Obama, The Basketball Player
By Eddie Alinea
PhilBoxing.com
Mon, 28 Apr 2014
Not many Filipinos knew that the United States President Barrack Obama used to play basketball in his high school days in the Island of Hawaii where he grew up.
Nicknamed 'Barry O'Bomber" for his deadly left-handed jump shot, the 44th U.S. Head of State, in fact, led the Punahou high school squad to the Hawaii State championship in his playing days.
Stories were written that from where he lived at the prestigious Punahaou campus, he was often seen carrying books in one hand and dribbling a basketball in the other while going to school.
Basketball has been an important part of the two-termer president's life, from his childhood days top his college days at the Harvard Law School.
Even today, the head of the world's most powerful nation brings to the White House qualities that teammates and old friends remember seeing on the hard court.
It came as no surprise, therefore, that when he was first elected in 2008, President Obama, a look-alike of Rain or Shine stalwart Gabe Norwood in the local pro-league Philippine Basketball Association, hired a team of cabinet members and aides with serious basketball background either for seeing action in college tournaments and amateur and pro-leagues.
"I think we're putting together the best basketball-playing cabinet in American history," the President-elect was quoted as saying during a press conference prior to assuming the government's highest post.
"I could play basketball with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent," Obama wrote in his memoir. When he was re-elected, his next inner circle looked to have been filled with players who remained permanent fixtures of his retinue that play pickup games in whichever cities he visited in his first two terms at the Oval Office.
While sport, for that matter basketball, is not in Obama's agenda in his visit to the Philippines starting today, it won't surprise anybody if he chooses to squeeze in an hour or two from his schedule to watch basketball games, especially at a time when the semifinal round of PBA Commissioner's Cup is currently on-going.
That is if the PBA high priests or even the Samahang Basketbol Ng Pilipinas would extend him, the highest basketball-playing official of a country, an invitation.
Naming former athletes and sportsmen in key positions in the U.S. government is not new though. Many heads of state have found it politically expedient to bring along favored sport to the White House.
Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, boxed and practiced jujitsu and, according to presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, maintained his heavy set of paraphernalia in the presidential residence.
John F. Kennedy favored touch football, while George H. W. Bush used to host high-powered tennis matches at the Palace. His son George W. Bush had gone mountain biking with the group he called "Peloton One" in tow, President Richard Nixon embraced bowling as means of connecting with the working class voters.
According to the Washington Post, a group of regular basketball buddies in their 40s or roughly 28 years old plays with the president, if he has time to.
They include, to mention a few, vice president Joseph Biden, who once managed the freshman basketball team of Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware; retired Gen. James Jones, a 6-foot-4 nominee for national security advisor and star-forward of Georgetown University in the 60s; and Susan Rice, then nominee as ambassador to the United Nations and a popular point-guard for the National Cathedral School in Washington.
Click here to view a list of other articles written by Eddie Alinea.
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