United States women’s national team star Trinity Rodman detailed a fractured relationship with her father, NBA champion Dennis Rodman, who she said was emotionally distant and created financial difficulties for his children during their youth.
The soccer player has been reluctant to talk about her father in public, alluding to a complicated relationship with the former basketball star. However, in an episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast that was released Wednesday, Rodman finally spoke in detail about his father. “He’s not dad,” she said. “Maybe for blood, but nothing more.”
“With dad’s situation, in terms of what I’ve leaked and what I’ve talked about, I feel like my brother and I have been very generous with the way we’ve talked and very selfless,” Rodman said. . “I think we never want to make him look bad, and that’s at the cost of containing a lot of problems that we’ve been through and just trauma, per se.”
Rodman, along with his older brother DJ and mother Michelle Moyer, lived with his father in the early years of his life, but his lifestyle forced Moyer to move the family from their home in Southern California.
“My mom was very good at making every situation seem calmer than it really was, and I think that’s what parents do to protect their children, but I think even at a young age, it was like she was partying all the time.” time,” Rodman said. “We try to live with him, but he throws parties 24/7, brings random bitches… I still believe that my father has never loved anyone after my mother. I really believe that. I think that He doesn’t know how to do it. I think they both felt the same way about each other, but their demons were too strong for that. I think my mom just saw the situation of: ‘We love each other, it’s not going to work.’ For my children, I can’t let them see you “You treat me this way, embarrass me this way, and have a party scene all the time.”
Rodman said his father essentially cut off the family’s financial situation, forcing them to live at one point in a Ford Expedition, then in a motel and eventually sharing a room with his mother as a teenager.
“Growing up in a rich place when you don’t have money is a different struggle,” Rodman said. “I think it was very difficult for me, my mom and my brother. We went to schools where everyone had money.”
Rodman said she and her brother saw their father at most four times a year when they lived in the same city, and throughout her childhood, money remained a complicated topic. He would accuse his mother of only going after his money, refusing to pay child support, and offering his money in controlled environments.
“My dad likes to be in control,” he said. “He took us shopping, he got us phones, he did this, he did that. ‘I’ll take you and your brother shopping!’ My brother and I were like, ‘We don’t want to go shopping. We just want money in and out after school with our friends,’ so it was like he didn’t want to give us money to do that. .He needed to be in control of taking us shopping and swiping his own card, but if we asked, ‘Can we have $100 to go buy food, go to Claire’s house to get my ears pierced?’, little things like that, he was like. , ‘No. You’re using me’, all these things.”
She attributed his strained relationship with his family and money to bad influences around him, as well as a substance abuse problem.
“I think as successful as he was and how rich he was, he was surrounded by a lot of toxic people who took his money and took advantage of him and because he was into alcohol, he was brainwashed into all of that. He really had no control over anything. “, said. “We tried to be that base and be the good people around him because we never really asked for anything unless we really needed it. My mom, my brother, me and it was like, ‘We only want you.’ And I think that he never understood the fact because he never experienced it. He also never had family problems. He never understood that people could just want to be around him and want to make him happy.
Impact on his football career
Rodman said financial difficulties growing up made it difficult at times to be a young football player, which remains an expensive extracurricular activity for many families across the country.
“With football and everything, we got a lot of help from one of my club coaches, Greg Baker,” he said. “He prepared me and helped me. Thank God I had talent or else I don’t know where I would be, but he helped me and gave me those opportunities that I wouldn’t have had because I couldn’t.” We paid for certain things, so we worked on a lot of things, but also in a way they were handed to us just because we were talented, which helped especially with sports, it was very difficult to travel and go to hotels and do this away from home. trips and we have the money to stay at these Marriotts. We were at the Holiday Inn. That’s what we could afford.
Rodman’s father didn’t get involved when she became a promising USWNT prospect and then became one of the first NWSL players to skip college soccer entirely, eventually being drafted by the Washington Spirit in 2021. Her Her father surprised her by showing up in the Spirit’s playoff quarterfinals against the North Carolina Courage, something she realized midway through the game. It was the first time they had seen each other in months, which sparked an emotional reaction. She leaned on then-teammate Ashley Sanchez during a water break in the first half, while then-head coach Kris Ward also asked her if she wanted to continue playing, which she did.
“When it showed up in my game, I was so angry,” she said. “I started crying on the field. So I was trying to play the football game and I was crying… I was so angry. I was like, ‘You took away this happy moment from me. You fucked with my head again. I’m walking there so angry.’ , like ‘Fuck you.’ I walk over, he grabs my head and I start crying in his arms like I’m a father-daughter. [moment]”.
She later made an Instagram post about the moment, which went viral, hoping for a new beginning with him, but her father went months without contacting her again. The couple still speak infrequently, in part because his father frequently changes his phone number, but Rodman answers his calls in an act of sympathy despite describing him as “an extremely selfish human being.”
“I think now, even hearing his voice is painful because I think he misses it mixed with: he’s an alcoholic, and again, that’s something I don’t want to say, but I think, fuck,” she said. “It’s the truth and even in the last five years, hearing the difference in the way his sentences go together, I think he’s gone. It feels like he’s gone and I hear him talk. Now I answer the phone on my conscience, to “If something happens, God forbid, I want to know what I did, or if he needed to hear my voice before something happens. “That’s why I answer the phone, not for me.”
