[Vision2020] The Audacity of Hoops

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of the January 19, 2009 edition of Sports Illustrated.

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The Audacity of Hoops Story Highlights
As a boy Barack Obama began playing basketball, and he never stopped
As president, Obama is expected to put a full court in the White House 
 
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.

---------------------

The Dream Team

Barack Obama has indeed assembled what he calls "the best basketball-
playing Cabinet in American history." Here's a who's who of the incoming 
Administration and others in the Obama hoop loop—enough ballers to fill up 
three pickup squads

CABINET
ALL-STARS

Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
6'5" co-captain at Harvard in mid-'80s, played in USBL and Australia; has 
won three Hoop-It-Up three-on-three titles

Eric Holder
Attorney General
Before a season on Columbia freshman team was 6'2" co-captain of the 
Stuyvesant High Hoopsters in Manhattan

Ret. Gen. James Jones
Natl. Security Adviser
In 1963--65 the future Supreme Allied Commander Europe was a 6'5" 
frontcourt reserve at Georgetown

Susan Rice
Ambassador To U.N.
5'3" point guard at National Cathedral School in D.C. played for Oxford as 
a Rhodes scholar at New College

Timothy Geithner
Treasury Secretary
While president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he played in its 
league. Said to hate to miss a pickup game

AIDES DE HOOP

Craig Robinson
Oregon State Coach
President's 6'6" brother-in-law was two-time Ivy League Player of Year at 
Princeton and a pro in England

Marty Nesbitt
Campaign Treasurer
Board chair of Chicago Housing Authority and CEO of The Parking Spot 
played at Division III Albion (Mich.) College

Dr. Eric Whitaker
Hospital Executive
University of Chicago Medical Center executive vice president played at 
Division III Grinnell (Iowa) College

Reggie Love
Obama's Personal Aide
Scholarship football player at Duke was walk-on forward on '01 NCAA title 
hoops team; always plays on Obama's side

Alexi Giannoulias
Illinois State Treasurer
6'2" guard played at Boston University and was a pro in Greece; met Obama 
in University of Chicago pickup games

Hill Harper
Television Actor
CSI: NY star and Harvard Law grad organized game between law students and 
prisoners in which Obama played

Alan King
Chicago Attorney
Played at University of Chicago's Lab School with Arne Duncan and at 
Division III Augustana College in Illinois

David Axelrod
Senior Adviser
Met his wife in a Chicago coed basketball league. Longtime Bulls season-
ticket holder, occasional campaign pickup player

John W. Rogers Jr.
CEO, Ariel Investments
Obama fund-raiser and cochair of Inauguration Committee was Princeton 
captain in '79--80 and a teammate of Robinson's

Marvin Nicholson
Campaign Trip Director
6'8" former caddie played hoops at University of Western Ontario and was 
John Kerry's personal assistant in '04

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Barack Obama Basketball Mixtape
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-3ROv_MsNs
 
Barack the House, Moscow!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNle_402RY0

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"For a lapsed Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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