(From Wright Thompson for Outside The Lines at ESPN.com)

Washington’s most influential are suddenly taking up hoops, all in the hopes of getting a run with President Obama.

WASHINGTON — Baron Hill is in training, working on his jumper, pumping iron, doing rep after tedious rep on the weight machines to strengthen his bum knee. He swore 15 years ago that he’d never play competitive basketball again, but here he is at his health club, 55 years old, shooting baskets alone. Once, he was an Indiana high school legend, a member of the state’s hall of fame, but those pictures are in black and white.

AP Photo/John Harrell

U.S. Rep. Baron Hill is reviving his basketball jones, hoping to reclaim the form that made him an Indiana high school legend.

Just your typical bourgeois midlife crisis, right? Not exactly. Consider who Hill is, where he is and why he’s doing this. For starters, he’s an influential member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a powerful guy, co-chairman of the Blue Dog Democrats. The court he’s on isn’t at a local Y. He’s in Room SB-322 of the Rayburn House Office Building: the famous House gym. There’s a little electronic device he keeps on his key chain that lets him in whenever he wants.

The why is a bit more complicated. Outside D.C., it would seem absurd. In D.C., it’s just doing business. Getting his basketball game up to speed isn’t about him. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s somewhat about him, about his own political future. But it’s also for the 675,000 citizens of his Indiana district, the people he has been sent here to serve. The reason he’s back in training isn’t because he wants to be but because the president of the United States likes to ball.

“I stayed away from the game,” the five-term Democrat says, “and here I am shooting hoops again. And it’s because of him. If I ever have an opportunity to play with him, I want to be able to halfway get around that court well enough.”

Other congressmen hit the bikes, the weights, the machines. Hill’s alone on the court this morning. At the end of his workout, just like when he was a kid, he won’t leave until he makes 10 straight free throws. He still has that soft touch. When people see him shoot, they stop and stare.

Hooping toward the epicenter

A clarification: There are actually two Washingtons.

One Washington is made up of regular people who do things like eat at a restaurant because they like the food. This is the last you’ll hear of them here.

We’re touring the other Washington, the plastic one, the city of politicians and, because D.C. is more barnacle than boat, those who orbit around them. Citizenship isn’t defined by birthplace or address but by connections. Live next to a powerful senator? Not a chance. Know a powerful senator? You’re in.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Reggie Love, Obama’s personal aide, was a two-sport star at Duke and won a national title on the hardwood in 2001.

This D.C. is a lot like junior high: The student body waits to see what the cool kids do. The president — no matter who — is the coolest kid. People eat where he eats; Obama went to a local burger joint, and now you can’t get a table there. People scheme for the opportunity of a chance encounter. Parents push their own children to befriend his kids. They adopt his mannerisms, his catchphrases, even his sports. Especially his sports. Clinton played golf so everyone in D.C. played golf, working angles to get into a foursome (with Clinton, we might need to clarify that we’re referring to a group of four who enjoy a round of golf together).

One time, a prominent CEO received a coveted golf invite. But he didn’t know how to play, so he tried to learn. The golf lessons became a running joke in the West Wing, a story about pride being the first casualty in the battle for connections. The CEO wasn’t alone. The prime minister of Barbados took lessons, too, and got busted for it by his local newspaper.

Local powermongers and wannabes like inner circles, even if they’re not in them, because it gives them something to shoot for. There’s a pecking order. Even if you’re never invited to Obama adviser David Axelrod’s house for his casual Wednesday night meeting, you know it exists. It’s a holy grail of access.

Which brings us back to basketball.

Obama loves all things hoops. By executive fiat, the White House tennis court is being retrofitted for basketball. He mentions the game every other speech, including his controversial commencement address at Notre Dame. There’s a blog devoted to his on-court exploits called Baller-in-Chief. His brother-in-law is the coach at Oregon State. His friends hoop. His personal aide, Reggie Love, hooped his way to a national title at Duke and is the gatekeeper for the presidential game. The senior staff hoops. The junior staff hoops. Four members of the Cabinet hoop. Wanna guess what comes next? There’s a new prize to be won.

“What’s the hottest invite in Washington?” former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers asks. “Yeah, it’s great to go to White House state dinners or Stevie Wonder kinds of events. But what’s the sine qua non? It’s a pickup game with Obama. That’s the inner, inner, inner sanctum. Proximity is everything in this town. How close are you to the epicenter?”

No one ever feels close enough, so all over town, people are playing hoops, in newly started leagues, in pickup games at private schools, even in Congress. They’re trying to work their way into games with Obama, or at least with his advisers. Hoops in D.C. has become another way to get ahead.

AP Photo/Punahou Schools (3) and Laura S. L. Kong/Getty Images (middle)
Basketball has been a constant presence in Barack Obama’s life, dating back to his days at Punahou School in Honolulu in the late ’70s.

How things really work in D.C.

For people who don’t spend much time in Washington, all this can be confusing. What’s the difference between hanging out and networking? Isn’t a cigar sometimes just a cigar? Washington doesn’t really make sense until you understand that a moment almost always exists on two levels. There is the moment itself, not unlike a moment anywhere else in the world. Then there is its political shadow, which is far more significant.

Here’s an example.

This is the moment: A breeze blows through the leafy campus of Sidwell Friends School. A sunken quad of sorts sits in the middle of the buildings, steps from the Fox Den Café. When the students are here, this is a beehive of activity. Because it’s Sunday, the place is peaceful. To the left of the chairs and benches is the gym, where a group of middle-aged men get ready to play basketball. Most have been friends for decades; their children and their children’s friends now want in the game. It’s Mother’s Day, so a few regulars are missing, and some guys brought the kids to give Mom a chance to sleep in. One boy spreads out Legos in the corner. It’s a chance for everyone to unwind away from work. “Nobody ever talks about what they do,” Julius Genachowski says.

Who is Julius? Exactly.

Pete Souza/White House/Getty Images

If the president of the United States gets a little too aggressive on defense, would you call the foul?

Julius plays with his son Jake, who’ll be a senior in high school, and there’s chemistry between father and son. On a fast break with the two Genachowskis out in front, Julius passes the ball to Jake, who lays it in. Jake’s the best athlete out here, and that makes Julius proud. Two summers ago, in their annual one-on-one game, Jake won for the first time. “I’ve been postponing playing with him again,” Julius says, smiling. “I think my time has run out.”

Tom Freedman takes a break to read to one of the kids, a little girl who’s crying. “Let’s stay and watch Dad from here,” he tells her, pointing to her father on the court.

With tag-team baby-sitter rules in effect, Richard Danzig checks out a while later to calm the crying girl. He holds her in his lap and gets out a children’s book. His voice changes, turning silly. “Hey, is this a rabbit?” he reads. “Hey, what about this?”

This is the shadow: At the main campus of the exclusive private Sidwell Friends School, where Chelsea Clinton went when her dad was president, and where Malia Obama is a fifth-grader, a group of Washington’s political elite gather. Since the election, so many more people want to play with them that they’ve added a second weekly game. “If you’re interested in Washington types, people who are in and around the administration, the Sunday game is more interesting,” Danzig says. “The Wednesday night game is more young special assistant types.”

Some of the usual suspects are missing, including the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and the vice president for research at the National Defense University, who was a special adviser to President Clinton from the National Security Council. Obama’s top adviser, Axelrod, who got the office closest to the Oval, has played here.

In addition to running fast breaks, Julius Genachowski is the nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission. He clerked for two Supreme Court justices and went to Harvard Law School with the president, where they were friends and in top positions on the Harvard Law Review together. His son attends the same elite D.C. school that educates White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s kids.

Freedman was a senior adviser in the Clinton White House.

Danzig is a former secretary of the Navy, the defense adviser to the Obama campaign who some thought would be secretary of defense. Some think he still will be.

Martin H. Simon-Pool/Getty Images

If you get a coveted invite to hoop with the president, you’d better make sure to pack some game.

How does getting in a game help?

Teddy Downey sits at a table by the bar at the Hawk ‘n’ Dove, a saloon a few blocks from the Capitol where Hill staffers go for lunch or to tie one on at the end of a long day. He’s 27 and runs a company that provides political analysis to investment firms. It’s his job to know everything that’s going on in town and how it might affect the financial markets. In other words, he sells knowledge, so he plays in two weekly games: with reporters who have inside info and with the staff of the Senate banking committee.

Downey is explaining how basketball is used as a political tool, using as his sermon the well-known Richard Ben Cramer book, “What it Takes,” about the 1988 presidential election. There’s a chapter in the book about knowledge, about how it’s acquired and about its value. Cramer wrote: “Knowledge is power, and the capital is a city built on power, which means knowing and being known. But this is more than a business in Washington. It is life. Only in the bars of Capitol Hill will you hear a normal, healthy young woman responding to the blandishments of her handsome swain with the delighted, breathy question, ‘You know Kerrey?’”

Even if no information changes hands, a game with someone powerful gives the appearance of being inside. Even that kind of interaction is invaluable. It means that in your next business meeting, you can say, “Well, I was just playing ball with so-and-so …” You are one step closer to the center than the other people in the room. They have no idea that nothing important was discussed, so they must assume that it was.

You now have power.

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

For trusted adviser David Axelrod and Obama, basketball provides a nice escape from the constant stress of their day jobs.

With liberty and playing time for all

Ken Salazar is secretary of the interior, which means he’s in charge of a whole bunch of cool stuff, like Old Faithful, Lincoln’s birthplace and the indoor basketball court closest to the White House. It’s Tuesday night, and the pickup run is in full swing when he finally gets to the basement of his building. He has been to three or four states today, so there’s a bit of stress to burn off.

“Hey, Mr. Secretary,” calls Ray Rivera, head of external and intergovernmental affairs for Interior and formerly Obama’s campaign chairman for Colorado, “you get the winning squad.”

These games happen twice a week, and because the gym is just four blocks from the White House, folks from there play here, too. In late February, Obama came over one Saturday morning for a game, taking on Salazar and some of his staff. Rivera, who’s outfitted tonight in a Carmelo Anthony jersey, played that day. He had received the call the day before: Be ready. Obama & Co. won. “We’ve been asking for a rematch for months,” Rivera says. “That was like the second week we were here.”

The games are fluid. There’s a good energy on the court. People talk on defense. When Salazar finally gets in, it’s obvious he is actually pretty athletic, and he has a lot of hustle. He’s not easy to cover. Someone yells, “Who’s got Secretary?” Other than being addressed by his title, Salazar is treated like everyone else. Look around at the court right now. Don Gips, the director of personnel at the White House, is in the game, too, setting devastating picks. Then another regular, Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., joins in. So now, on the court at the same time, are a Cabinet secretary, the guy in charge of administration hiring, a U.S. senator … and a bunch of staff members, some of them very junior. This is the dramatic difference between basketball and golf. Nobody’s taking an intern to play golf at Congressional Country Club. Basketball is much more democratic. During a break, Casey is talking to scheduler Courtenay Lewis, explaining that she should treat him like anyone else.

AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast

Bob Casey says a foul is a foul — even when it’s committed by a senator from Pennsylvania.

“I fouled you, and you didn’t call it on me,” he says.

“Well …”

“You should have,” he says.

(Don’t think everyone acts like Casey. This, after all, is Washington, and politics trump everything, even democracy. A story: Former Division I player interviews for a job at the White House, an entry-level administration position. At the interview, he is told that there likely could be a position for him in one of the departments — and that he’ll be invited to play in one of their pickup runs. Oh, and a final piece of advice: If you get into a game before the job is finalized, let the other team win. No tomahawk dunks on a potential benefactor. Capisce?)

Special assistant Jonathan Jourdane looks around at the court. He works for Rivera, who works for Salazar. The other guys are calling him “All-Star,” and the secretary points out how much joy he brings to the game. And although Jonathan Jourdane is a name you might be hearing on the evening news in a decade or two, right now he’s about as low on the food chain as you can get. But he’s in Washington playing basketball with some really important people, so he must be doing something right.

A little later, that bright, bright future flashes before his eyes. Jourdane’s and Casey’s feet get tangled. Casey, a former college player who came back to basketball to play with Obama during the campaign, hits the ground hard. There’s a gasp. Oh, my god! Did Jourdane kill the senator?

Casey gets up, dusts himself off. The gasps turn to laughs. Casey’s one of those laughing. This is a moment that will, almost certainly, be brought up again. And again.

“You tripped the senator,” cracks Brian Screnar, Salazar’s White House liaison . “You’re never allowed in Pennsylvania again!”

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar took it on the chin in his first meeting with Obama’s squad.

Basketball Klutzes Inc.

OK, somehow you manage to get yourself invited to a game with a senator or cabinet secretary or, by a miracle, the president. But you actually suck at basketball, and talent is a tough thing to fake on the court. Now what?

Well, you might try calling Arthur Jackson.

For fun, he’s the commish of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Saturday morning run at The Lab School of Washington. His day job is president of One on One Basketball, a company that organizes youth training camps in the area. To get to Jackson’s office, turn on a narrow side street off Mass Ave. and pull into the parking garage. In the shadows, there is a green door that leads to, of all things, the back of a flower shop. That’s where he works. The place smells like a garden.

AP Photo

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan can often be found hooping it up on Saturday mornings at the Lab School.

In what little time he has left over in his day, Jackson coaches two youth teams. This winter, Bernard Muir, a teammate of Jackson’s at Brown who is the athletic director at Georgetown, invited Jackson to bring the kids to a Hoyas game. Coincidentally, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty (who has played ball with Obama and Jackson) invited him to the same game. Jackson asked the mayor whether he could bring the kids up to his box. The mayor said yes. In the suite, Arthur ran into Duncan, which is where the Lab School run was born.

Watching all of this closely was the parent of one of the kids and CEO of a nonprofit company who does work on the Hill. The next time he saw Jackson, he pulled him aside: “I have a business idea.”

He laid it all out: The president and his confidants play hoops, which put people you could never get on the phone in regular games, which made others play hoops, which made the ability to play basketball a legitimate club in the bag of Washington power. Would Jackson be interested in giving basketball lessons on Capitol Hill?

Well … sure. “I think there’s a big market,” Jackson says. “The law firms, the lobbyists are gonna want to be able to get into these games. And they won’t want to embarrass themselves once they get out there.”

The image of a wing-tipped brown-noser learning to execute a crossover is hilarious, but a lot of people around town, when they stop laughing, say it won’t ever happen. Why? If the lessons weren’t totally secret, it would defeat the purpose. The only thing worse than not operating is being caught operating. Jackson gets that. He’s figuring out a way to offer classes firm by firm in a private gym. He hopes to start executive training in the fall.

Everybody’s got the fever

In December, there wasn’t a regular pickup game in the House gym. By February, lots of congressmen had rediscovered their love for the sport. Former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler, D-N.C., is the game’s commish, and they go almost every morning at 6:30. “I’ve been playing for the last month or so again,” says Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash. “Everybody wants to get in on the first administration versus Congress basketball game.”

The first commish of the House game was New York Rep. Tom Downey, father of Teddy Downey and one of the Watergate Babies of ‘74. He arrived back then to find a single wooden half-moon backboard attached directly to the wall. That wouldn’t stand. Downey, 25 then and brash, began a lobbying campaign for glass backboards. A run was born. The MBA (Members Basketball Association) guys love to tell the war stories, like the time Bill Bradley, the senator and former New York Knick, needed support for his tax reform bill and came to make connections. “We’ve got the ball at half court,” recalls Mike Oxley, a former congressman from Ohio. “He’s on point. I’m in the corner. I throw it to the top of the key, and Bradley throws the ball to where I should have been. I’m standing there picking my nose. I’ll never forget the look he gave me: Is it worth it to play with these clunkers?”

Downey, who lost his seat in 1992, tells one about his friend Tom McMillen, who became a congressman in 1987, a year after his NBA career ended. “The most terrified McMillen ever looked in all the years I knew him,” Downey says, “was when he heard Magic was coming down.

“‘I’m not gonna cover him,’ McMillen says.

“‘No, no,’ I say, ‘why should you cover him? You played in the f—ing NBA. You’re 6-11. You expect me to cover him? You expect Russo to cover him? He’ll make you look bad? He makes people look bad in the NBA. Of course he’s gonna make you look bad.’”

(Another quirk of D.C.: There are often 10 versions of the same story, all told with equal conviction. Case in point: McMillen says he wasn’t there when Magic Johnson played.)

Eventually, the game deteriorated, and by 2006 it had died. Then Obama was elected to the White House. A game with him became currency, at home with voters and in town with colleagues, like invitations to watch the Super Bowl or a ride on Air Force One. (Emanuel employs a detailed system to keep track of who scores face time.) Hill, whose early endorsement helped Obama carry Indiana, was even asked to play basketball with the president at Camp David, although the White House later canceled the trip. “I’ll get one in,” Hill says. “I’m pretty confident in that. Maybe two if I play well enough.”

Hoops was back. Plans began for a White House-Congress game. Both sides talked smack. The House run caught on, led by young members who loved basketball. They played half court for a while, then switched to full court, going baseline to baseline, then icing down joints in the locker room and limping the next day in the halls of Congress. Word got back to Pennsylvania Avenue. Not long ago, Shuler was at the White House. The first words out of the president’s mouth, Shuler remembers, weren’t about health care or foreign policy. No, Obama led with a question: “How’s the pickup basketball coming over there?”

Shuler said the game was good enough to make sure nobody, not even the president, could take it to the hole.

“Mr. President,” he said, “you can’t bring that stuff inside.”

“Don’t worry,” Obama said. “I pick the teams.”

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

While living in Chicago, Obama often played on the basketball courts at Hayes Drive and South Lake Shore Drive. Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s brother and now the coach at Oregon State University, also played pickup games here.

Desperately seeking Obama

The invites to play with the Baller-in-Chief have been scarce. Mostly friends and staff — the old Chicago crew. “The only thing that’s changed is we’re playing at Camp David,” cracks Duncan, who has known the president for years.

The secretary and some staff at Interior got a run, as did some old buddies of Love’s. Arizona Cardinals QB Kurt Warner got an invitation, as did at least one member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The mayor of Washington got a run. Everyone else is angling. Love apparently keeps a list of names in case he needs extras.

If you don’t have Love’s extension, there’s another, more circuitous road. Play with an Obama confidant — and play really well. The best baller in Obama’s Cabinet, without question, is Duncan, who got a tryout with the Boston Celtics and played professionally in Australia. Duncan plays a lot, but his regular game is on Saturday mornings at the Lab School, which is located between the Georgetown Reservoir and the German Embassy.

“That’s gotta be the screening game,” says Matt Laczkowski, a former North Carolina walk-on who runs hoops at a swanky D.C. health club. “It’s gotta be.”

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Kory Mckay, left, is pressured by then-candidate Obama in a “3-on-3 Challenge for Change” in Kokomo, Ind., in April 2008.

The guys park their cars and change shoes. Most played college basketball; some played overseas. It’s a curious mix. Two played at Harvard. One, former Maryland guard Jeff Baxter, roomed with Len Bias and was there when he died.

Arthur Jackson uses a winch to lower the backboards from the ceiling. This run is his baby; he sends out an e-mail on Thursdays to a tightly controlled group that includes NFL wide receiver Antwaan Randle El and John Rice, brother of Susan Rice, who is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The first 15 to reply are in.

Fourteen are here so far. Right now, this run is two degrees removed from Obama, several times over. One guy is tight with the mayor, who is tight with Obama. Another guy went to college with Love, who is tight with Obama. A third guy played college ball with Duncan, who is tight with Obama. When Duncan finally gets here, they’ll be just one degree removed. He’s probably just running late.

Sean Tuohey, a D.C. native and former Catholic University player, moved back to town only recently. He had co-founded a basketball nonprofit called PeacePlayers, which used hoops to bring together communities in Northern Ireland, Israel, Palestine and South Africa. When he got back from all those places, he didn’t fit into the corporate structure needed to keep a business running, so he quit. Now he’s searching. He is a strange combination of a dreamer and an operator, and he started playing ball again with a goal: Obama. Tuohey says he has lost something of himself lately and believes he could get some reflected mojo from the president. He believes hope is contagious. “The tidal wave that is Obama was so strong,” he says, “you’ve got to get in it somehow. I’m going out playing again, for very selfish reasons. Obama made the game very trendy again because it’s a way to advance yourself.”

The first time Tuohey got in this game, he felt the pressure. Diving for loose balls, willing the balls in the hole, hoping that maybe, just maybe, Duncan would stop him after the game and say, “I really like how hard and smart you play. Why don’t we stay in contact?” Afterward, he introduced himself to a guy he thought was Duncan … and found out he wasn’t even there. The next time, he actually got a few minutes to tell the secretary about the inner-city schools he works in.

The run is intense, and the guys not playing enjoy the breather. Tuohey, Baxter and Duke alum Jason Goldblatt sit against the wall and talk about the rumor Obama plays secret games at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Does he drive? Take Marine One?

“Walter Reed has a pad,” Baxter says.

“I’m sure he plays early, so it doesn’t matter if it’s 16 cars,” Goldblatt says.

“If he’s playing, I bet Arne Duncan is playing,” Tuohey says.

“I wonder if Reggie is playing?” Goldblatt says.

“Did you know him at Duke?” Tuohey asks.

“Yes,” Goldblatt says. “I might send him an e-mail telling him about this game. Trajan Langdon’s on the e-mail distribution list.”

Soon, it’s their turn again. The games go until everyone is exhausted. Duncan never shows up. They can all read why in The Washington Post the next day.

He was playing with Obama.

Pete Souza/White House/Getty Images

Obama enjoys a moment alone on the court during a May 9 trip to Fort McNair in D.C.

Hooping at the epicenter

The Obama guys are waiting for someone to come open the gym at Sidwell Friends. They met on the campaign trail, and they’re just getting settled into Washington. Some work at the White House now; others have ended up at various agencies. Everything’s still new.

They’re throwing a football around, quickly turning idle activity into an alpha competition: first one to get the ball through the tire swing on the jungle gym. Technically, it’s a jungle gym, but it looks more like something designed for the Apollo missions. The thing cost more than some of their cars. The school costs more per year than their annual take-home pay. It’s where their boss’ daughters go.

“Every kid’s parent is a doctor,” says Herbie Ziskend, a staff assistant in the vice president’s office.

White House press assistant Ben Finkenbinder laughs.

“Or president,” he says.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

During the 2009 White House Easter Egg Roll, one boy used a little presidential power to pull off a slam dunk.

Work still brings a sense of wonder. Before the game starts, the guys catch the latest gossip, brought by someone who was just in the office. They’d seen actor Dulé Hill and Reggie Love walking the halls together. Dude, Charlie and Reggie! The guy who played the president’s aide on “The West Wing” and the president’s actual aide, together. They love that. They love doing important work with important people in an important place. Finkenbinder is one of the youngest people to have a West Wing desk. Well, it’s more of a ledge, with the office printer beneath it, and he shares it with another staffer, a woman named Katie Hogan. But only four doors, two hallways and the Roosevelt Room separate them from the president of the United States.

“Probably about 25 feet,” Hogan says.

How many steps?

“In heels, 12. In flats, 10,” she says, laughing.

Anyone a dozen steps from the Oval Office is, by definition, important. That’s a new experience. Finkenbinder was taken aback by the idea. It didn’t occur to him that other people in Washington might play basketball because he and his friends and their boss like to play basketball. That’s the other truth about D.C. trends: The closer you get to the epicenter, the more people do things because that’s just what they do.

When Finkenbinder got to D.C., he began asking around for a run. He still hadn’t found one when Love called in late February. The president had a game at the Department of the Interior. Would he like to play?

That’s how he found out about the gym at Interior and how the White House junior staff ended up playing its Tuesday night game there. The commish of the Interior game is White House intergovernmental affairs staff assistant John Oxtoby. He’s in the Sidwell run, too. People around town are starting to figure out that he’s the guy who sends out the e-vites. One person, who makes his living by knowing and being known, as Cramer put it, brought up the game and Oxtoby’s name. He says: “They really want to keep it all staff. This guy annoys the s— out of me because I have to e-mail him.”

The rules of the Tuesday game are strict. The first 12 to reply are in. At Sidwell, one guy comes over to Oxtoby to plead his case to play in the Interior game. “When do you send out the Tuesday evening e-mail?”

“Sometime Monday,” Oxtoby says.

“I’m gonna be on an airplane Monday,” the guy says, asking whether he could reserve a spot early.

“You can’t do that,” Oxtoby says.

When it gets going, the Sunday Sidwell game is pretty good. Finkenbinder’s the best player on the floor today. A few guys sit out each run. Rock, paper, scissors to see who goes in if anyone needs a rest. When they’re done, they collect their BlackBerrys and head toward the door. They’ve all got work in the morning.

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

On the campaign trail in April 2008, Obama worked out against Tyler Hansbrough and the Tar Heels in Chapel Hill, N.C.

For one power broker, it’s a tension-releasing hobby

Everyone’s waiting at the South Lawn for the president: members of Congress, the North Carolina basketball team, Tar Heels coach Roy Williams and his wife, a line of television cameras, and some White House staffers. Finkenbinder is making sure the media stay behind the rope. Wrangling, it’s called. His job is literally to herd the media like they’re alpacas. His phone rings: more staffers who want to see the national champion Tar Heels honored.

There’s an announcement — “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States” — and Obama steps to the podium. He’s funny, cracking jokes about the time he played with the Heels during the campaign, about Reggie Love’s going to Duke. He nods at the UNC grads on his staff, who are standing off to the side.

These visits seem fun for him. He even took the UConn women’s team down to his outdoor basket for a game of P-I-G (he won). Throughout his life, he has found peace on the basketball court. It has been a companion, from his lonely childhood all the way through the campaign. It’s how his future brother-in-law checked him out when he started dating Michelle. He has played to relax and to make political friends, for fun and for work. He has followed it as a fan, keeping an eye on a game while reading briefing papers and Foreign Affairs magazine. Now he can play with anyone he wants. Now the best teams in the country come to his house and present him with jerseys.

“If somebody could just present me a jump shot,” he says afterward. “I need one of those.”

He heads back to his office, past the West Colonnade, where the famous picture of the Kennedy brothers was taken, past the withered pink roses, past the Secret Service agent on post at the door that leads to the West Wing, toward the two plants by his entrance to the Oval Office. During his walk, if he looks to his left from the Rose Garden, he can see the top of his backboard, just down the hill from his desk, peeking above some trees and his daughters’ jungle gym. Outside the gates, it’s a holy grail. Inside, it’s where the boss goes to unwind.

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Update (3/1/2009):

Here is the audio of the segment …

Download audio file (NPR-WBUR-Here-and-Now-2_27_09.mp3)

Also, you can get the original Podcast directly from iTunes here.

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2/26/09:

I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be on NPR (National Public Radio) tomorrow, on a show called “Here and Now” that’s produced by WBUR Boston.

“Here and Now” host Robin Young sat down last week with me and Sports Illustrated writer and author Alexander Wolff to discuss President Obama’s affection for pickup basketball.

The recorded segment will air at around 12:00 p.m.

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(From Alexander Wolff at Sports Illustrated Online)

Claude Johnson, founder of the website Baller-in-Chief.com, sees the elegance and even temper of San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker.

The path is a familiar one: Ancestry in Kansas; influences from Africa; a kind of apotheosis in Michael Jordan’s Chicago; eventual acclamation by the world. And while, no, basketball itself won’t be sworn in next Tuesday as the 44th president of the U.S., the game has played an outsized role in forming the man who will. Basketball, says his brother-in-law, Oregon State coach Craig Robinson, is why Barack Obama “is sitting where he’s sitting.”

The game provided space in which the young Obama explored his identity as an African-American. He won a reputation as a consensus builder while playing recreationally in college and law school. A pickup game with Robinson did nothing less than confirm Obama as a worthy suitor to his wife-to-be. In Chicago, basketball helped him connect with the South Siders he worked with as a community organizer and with the circle of professionals who would help launch his political career. He began to scratch out notes for his 2004 Democratic Convention speech, the one that loosed his career from the D league of state politics, while in a hotel room watching the NBA on TNT. As for the two reddest states Obama flipped in the ‘08 general election, Indiana and North Carolina, each narrowly chose him after he made a basketball lover’s case to basketball-loving people.

The more than 300,000 people who have watched the Barack O-Balla mixtape on YouTube, with its highlights from high school through Election Day, might describe Obama’s game as old-school schoolyard: reverse layups, double-pumps in the lane, mambos off the dribble and a signature fake-right, drive-left move. (Obama also shoots a decent midrange jumper, though his high school nickname, Barry O’Bomber, is a misnomer.) Ask whom he resembles, and an array of answers comes back. Claude Johnson, founder of the website Baller-in-Chief.com, sees the elegance and even temper of San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker. Others receiving votes include Kenny Anderson, Dick Barnett, Manu Ginóbili, Lionel Hollins and Delonte West (sans neck tattoos).

Robinson weighs the evidence — 6′ 1 1/2″, savvy, lefthanded — and comes up with Lenny Wilkens, the Hall of Fame playmaker who campaigned for Obama and whose autograph graces the basketball that decorated the President-elect’s spare Chicago transition office. “Lenny was a thicker player and Barack is very slight, even if [defensive] physicality doesn’t bother him,” says Robinson. “But the calmness of Lenny, that’s Barack. He knows the game well enough to fit in and isn’t out of his element athletically.”

In the same way that his candidacy confounded much of the political wisdom about race, Obama’s game at age 47 makes a muddle of categories. “Here you have a laced-up professional off the court — a ‘white’ persona — who throws behind-the-back passes and busts crossovers,” says Johnson. “You’d think he’d have a basically stiff game, like Tim Duncan’s, but no, he’s showing up at a North Carolina practice or playing ball with [NBA guard Chris] Duhon. So the guy on the street says, ‘Whoa, he’s got a little game!’ It’s part of his appeal.”

Obama remains something short of the total hoops package. He can’t dunk. He doesn’t have a nickname. His usual getup of black sweatpants and gray T-shirt (call it the Police Academy Trainee look) isn’t likely to set a trend. But he does stick his nose in it. In Kuwait last July he didn’t merely visit U.S. troops, he swished a three for them — first try, no warmup. And as president he’ll keep the counsel of a roster’s worth of former ballplayers, in and out of his Cabinet, many better at the game than he.

Elizabeth Alexander is handling poetry duties at the Inauguration, but Obama himself could serve ably as bard of the new First Sport. In Dreams from My Father, his 1995 memoir, he captures both the cadences and the beguiling essence of the game: “And something else, too, something nobody talked about: a way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that’s how you sustained the trance. In the middle of which you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile, as if to say, ‘Damn….’ “

Hoop Dreams from My Father

Obama’s father, Barack, a Kenyan exchange student at the University of Hawaii, left his wife and son soon after the latter’s birth in 1961. White, Kansas-born Ann Dunham was left to raise Barry first in the islands, then in Indonesia, where she moved in 1967 after marrying another exchange student, Lolo Soetoro. His mother, Obama writes in Dreams, believed that “to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear… [and] we were to carry with style.”

Yet one day, roaming the library of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, where his mother worked, Barry read in a magazine of a black man’s unavailing efforts to lighten his skin and the physical and emotional scars that followed. By age 10, sent back to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and attend Punahou, the elite private school to which he won a scholarship, Barry sensed a gap between his mother’s romantic notion of blackness and the signals society sent his way. As for raising oneself to be a black man in America, he remembers, “no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Aside from those stationed with the military, Hawaii in the mid-1970s could count barely 400 black residents.

Soon two events conspired to help Obama address his alienation. In December ‘71, during a visit that would constitute Barry’s only memory of the man, his father gave him a basketball as a Christmas present. A photo survives of the two of them posing with the ball before the Christmas tree. Barry would come to regard that basketball as a charge as much as a gift.

The second event would take place a few months later, after Barry’s grandfather scored two scarce tickets to watch Hawaii play. Between 1970 and ‘72 the Rainbows put together a 47-8 record and received the university’s first NIT and NCAA invitations. With aloha-print shorts and bountiful Afros, the Fabulous Five averaged 90 points a game as the pep band played Jesus Christ Superstar and fans spilled into the aisles. As Obama recounts in Dreams, “I had watched the players in warmups, still boys themselves but to me poised and confident warriors, chuckling to each other about some inside joke, glancing over the heads of fawning fans to wink at the girls on the sidelines, casually flipping layups or tossing high-arcing jumpers until the whistle blew and the centers jumped and the players joined in furious battle.”

This, he decided, was a world into which he could fit his young black self. By the time he hit his teens, he was taking his father’s gift to school, shooting between classes and over the lunch hour. Teachers and students soon remarked that his gait had taken on a ballplayer’s bounce, a suppleness of foot that can be seen today when he bounds onto a stage. As he grew more confident, he drifted to the school’s lower courts, even after basketball practice. There, and at the university gym and at playgrounds around town, he would engage the island’s best adult players. Chris McLachlin, Punahou’s varsity coach, can’t recall a player who loved the game more.

In those pickup games, Obama has written, “a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up. That you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions — like hurt or fear — you didn’t want them to see.” An airy civility prevails in Hawaii — No talk stink goes an idiom in the local pidgin — but the playground offered an alien rhetoric that suited Barry just fine.

Obama admits to “living out a caricature of black male adolescence” with his embrace of the game. A Punahou senior who hoped to become a lawyer watched Obama, two years younger, inscribe a parting message in his yearbook: Get that law degree, and someday you can help me sue my NBA team for more money. But even if Obama played “with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent,” as he writes, that passion came with perks. “At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own. It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.”

With all those hours of play he developed what he’d later call “an overtly black game.” One of his favorite R­ &­ B songs was William DeVaughn’s Be Thankful for What You Got, a mid-’70s ode to inner-city pose-copping, with its invocation of Diggin’ the scene/With a gangsta lean. Obama’s immersion in basketball was, in fact, a kind of pose. Eventually he would have to apply the message in the song title to his experience as a senior on McLachlin’s Buff ‘n’ Blue varsity.

He had played jayvee as a sophomore and made Punahou’s second varsity as a forward the next season. (The school fielded multiple teams in some sports to accommodate its huge enrollment.) After having learned the game on the playground, Obama ran up against McLachlin, a disciple of John Wooden, Dean Smith and Pete Carril. “We had some conflict,” Obama told SI last year. “Some tension.” A black friend, ratifying Obama’s belief that he should be getting more playing time, hinted that Obama was now stuck in that other hoary African-American hoops narrative: Black Prometheus, Straitjacketed by the Man.

In McLachlin’s telling, it was simpler and less sinister than that. “He was really, really good and could have started for any other team in the state,” the coach says. “But we were really good, and it was so hard to break into that group. Three kids went on to Division I scholarships, two at his position.” McLachlin, then in his early 30s, believes that if they had met later in his coaching career, Obama would have had a more rewarding experience. “I would have made a place for a player like him,” McLachlin says. “But in those early days I was much more conventional. Play five, maybe one or two subs, go to the bench with a big lead. Obviously it was frustrating for him. So he negotiated.”

During his senior season Obama led a delegation of pine-riders to McLachlin’s office to make the case on their behalf for more playing time. “I reminded him it wasn’t about him, it was about the team,” McLachlin says, “and the end result was that we had a pretty amazing year.” The Punahou team that beat Moanalua High 60-28 for the 1979 state title is regarded as one of the greatest in Hawaii history. In that game Obama missed a free throw and scored on a garbage-time breakaway.

That season, Obama told SI a year ago, he learned about “being part of something and finishing it up. And I learned a lot about discipline, about handling disappointments, about being more team-oriented and realizing that not everything is about you.”

McLachlin agrees. “Despite the fact that there was pushback, he never lost sight of what the goal was,” the coach says. “We sometimes don’t get the lessons teachers teach us until years later.”

When he returned to Punahou in 2004 to address a packed chapel, Obama admitted to having been “kind of a pain in the butt when I was here.” From the dais the old second-stringer found McLachlin in the shadows. “Coach Mac, is that you?” said the new U.S. Senator from Illinois. “I’ve gotta tell you something. I really wasn’t as good as I thought I was.”

McLachlin felt a weight leave his shoulders. “As much as I berate myself for my own lack of maturity as a coach at that time, obviously some stuff stuck with him and helped shape his character,” he says. “I didn’t screw him up, is what I mean.”

Obama has alluded to the many hours he devoted to basketball as time he might have spent rounding himself out. “I had bought into a set of false assumptions about what it means to be black,” he has confessed. The game had nonetheless dug its hooks into him. And while by the time he left Punahou he knew how to get lost in a book, discuss geopolitics with friends and write up something for the literary magazine — clique-conscious classmates wondered whether Barry wanted to be a jock or a brain — one phrase leaps from his senior yearbook page. It’s a kind of epitaph for his time in Hawaii: We go play hoop.

Community on the Court

If a presidential campaign is an MRI of the soul, as Obama strategist David Axelrod likes to say, a pickup basketball game is a polygraph of the heart. Obama’s experience with the organized game would total three high school seasons, only one of them on Punahou’s top varsity, and that largely on the bench. Thus he’s less a retired ballplayer looking to keep in shape than what’s known as a baller — a product of basketball’s speakeasies, not its licensed establishments.

“If he’d been in organized ball, it’s very possible he’d have gotten the whole thing out of his system,” Johnson says. “He might say he’s better now than he ever was, but there’s pathos there. You’re still trying to prove you’re good enough to start on your high school team. In basketball you’re continually trying to prove yourself, and in pickup even more so, because there is no record. You can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m 19-1.’ It’s all on you.”

Pickup ballplayers don’t talk as much as golfers during a round, but they more quickly reach judgments about temperament and collaborative aptitude. And there’s the emotional containment that ballers learn to bring to the court, even if only to ensure that no one can sneak up behind you to see emotions… you didn’t want them to see. Asked the boxers-versus-briefs question, Obama gave the pitch-perfect pickup baller’s reply: “I don’t answer those humiliating questions, but whichever one it is, I look good in ‘em.”

Organized basketball, particularly in high school, is an exercise in submission to social control. Pickup ball, by contrast, involves collective governance and constant conflict resolution. It is, to borrow Sarah Palin’s phrase, community organizing in which everyone has “actual responsibilities.” For all its associations with inner-city pathologies, pickup ball harks back to a traditional time, when kids weren’t squired to playdates or stashed with third parties but made their way to the park on their own, picked teams and — as Obama did — grew up along the way.

“There’s an ethical undertone in pickup that people miss,” Robinson says. “The game has to be played fairly or it breaks down. You practice an honor code, making your own calls and giving them up. If Barack travels, he’ll give it up, not sneak it by you. You play with hundreds of guys who’d never do that. It all gets back to how you can tell a guy’s character on the court.”

One of the flaws Obama owns up to is “a chronic restlessness.” As he made his fitful way after high school, however, basketball abided. He spent two years at Occidental, a small liberal arts college near Pasadena. The first fall he worked out informally with 15 or so freshman hopefuls, many of whom remember his stylish game. He never was on the school team, but he played “noonball” with faculty, students and staff. As Eric Newhall, a professor who played in those games, has put it, “The greatest contribution Occidental has made to American democracy was to help Barack Obama decide that his future wasn’t in basketball.”

By his sophomore year Obama had thrown himself into classwork and antiapartheid activism, and begun to map a path east. He transferred to Columbia and became more serious about his future, though he still made pilgrimages around Manhattan “to play on courts I’d once read about.” After graduation he took a job on Chicago’s South Side, where he brought together white priests, black pastors and civic leaders to solve common problems. It was frustrating work marked by intermittent victories. For example, he used basketball as a means to get through to an on-the-edge adolescent who was scaling back his expectations for life.

Several years later, at Harvard Law, Obama joined a group of law students who played against inmates at a nearby prison, where the cons lining the court made sure their visitors knew how many packs of cigarettes rode on the outcome. When he became the first African-American elected to head the Harvard Law Review, he won a 19th-ballot victory largely because conservative and liberal factions both believed he’d give them a fair hearing. At least a few fellow students had taken his measure on the court. “He was a passer despite the fact he could score,” remembers classmate Andrew Feldstein. “Inclusive is the best way to describe him.”

Soon after Obama began his second tour in Chicago, as a summer associate with the law firm of Sidley & Austin, he started seeing a lawyer there named Michelle Robinson. She would introduce him to John Rogers, an investment executive who had captained the team at Princeton; her brother would connect Obama to Marty Nesbitt, a parking garage baron and former small-college player. Both would help bankroll Obama’s plunge into elective politics.

But before matters between Barack and Michelle could advance too far, she had a test to administer. Having grown up listening to her father and her brother, a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton, insist that a man’s character gets laid bare on the court, she hatched a plan. Craig Robinson rounded up a quorum of friends of varied abilities. “I didn’t want the game to be too intimidating,” he says, because it would’ve been painful to tell Michelle the prospect with the odd name hadn’t made the grade. He needn’t have worried. Obama found that sweet spot between not shooting every time and not always passing to Craig. In campaign appearances Robinson would retell the story with a kicker: “If I could trust him with my sister, you can trust him with your vote.”

He Got Next

In the spring of 2007 the Obama campaign looked like tiny Milan (Ind.) High next to Hillary Clinton’s Muncie Central. The director of the candidate’s New Hampshire operation wanted to have Obama play ball with high school kids around the Granite State. Axelrod, who has a track record of persuading white voters to support black candidates, balked. “People didn’t know him well yet, and I didn’t want him to play into a stereotype,” he says. But after losing primaries to Clinton in Ohio and Texas on March 4, the campaign looked at a two-month gap before critical votes in Indiana and North Carolina. “We wanted to do campaigning that got us closer to the ground — more diners and less platform speeches,” Axelrod says. “Basketball was a no-brainer. Besides, any excuse to play is one he’ll take.”

Obama engaged voters in those two states with an idiom familiar to Hoosiers and Tar Heels alike. In Indiana he played H-O-R-S-E with a boy in the hamlet of Union Mills. He played three-on-three in Kokomo. He sank a “buzzer-beater” at an arcade game during a visit to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle. Then he ran full-court with coach Roy Williams’s varsity in Chapel Hill. “He actually got to the hole and blew the layup when he saw [college Player of the Year Tyler] Hansbrough coming at him,” says Axelrod. On May 6 Obama won North Carolina and nearly captured Indiana, essentially locking up the nomination. Six months later, by which time Dean Smith had endorsed him, Obama carried both states against John McCain — in each case by a lone percentage point. Basketball might well have made the difference.

On Election Day, Obama and 40 or so others picked teams and played round-robin at the Attack Athletics complex in Chicago. “He was the one who had noticed the pattern,” Nesbitt says. “We played in Iowa and won. We didn’t play in New Hampshire and lost. We played every election day thereafter.”

Before the Iowa caucuses, after Team Obama won a game, the candidate offered a high five to the captain of the losing team. Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois state treasurer, refused to deal digits in return. “Why are you being a sore loser?” Obama asked.

“I’ll give you a high five back if you admit you stack the teams.”

“I don’t care who I play with. I’ll play with anybody. You want to switch teams? We can switch teams if you want!”

Giannoulias declined as a point of pride, then got the grin that Obama has long deployed to defuse tense moments.

As the lone former Division I players under 35 in Obama’s basketball circle, Giannoulias and Reggie Love always line up on opposite teams. Obama makes sure he’s teamed with Love, the 6′ 4″, 225-pound former Duke captain (class of 2005) who served as his “body man,” or personal assistant, during the campaign. “Barack gets feisty,” says Giannoulias, 32, who stands 6′ 2″ and played at Boston University. “He always makes Reggie guard me, and it drives me nuts.”

Indeed, following the May 6 primaries Obama campaigned with bruised ribs, the result of a shoulder Giannoulias gave him on a drive to the basket. “He’s tough but not dirty,” says Giannoulias, who won statewide office at age 30 thanks largely to Obama’s support. “He has fun, but he’s intensely competitive. Even as he gets along with everyone, he tries to find a way to win.”

“I’ve seen him stand up for himself,” says Robinson, “but I’ve never seen him lose his cool. That’s the Lenny Wilkens part of him.”

Not everyone accepts the Wilkens comparison. The McCain campaign aired an attack ad suggesting that Obama had disrespected the troops by shooting hoops with them, with footage of his three-pointer in Kuwait drawing a portrait, as New York magazine’s John Heilemann put it, of someone “blinged up and camera-hungry…. Allen Iverson with a Harvard Law degree.” By the end of the campaign, however, Obama had sold himself to the great, broad middle as a Wilkens type, a man who could channel street cred into the mainstream, who wanted the challenge and was up to it.

“It wasn’t that he made or missed that shot,” Robinson says of Obama’s three-pointer in front of the troops in Kuwait. “It’s that he took it.”

That, Axelrod says, is what consistently strikes him about his boss. Before the first debate with McCain, Axelrod recalls, “We’re standing in the greenroom and he’s about to take the stage, and I could’ve easily gone to the bathroom and thrown up. So I ask him how he’s feeling. ‘I’m a little nervous, but it’s a good nervous,’ he says. ‘Give me the ball. Let’s play the game.’­ “

Baller-in-Chief

The outdoor half-court on the White House grounds isn’t up to the all-seasons, all-court basketball ambitions of the new President. Giddy at what Obama’s election could mean for its product around the world, the NBA has offered to help install an indoor full court. Meanwhile, Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin has offered use of the Verizon Center. At the very least, Axelrod and Nesbitt predict, there will be regular trips to the full court at Camp David.

After helping make him who he is, after helping him get elected, how might basketball influence the way Obama governs? People it will behoove him to get along with — both Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) and Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero play regularly — could wind up as guests in Presidential games. For Cabinet officials there will be face time with the President, and for those who play (prospective Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder) there will be in-your-face time as well.

Much has been made of how Obama has assembled, Lincoln-like, a “team of rivals” to advise him. Last summer McLachlin, Obama’s high school coach, asked an AP reporter to relay a message to the candidate: In 40 years of coaching he’d learned that there’s no such thing as the perfect coach, but there is such a thing as a perfect staff if you surround yourself with people who are good at what you’re not. “People seem to agree he’s done an amazing job of putting together a Cabinet,” says the old coach. “It says a lot about why so many people latched on to him as a dream-giver. Because he’s honest about his shortcomings, he can reach for the stars.”

During his family Christmas vacation on Oahu, Obama and several Chicago friends met up with a handful of the President-elect’s high school buddies and Coach Mac at the Punahou gym. Over nearly two hours they squeezed in four games. Obama dished out no-look passes and finished off a spin in the lane with a finger roll. He sank several shots from deep. Twice he crossed over former Punahou teammate and NFL player John Kamana, the best athlete on the floor. McLachlin, having bought into Craig Robinson’s analogy, yelled “Lenny!” from the sidelines a half-dozen times.

There’s more of McLachlin and his coaching influences in Barack Obama than Barry O’Bomber would ever have imagined. “Avoid the peaks and valleys,” John Wooden used to tell his teams, much as Obama told his campaign. Dean Smith was a master at setting aside a loss and moving on, as Obama did after New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In November, Rogers, the old Princeton Tiger, supplied interim offices for the Obama transition team at his firm, Ariel Investments — which meant that for three days the President-elect called world leaders from a conference room named after Pete Carril. The undomesticated high school ballplayer has fallen in with Duncan, Robinson and Rogers, ex-Ivy Leaguers who have won national three-on-three titles by using smarts and structure to school players half their age. Says Rogers, “He’s around a lot of guys who know how to play and aren’t just running up and down the court.”

Throughout Obama’s career there’s been a pattern of counterweight, of his providing yin where there’s yang, and vice versa. At Punahou, with order and orthodoxy all around, he chose to develop a gut-bucket game. On Chicago’s South Side, where hoops and life tend toward entropy, he worked as an organizer. At a Harvard Law School roiled by ideological polarization, he was the difference-splitter. Basketball’s appeal, Obama told HBO’s Bryant Gumbel last year, lies in an “improvisation within a discipline that I find very powerful.” With its serial returns to equilibrium — cut backdoor against an overplay; shoot when the defense sags — the game represents Obama’s intellectual nature come alive.

Another dialectic, as old as the ancients, poses the great challenge of government: How best to balance the rights of the individual with the welfare of the group? That tension surfaces in Obama’s speeches and writings again and again. “Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values,” he writes in The Audacity of Hope, “the glue upon which every healthy society depends.” In the Africa of his roots he sees the pendulum swung so far toward the collective that the individual can be overburdened and paralyzed. In the America he’s poised to lead he sees individuals gaming a financial system so enfeebled that the collective faces deficits and recession. Where is the golden mean, that place where We the People might find “a way of being together,” where the best players stop worrying about their points and the worst players get swept up in the moment and the score only matters because that’s how you sustain the trance?

The same tension sits at the heart of hoops. Titles await teams that can braid what Obama, speaking of America here, has called “these twin strands — the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity.” Maybe Barry O’Bomber needed to be a Punahou reserve to become a Hawaii state champion. Maybe Barack Obama needed to be a community organizer to become a U.S. Senator. And maybe, just maybe, Americans chose him as their next president because they too have come to recognize that in the end it’s not about you, it’s about the team.

Perhaps on Tuesday he will say it: Come, let us get swept up in the moment. Let us create and sustain the trance.