Steve Kerr has never shied away from politics during his tenure as head coach of the Golden State Warriors.
But unbeknown to him, and years before the former Chicago Bulls guard assumed the helm in Golden State, Kerr was at the center of one of the first conversations ever held in the Oval Office about how to broach diplomatic relations with the new leader of a rogue nation.
Kim Jong-un rose to power as the dictator of North Korea in late 2011 following the death of his father, supreme leader Kim Jong-il. Roughly six months later, in May of 2012, economist Marcus Noland gained an audience at the White House with then President Barack Obama. He was summoned at the behest of the president who was looking for an out-of-the-box path to approach the young world leader. Noland’s idea — use basketball and Kim Jong-un’s reputed love for the Bulls as a way in, utilizing Kerr as an ambassador of sorts.
Alex Schiffer, of The Athletic, detailed the ins and outs of the crazy, but strangely palatable idea, that never came to fruition in a piece published online Monday, December 20.
Steve Kerr: A Diplomat and a Scholar
GettyHead coach Steve Kerr, of the Golden State Warriors, at the Pepsi Center on March 3, 2020 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
Noland’s thought was essentially to use a member of the NBA Championship-winning Bulls as an icebreaker. To that point, Noland told Schiffer, there was no knowledge of any American ever having met with Kim Jong-un, at least in any official capacity.
“We have to work with what we’ve got,” Noland told President Obama, according to the interview conducted by Schiffer. “If this guy is really as big of a Chicago Bulls fan as we hear, let’s work with that, because we have nothing else to go on.”
He thought Kerr was the perfect choice, as his father had been the President of the American University of Beirut, which offered Kerr an “international perspective” while also being a member of the Bulls title teams.
Also floated as potential candidates for a game of H-O-R-S-E with the supreme leader of North Korea were former Bulls players Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman, the latter of whom would one day forge a relationship with the reclusive dictator of his own accord, which lends some credibility to Noland’s notion in retrospect. However, the two members of Obama’s National Security Council who would accompany Kerr as part of the unique diplomatic endeavor, Danny Russel and Syd Seiler, were skeptical.
“Obama’s advisers reminded Noland of their political playbook and how radical his idea was,” Schiffer wrote in his piece for The Athletic. “They were conventional foreign policy thinkers, and Noland’s idea was … unconventional, to say the least.”
Kerr Reacts Upon Hearing Account of Plan Years After it was Scrapped
GettyHead coach Steve Kerr, of the Golden State Warriors, at ORACLE Arena on April 15, 2019 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
Kerr wouldn’t hear of the idea until just a little more than one week before the article in The Athletic made it to print. Schiffer explained that Anna Fifield, an Asia correspondent with the Washington Post, had recently finished a book on Kim called “The Great Successor,” of which Kerr was shown a copy on Tuesday, December 14, 2021.
Kerr’s reaction — baffled laughter.
“Oh my god. That’s hilarious,” he said.
“I’ve never heard that before,” added Kerr, according to Schiffer. “I had no knowledge of that story. So that’s … I’m surprised.”
While Kerr said he wouldn’t have been keen on the idea had it been presented to him nine years prior, there was one condition on which he would have taken up the mission.
“Unless President Obama himself asked me to do it,” Kerr said. “If he had asked me to do it, I would have done it.”
Had he been asked by the president to embark on the endeavor, Kerr said he would have beaten the North Korean dictator into the ground in a game of H-O-R-S-E — diplomacy be damned.
“I’m going all out, because it doesn’t matter,” Kerr told Schiffer. “Because the report in the [North Korean] international media would have been that he skunked me. I know (his father) made a birdie on every round of his golf score that one time. So he would have destroyed me in H-O-R-S-E, too.”
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HORSE With a Dictator: Dubs Kerr Was Pondered as Diplomat to N. Korea