little is known about Kim, who took power in late 2011 after his father died and is believed to be about 30 years old, he has shown an appreciation of basketball. North Korea won six medals at the London Games in 2012 in sports ranging from judo to weightlifting, although it has never fielded an Olympic basketball squad. With support from Kim, it would not be an impossible task to build a competitive national program, perhaps by the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games.
Photo: AFP / KCNA via KNS
“I’m certain it’s going to lead to more and more people playing basketball,” said James Person, director of the North Korea International Documentation Project at the Wilson Center in Washington. “I have very little doubt that you’ll see basketball courts popping up around the country and kids learning to play.”
Whatever the impact inside North Korea, Rodman’s antics, including an alcohol-fueled rant in a TV interview, may not have helped the nation’s push for world recognition of its basketball aspirations. The NBA disowned his trip to the country, made in the face of international economic sanctions on dealings with North Korea.
The country is a member of the International Basketball Federation, known by its French acronym FIBA, though it has no ranking points and has not competed in any events recently or ever in the FIBA World Cup, the organization’s biggest event.
“North Korea is indeed an integral part of FIBA Asia and are very crucial for further development of basketball in the region,” FIBA Asia secretary-general Hagop Khajirian said in an e-mailed statement.
FIBA has three approved referees in North Korea. The country had planned to participate in the Asian Championships for Women, which began in October last year, until pulling out just before its start without giving a reason.
“Let’s say they were trying to qualify for Tokyo, they have four or five years ahead of them,” former International Baseball Federation president Harvey Schiller said. “Can you take people who have no knowledge of basketball and turn them into basketball players in four or five years? It’s not like bobsled, where you just need to push and jump in the sled, but I think it’s possible.”
Rick Burton, the former commissioner of the Sydney-based National Basketball League, said Kim’s display of affection for the sport means that many parents and children will be told: “Basketball is good for you. If you get good at basketball, the dictator for life is going to think highly of you.”
“If that’s accurate, you should have a groundswell and that groundswell is going to be looking for outlets,” said Burton, a sports management professor at Syracuse University in New York.
North Korean interest in the sport is not new, Person said.
Displayed inside a North Korean museum showing foreign leaders’ gifts is a Michael Jordan-signed basketball that former US secretary of state Madeline Albright gave former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father, while trying to arrange a visit by then-US president Bill Clinton, Person said.
Kim Jong-il was a “huge fan of the Bulls,” the NBA team that Rodman played for with Jordan from 1995 to 1998, he said.
Person, 38, said he was given a drive-by tour of a Pyongyang street in 2012 where they were finishing construction of new sports facilities. It included ice skating and gymnastics centers, as well as what he thinks was a basketball facility.
“It was this very long street with these massive structures that were being built to train North Korean athletes,” Person said. “The North Koreans take their sports very, very seriously.”
“If you go back a ways, you can look at the old Soviet Union, they basically imported US coaches to teach them the game,” Schiller said in a telephone interview. “They don’t have to bring coaches in from the United States. If they have a good relationship with coaches from China, they can bring coaches from there.”
While creating a strong basketball program is especially challenging in North Korea, it could build a program capable of international competitiveness in between five and 10 years, according to Bobby Sharma, the senior vice president of global basketball and strategic initiatives for sports agency IMG Worldwide.
Unlikely to send players elsewhere to train, North Korea would need to develop a strong internal pipeline to determine who its best players are and a “cherry-picking protocol” to find athletic youths, Burton said.
Person said that Kim’s main motivation in publicizing Rodman’s most recent visit was as propaganda to show that great Americans, such as NBA stars like Rodman, are wiser than the US leadership, though basketball will flourish as a result.
Another side effect is that North Korea’s people will be further introduced to another US institution — capitalism, Burton said.
“Capitalism is based on winning and communism is based on everybody being equal, and when you push sport you ultimately create winners,” Burton said. “The very use of sport is going to introduce a whole lot of capitalism.”
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