Dennis Rodman loses it during CNN interview

Dennis Rodman is in North Korea to play basketball. Just don't ask him about it.

Rodman and a team of former NBA players are currently in North Korea to play basketball on Kim Jong Un's 31st birthday — and Rodman's feeling pretty defensive about it.

In an exclusive satellite interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, Rodman reacts angrily — and bizarrely — when questioned about anything related to why he's there, whether he should be there in the first place, and if he'll use the opportunity to stand up for imprisoned American citizen Kenneth Bae, who was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour on vague charges.

Rodman, who calls his frequent visits to the isolated communist country "basketball diplomacy" — and who previously called Kim "a friend for life" — jabs his finger at the camera, arguing that Cuomo wouldn't be asking him to intervene in the Bae case if he understood "what Kenneth Bae did."

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"Do you understand what he did in this country?"

"What did he do?" Cuomo asks.

Rodman retorts: "You tell me."

Then Rodman loses it, ranting on and on — sometimes incoherently — about the sacrifice his team made to visit the country and claiming that their presence will eventually "open doors."

"One day, one day, this door is going to open because these 10 guys here, all of us, Christie, Vin, Dennis, Charles ... I mean everybody here, if we could open the door just a little bit for people to come here and do one thing."

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After a couple minutes of screaming at Cuomo, Rodman is interrupted by teammate Charles Smith, who calmly explains the team's intentionally non-political stance in the country.

"We didn't know it was going to take this kind of negative spin with what we are doing because we're not politicians, we're not ambassadors. We're here to do what we've been doing most of our lives," he said, attempting to do a little damage control.

While Rodman might believe in his "basketball diplomacy" mission, the NBA doesn't have his back on this one:

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