Understanding Obama Through Basketball
Alexander Wolff, a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, argues that basketball has been a “touchstone” in Obama’s “exercise of the power of the presidency,” and that he has used it “more often and more effectively than any previous president had used any sport.” It was a campaign tool during Obama’s first run for the Presidency: scenes of him playing basketball on the trail highlighted his youthful vigor and, as Wolff writes, “undermined Republican efforts to portray Obama as foreign, suspicious, or someone who ‘pals around with terrorists.’ ”
.. “At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own,” Obama writes. “It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.” The court was a plausibly fair and meritocratic space where the best might flourish, but also a place where ideas about race were inescapable.
.. Obama’s brother-in-law, the college coach Craig Robinson, identified the President as being “extremely left-handed,” meaning that he can’t go right. (This fact has perhaps been underutilized by the President’s Republican opponents.)