U.S. women’s national team star Trinity Rodman has detailed a fractured relationship with her father, NBA champion Dennis Rodman, who she says was both emotionally distant and created financial difficulties for his children during their youth.
The soccer player is reluctant to speak about her father in public, hinting at a complicated relationship with the retired basketball star. In an episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast released Wednesday, Rodman finally spoke at length about his father. “He’s not a father,” she said. “Maybe by blood, but nothing else.”
“As far as Dad’s situation goes, in terms of what I’ve filtered and what I’ve talked about, I feel like my brother and I have been very generous in how we’ve handled it. spoken and very selfless,” Rodman said. . “I think we never want to give it a bad image, and that comes at the cost of a lot of things, and a lot of issues that we’ve been through and as a trauma in itself.”
Rodman, alongside 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 Southern California home.
“My mom was really good at making every situation sound smoother than it actually was, and I think that’s what parents do to protect their kids, but I think even as a young kid it was like he was partying all the time,” Rodman said. “We tried to live with him, but he parties 24/7, brings random bitches… I still think my dad didn’t love anyone after my mom. I honestly believe. I don’t think he knows how. I think they both felt the same way about each other, but it’s just that his demons were just too strong for that. I think my mother just saw the situation from: “We love each other, this isn’t going to work out and. for my kids, I can’t have them seeing you treat me this way, embarrass me this way and have a party scene all the time. You have little babies.'”
Rodman said her father then essentially cut the family off financially, forcing them to live at one point in a Ford Expedition, later in a motel and ultimately sharing a room with her mother when she was a teenager.
“Growing up in a wealthy place when you don’t have money is a different struggle,” Rodman said. “I think it was really hard for me and my mom and my brother. We went to schools where everyone had money.”
Rodman said she and her brother saw their father a maximum of four times a year when they lived in the same town and that during their childhood, money remained a complicated issue. He allegedly accuses their mother of only wanting his money, refusing to pay child support and offering his money in controlled environments.
“My dad likes to be in control,” she said. “He would take us shopping, get us phones, do this, do that. ‘I’ll take you and your brother shopping!’ My brother and I were like, “We don’t want to go shopping, we don’t want to go shopping, we just want the money to go in and out after school with our friends,” so it was like. he wouldn’t give us money to do that He had to have the control to take us shopping and swipe his own card, but if we asked, “Can we have $100 to go pick up.” to eat, go to Claire’s to get pierced ears? stuff like that, he was like, ‘No, you’re using me,’ all that.”
She attributed her strained relationship with her family and money to the bad influences around her, as well as a substance abuse problem.
“I think with his success and wealth he was surrounded by a lot of toxic people who took his money and took advantage of him and because he drank alcohol he was kind of brainwashed into All of this, I really had no control over anything,” she said. “We tried to be that foundation and be the right people around him because really, we never really asked for anything unless we really needed it. Me, my mom and my brother, it was like, ‘We just want you,'” and I think for him, he never understood that fact because he never experienced it. He also had complicated family issues. He never understood that people could just want to be with him and just want to make him happy. thought, “Money, money, money, money.” »
Impact on her football career
Rodman said financial struggles growing up sometimes made it difficult to be a youth football player, which remains an expensive extracurricular activity for many families across the country.
“With football and everything else, we got a lot of help from one of my club coaches, Greg Baker,” she said. “He kind of set me up and helped me. Thank God I was talented, otherwise I don’t know where I would be, but he helped me and he gave me these opportunities that I wouldn’t have had because I couldn’t pay for certain things, so a lot of things, that we worked for but also, in a way, we were entrusted with just because we were talented, so that was. helped especially with sports, it was very difficult to travel and. to go to hotels and do all that travel and have the money to stay at those Marriotts. That’s what we could afford.
Rodman’s father remained minimally involved as she emerged as a promising USWNT prospect, then became one of the first NWSL players to skip college soccer altogether, eventually being drafted by the Washington Spirit in 2021. Her father surprised her by showing up in the Spirit’s playoff quarterfinals against the Washington Spirit. North Carolina Courage, a realization she made mid-game. It was the first time they had seen each other in months, sparking 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 he showed up at my match, I was so angry,” she said. “I started crying on the field. So I’m trying to play football and I’m crying. … I was so angry. I was like ‘You took this moment of happiness from me. You fucked with my head again. I’m walking there, so angry, like ‘F— you.’ I walk over, he grabs my head and I start bawling in his arms like it’s a daddy-daughter moment.”
She then posted a post on Instagram about the moment, which went viral, in the hope of a new start with him but her father then went months without contacting her again. The two still rarely speak, partly because his father frequently changes his phone number, but Rodman answers his calls in an act of sympathy although he describes him as “an extremely selfish human being”.
“I think now, even hearing his voice is painful because I think he misses him, mixed with – he’s an alcoholic, and again, that’s something I don’t want to say but I feel just say, fuck it,” she said. “It’s the truth and even in the last five years, hearing the difference in the way his sentences flow, I think he’s gone. I feel like he’s gone and I hear him talking – I answer the phone now for my conscience, for it’s like something happens, God forbid, I want to know that I did it, or if he had need to hear my voice before something doesn’t happen, that’s why I answer the phone – not for me.
