Barack Obama became obsessed with basketball at one point in his life, not as a high schooler, surprisingly, but in law school.
You can see that love and skill in action if you watch the Bryant Gumbel special below on his game.
In the segment, for the first time on television since he was a kid, Obama plays. He wears a t-shirt and modest sweat pants. He plays in a funky gym with some servicemen and women, and helps win a game.
The move with which he wins the game is well-practiced, complex, and aggressive (but not hostile). He wins a game on a fake right, go left, spin back into the lane, bank-shot.
Take a look. Enjoy.
How natural Obama is; how much he obviously loves the game, how easily he becomes part of the flow. He's not a jump shooter, he's a fast break guy, a get to the hoop guy. Your usual aggressive American.
Yet somehow he is unpatriotic, because he went to Harvard and taught at Chicago and lived in Hyde Park and served on a board with a man who in the 60's was a radical.
It's a "That's not America" claim, and it's bogus. No game is more American that basketball, invented in this country for something to do on cold Midwestern nights, Basketball, more than baseball, more that football, both of whom have root in English games, was born in the USA. And it's a game that found a new identity, and a powerful one, when black men were allowed to play, and changed everything.
I recall teaching a class as a young man in story analysis, being attacked by a student angry about a bad grade I had given out, and because I was attacked unfairly, by sheer luck won the sympathy of the class.
Up until that point the class had been respectful but not especially involved. Suddenly they began to listen to what I had to say. I think this preposterous "debate," in which ABC attacked Obama for all the trivial issues it could think of for as long as it could, will make Obama a more sympathetic figure, not less.
Here's hoping. And here's Barack on the court:
