(From Matthew Futterman and Amy Chozick for The Wall Street Journal Online)
A Good Jump Shot, but Others Have Been Better Athletes; Teddy Did Jujitsu on the South Lawn
After his inauguration, the president hosted a Super Bowl party, correctly picked North Carolina to win the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and sat courtside for a Bulls-Wizards NBA game. He works out nearly every day, sports a Chicago White Sox cap and plays pick-up basketball with his buddies. This week he played P-I-G against the champion University of Connecticut women’s hoops team.
The president is also jumping into the fray on a host of controversial sports issues. A Democrat who believes in the power of government to force change, Mr. Obama is using his bully pulpit in a manner that could ultimately give him the most expansive sports résumé for any president since Theodore Roosevelt.
Before taking office, he pushed for a college football playoff to declare a national champion instead of the patchwork system of bowl games. In his first three-plus months in office, he has spoken out on behalf of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, lobbied for the U.S. to host soccer’s World Cup in 2018 or 2022, and even delivered a national tongue-lashing to Alex Rodriguez after the Yankees slugger acknowledged using a performance-enhancing drug during parts of three seasons.
“It’s so much a part of what he does, it’s almost as if this is becoming a post-sports presidency,” said John Sayle Watterson, author of “The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency.”
Some say it’s also good politics. “Intellectually he’s so lofty that I think he feels it’s necessary to bring himself down a bit,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. “There is nothing better to temper that loftiness than sports.”
While Teddy Roosevelt is largely seen as the modern standard-bearer for sportsmen presidents, sports have played a significant role in lives and work of numerous commanders in chief since 1900, considered the beginning of the modern era for organized sports in the U.S. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson became the first president to attend a World Series game. Herbert Hoover was a devout baseball fan who put up with constant booing when he showed up at the ballpark during the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave the “green light” to allow baseball during World War II.
John Kennedy sailed and played touch football, and signed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allowed the National Football League’s teams to negotiate jointly their network television deals. He also told the Washington Redskins they would lose the right to play at their federally funded stadium if they didn’t integrate the team.
Still, some presidents have been penalized for their efforts. Jimmy Carter called for the much-criticized U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and he micro-managed the schedule of play on the White House tennis courts. Bill Clinton tried to help solve the Major League Baseball strike in 1995 before giving up, since peace negotiations in Northern Ireland were probably easier than in Major League Baseball. (Mr. Carter was unavailable for comment, and spokesmen for Mr. Clinton did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
Though it wasn’t one of his initiatives, Richard Nixon gets credit for his 1972 signing of Title IX, landmark civil-rights legislation that demanded equality in women’s sports programs. He bowled his way through five-and-a half tumultuous years in office on the White House lane, and beginning in 1971 used ping-pong matches between U.S. and Chinese stars to ease relations between the two countries. On the lighter side, Mr. Nixon, a former college football reserve, drew up plays and sent them to Redskins coach George Allen.
For his part, George W. Bush, a former owner of the Texas Rangers, enjoyed his signature moment wearing a bullet-proof vest and firing a strike before Game 3 of the 2001 World Series in New York, when the city was reeling from the terrorist attacks. He also raised the issue of steroids in baseball in his 2004 State of the Union address. Some argued Mr. Bush was giving himself cover against criticism that he had turned a blind eye toward steroids as the owner of a team that acquired Jose Canseco. (In 2007, Mr. Bush told ESPN he had no knowledge of steroid use on his club).
White House-watchers say that Mr. Bush relaxed watching SportsCenter on ESPN, and that he never met a workout routine he didn’t like. His presidency started with daily runs, which morphed into vigorous 90-120 minute rides on his mountain bike once his knee went out. Staffers and Secret Service agents often struggled to keep up. In 2000, as his lawyers urged the United States Supreme Court not to re-start the ballot recount in the Florida election, Mr. Bush headed to his gym in Austin.
Yet even that record falls short of TR, the forefather of the U.S. conservation movement famous for his big-game hunting out West, jujitsu sessions on the White House lawn, and boxing and wrestling matches in the White House. In 1905, Mr. Roosevelt began pressing for rule changes and safety measures in college football, where players were dying from the brutal collisions. Mr. Roosevelt’s talks with a handful of top coaches led to a major conference on the issue, which ultimately prompted the creation of what is now the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
“Athletic sports, if followed properly, and not elevated into a fetish are admirable for developing character, besides bestowing on the participants an invaluable fund of health and strength,” Mr. Roosevelt wrote in the North American Review in 1890.
TR clearly set the bar high, and Mr. Obama is trying to reach it. Earlier this month, the International Olympic Committee’s site evaluation group began its visit to Chicago watching a four-minute video Mr. Obama taped pleading his hometown’s case. Mr. Obama also intends to be in Copenhagen in October when the IOC is scheduled to decide the Chicago’s Olympic fate. Also this month, he wrote to Joseph S. Blatter, president of soccer’s governing body, FIFA, stating the case for a U.S. World Cup by citing his own experiences with the game as a child in Jakarta and as a soccer-dad in Chicago.
During the winter, Mr. Obama took time in his first prime time news conference to show his personal disdain for Mr. Rodriguez’s steroid use, saying the revelation “tarnishes an entire era.”
As for creating of a college football playoff, Mr. Obama can wield little in the way of formal influence over the debate. However, NCAA officials have been put on notice that any plan they come up is going to have one very powerful critic weighing in.
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