This really isn’t a sporty story, no really it isn’t, but I couldn’t ignore it. What a player, what an achievement, and what a legend!

Kim Jong-il died today, and like I said, this has nothing to do with sport, except for a tiny titbit I picked up whilst listening to the news. Now, I know that a lot of you are golfing fanatics – by the way, what happened to the Rugby-Talk golf day? – and thought that one of Kim Jong-il’s more bizarre statements deserved a mention on Rugby-Talk.

Back in 1994, the man set a record that is likely to stand forever. Playing his first round of golf on a regulation, PGA-style, 18-hole course, Kim Jong-il scored 11 holes-in-one while he carded a stunning 38 UNDER par. Seventeen bodyguards were on hand to witness and attest the score. Regarding the 11 holes-in-one on a single round, that feat will only be repeated on putt-putt golf courses as most regulation-sized courses typically have only four holes short enough to reasonably be considered candidates for scoring an ace.

Sadly, the golfing world outside of North Korea has yet to accept this round of golf as legitimate.

Some more of his more mind-boggling facts include the following:

He had a supernatural birth

Kim Jong-il was born in Siberia in 1941 while his parents were there during the Japanese occupation of Korea, according to Soviet documents.

But according to official North Korean literature, he was born in a log cabin at his father’s secret base on North Korea’s sacred Mount Paektu in 1942.

The same reports claim his birth were heralded by a swallow and caused winter to change to spring, a star to illuminate the sky and rainbows to spontaneously appear.

He loved film so much he kidnapped two filmmakers

A film-making author with a collection of over 20,000 movies, Jong-il’s passion for the art led him to kidnap South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee to make Pulgasari, basically a socialist version of Godzilla.

The couple made an escape while in Austria on a trip to finalise plans for Pulgasari’s sequel by fleeing to the American embassy.

He was a fashion icon

Pyongyang announced the leader had become a worldwide fashion icon after Rodong Sinmun, a communist party newspaper in North Korea, reported Kim Jong-il’s suits had become a global fashion phenomenon.

An “unidentified French fashion expert” agreed: “Kim Jong-il mode, which is now spreading expeditiously worldwide, is something unprecedented in the world’s history.”

He didn’t defecate

According to the official biography on the North Korean state web site, Kim Jong-il didn’t defecate. The biography has since been taken down.

He lured short people with a wonder drug that promised to make them tall, then kidnapped them

Kim Hyun-sik, a former tutor to Kim Jong-il, said the government handed out pamphlets to thousands of people, selling a wonder drug that would make them taller. When they responded to the ad, they were sent away to “uninhabited islands in an attempt to end their ‘substandard’ genes from repeating in a new generation,” Hyun-sik said.

He only ate rice which was uniform in length and colour

A nephew of Kim Jong-il’s first wife, Lee Young Nam, wrote that the obsessive leader insisted his rice be cooked using the wood from trees cut from Mount Paektu (the mountain where he was born), and that he had female staff inspect each grain of rice to make sure it met his strict standards.

He was the world’s biggest Hennessey drinker

A study by Dr. Jerold Post, a former CIA psychologist, revealed the former dictator loved a Hennessey cognac that retails for $630 a bottle in Korea – $270 less than the average Korean annual income, $900.

“He is the largest customer over the last 10 years, averaging between $650,000 and $720,000 a year.”

So put that in your pipe and smoke it Sonny Bill!!