(From John Diaz at the San Francisco Chronicle Online)
In his 1995 memoir, “Dreams of My Father,” Barack Obama wrote about basketball’s transformative effect on his confidence and search for identity. Among the many lessons he drew from his Hawaii pickup games with “gym rats and has-beens” was that “respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was.”
Now 47 and about to be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, Obama is ready to bring the game – and its sensibilities of teamwork and spontaneity – to the White House. It is a fitting game for these times.
Basketball is an international sport, and also an egalitarian one. It is austere. A player does not have to pay a country-club fee or even own a basketball to join a pickup game at a local park. It is a meritocracy. On the playground, the winning team stays on the court, taking on all challengers, until it loses.
As community organizer Obama knew when he was building relationships on playgrounds in the South Side of Chicago, class distinctions dissolve in the intensity of competition. Basketball is “improvisation within a discipline that I find very powerful,” Obama told Bryant Gumbel on HBO last year.
Improvisation within a discipline is exactly what is needed in a White House facing the challenges of a reeling economy, a war in Iraq and a terrorism threat that has not gone away.
Obama had to improvise on the day of the Indiana primary when he invited Tony West, his California campaign co-chair, to join him on the court as they drove to an Indianapolis gym.
“Let me put this up front right now: I’m not a basketball player,” said West, an Oakland attorney who met Obama at the 2004 Democratic convention. “All I had was my running shorts and running shoes.”
Obama provided his extra size-12 basketball shoes; West provided the fodder for friendly jousting. The president-elect gives, and receives, his share of needling on the court.
“I became the butt of many jokes on the ride over to the gym,” West said. “And it still remains one of the president-elect’s favorite subjects for ridicule.”
Obama will inherit a neglected 26-by-26-foot outdoor half-court that was installed 18 years ago for President George H.W. Bush. One of the privileges of the presidency is the ability to expand the sporting options on the White House grounds. Theodore Roosevelt had the first tennis courts built there in 1902. Bill Clinton installed a putting green on the edge of the South Lawn. Gerald Ford ordered a swimming pool and tennis courts. Richard Nixon commissioned a one-lane bowling alley, which some people have suggested could be demolished to make way for an Obama’s hoops dreams.
Then again, Obama probably did enough damage to the bowling industry when he rolled a 37 during a campaign stop in Altoona, Pa., last spring.
President Bush has been a fine role model for American fitness, with a heart rate tuned by his vigorous long runs and charges through rocky terrain on his mountain bike. Still, these times call for presidential engagement as the antidote to the isolation of the office.
“People talk about what an even temperament he has, and that’s true,” said West, believed to be a candidate for a position in the Obama administration. “But the most intense I’ve seen him is on the basketball court. He plays hard, he plays really hard. The other thing is, for those 45 minutes you’re playing in the game, he’s just another guy on the basketball court.”
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