Baller-in-Chief

(From the New York Post Online)

Chris Duhon got to know President Barack Obama during pickup games in Chicago last spring and summer. Here are his thoughts, as told to Marc Berman, on yesterday’s inauguration of the 44th President of the United States:

KNICKS BLOG

AS I watched the inauguration unfold on TV in the locker room with my Knicks New York Knicks teammates after yesterday’s practice, I felt excited for our country, excited for my best friend Reggie Love and excited for my basketball acquaintance, President Barack Obama.

Reggie Love is Obama’s right-hand man, but his official title is “Special Assistant and Personal Aide to POTUS (President of the United States).”

To me, he’s just Reggie, my teammate for three years at Duke whom I still speak to every day. Through Reggie, I met President Obama and played pickup basketball games with him this past April, May and June - 5 on 5 - in Chicago’s East Bank Club. Reggie invited me to yesterday’s inauguration - an offer I had to decline.

To watch Obama win on Election Night was thrilling after meeting him on a personal level. It felt like Reggie was winning, too. Yesterday, after watching the inauguration ceremony, I just felt very excited because I felt connected to it as well.

It’s a breath of fresh air that we’re going to try to make a change. I texted Reggie right after the speech, “Congrats. Wish I could’ve been there.”

When Obama finished his speech yesterday, all of my Knicks teammates clapped as one. It was emotional. No one in that room expected to see a black president in their lifetime. I didn’t think that was something that would happen, growing up in Louisiana. To witness it actually happen shows that all of what our ancestors worked for and sacrificed for has finally come about.

Obama is very confident and he presents himself as a strong leader. He’ll do whatever it takes to get things done.

The times I’ve spent with Obama at the East Bank Club, he was very approachable, easy to talk to, cracking a lot of jokes. He made me feel comfortable as soon as we met, made me feel loose. It was cool to get to play with him a few times after my last Bulls season ended.

He watches basketball all the time. He and Reggie talk about sports and he loves the Chicago teams. He always asked me, “Are the Bulls going to make the playoffs this year? How good are they going to be?” He was always watching, especially because Reggie keeps an eye on my game.

During our pickup games, Obama was very vocal on both ends of the court, constantly talking, directing guys, telling them where to go. He understands how to play the game. He can only go left, though. He knows how to pass and is a decent shooter.

I was surprised, but more surprised at how he made me feel comfortable from the get-go. The whole time there, I wasn’t nervous to be around him. He’s just a normal guy like everyone else.

I had a chance to guard him. He guarded me a few times. I didn’t go full out, but everyone else out there does. Nobody takes it easy on him. They definitely go after him.

When the Knicks were in Washington last week, I went out with Reggie to a Japanese restaurant. Oddly, we didn’t talk about the upcoming inauguration or the Knicks. I was glad to catch up with him because we are both so busy. We were able to just get away from everything. It’s all you hear about, all you talk about. I don’t want to talk about basketball. He doesn’t want to talk about his job. We just talk about life in general.

Reggie didn’t know initially if he wanted to go and work in the White House after they won the election. He was thinking of going to law school to pursue that career. I told him it would be a great opportunity because not many people can say they worked for a president and be with a president all the time. He’s excited about it.

Reggie wondered if I could go to the event. I know how historic it is, first African-American president. I wanted to be there as a supporter and friend to Reggie. At the same time, I’m in the middle of the season. We’re not that far out of the playoffs. We’re making good strides. This is my obligation to compete with this team. I knew the best thing for me was to stay here.

As many people know, I am from Slidell, La. After Hurricane Katrina, my old house and where my sister still lived was destroyed. My high school was completely destroyed. I was glad I was able to help and do my part with my “Stand Tall Foundation.”

I think my home state will be in good hands with Obama. One of his main focuses is the education system. Louisiana’s educational system needs to be strengthened. Obama will help improve the situation there and in other neighborhoods around the country. Youth is our future. We need to educate them as best as we can.

After the Obamas settle in comfortably into their new home, I’d like to invite them to a Knicks game. We’ll see what happens!

(From the Daily Intel)

Judging by what we’ve been reading about the guy for the past two years, we were under the impression that when Barack Obama is inaugurated today, we’d have not just the most perfect president ever, but the most awesome basketball player our government’s ever seen. After all, the Obama profile in Sports Illustrated last week describes his game as “old-school schoolyard” and “feisty,” in addition to explaining how he basically used the sport to win everything from swing states like North Carolina to the approval of future brother-in-law Craig Robinson. The only two downsides to his game, we were led to believe, were that he can’t dunk and that his uniform of sweats “isn’t likely to set a trend.”

But is it possible Obama’s skills are — gasp! — overrated? In SI, Claude Johnson, the editor of baller-in-chief.com, talks about Obama’s cred, and how he’s played pick-up ball with the likes of the Knicks’ Chris Duhon. But in the Post today, Duhon himself crushes our hopes. His analysis of Obama’s best move? “I don’t think he has a best move.” To make things worse, the Sporting Blog today points out that he’ll be far from the best president, athletically speaking. (That’s a toss-up between Teddy Roosevelt and Gerald Ford.) And now that we think about it, there was that David Axelrod anecdote in SI about Obama blowing a layup last year when he saw North Carolina’s Tyler Hansbrough coming at him. With regard to his balling skills, at least, consider our expectations adjusted.

Brick!
Photo: Getty Images

(From Denver Stiffs)

In the Spring of 2002, the Denver Nuggets missed the NBA Playoffs for the seventh consecutive season, and for the 10th time in 12 seasons. Going back to 1990, the franchise had been run by a slew of incompetent, greedy, self-serving and lazy individuals who never took the time to understand the salary cap, scout international and high school players, or formulate worthwhile deals that paid off in the long run. On the floor and in the locker room, the coaches during this period were equally incompetent and/or lazy. They didn’t demand nightly excellence and effort from the players, often didn’t show up on time (or at all in some cases) to practices and even enabled a player mutiny at one point.

From 1990 through 2002, the Denver Nuggets franchise was in total disarray: they never won more than 42 games, won only one playoff series, and had four seasons in which they couldn’t do better than 21 wins (including one in which they won just 11 games, tying the NBA’s second worst all-time record). For a franchise that had only missed the postseason twice in 23 previous seasons, professional basketball in Denver had become a running joke.

And then change we could believe in came along in the summer of 2002 when a man with little experience and a funny name took over the coaching ranks for the team.

His name was Jeff Bzdelik.

Entering the 2002-03 season, Bzdelik inherited the worst roster in modern NBA history. In order to move “toxic assets” off the books, then-Nuggets GM Kiki Vandeweghe had pillaged the roster of what little talent it had remaining, and left Bzdelik with a roster of no-names such as Chris Andersen (who made the team after an open tryout…unheard of in the modern NBA), Mark Blount, Rodney White, Donnell Harvey, Junior Harrington, Vincent Yarbrough, Chris Whitney, Shammond Williams, Ryan Bowen, Kenny Satterfield and Predrag Savovic (who? He played 27 games that season!) and two teenage rookies with even funnier sounding names than Bzdelik: Nikoloz Tskitishvili and Maybyner “Nene” Hilario.

Under Bzdelik’s tutelage, 2002-03 was a dreadful season record-wise. The Nuggets won just 17 games, the third worst outing in franchise history, and were routinely clobbered by their opposition. They averaged 84.2 points per game (29th out of 29 NBA teams) and their attendance ranked 25th. In one game they put up just 53 points. A mere 58 in another. They scored in the mid-to-low 60s on three other occasions and managed less than 80 points a total of 30 times, more than a third of their games.

And yet if you watched this team play each game as I did, you’d never have guessed they were a 17-win team. In fact, you could argue (as I have on numerous occasions), that they won 17 more games than they ever should have.

Jeff Bzdelik changed the culture of professional basketball in Denver. The Nuggets may have suffered from years of ineptitude beforehand, had no money to work with, and an all-time worst roster to boot - i.e. the perfect storm for what should have turned into the fewest wins in NBA history - but Bzdelik never used any of this as an excuse. Under Bzdelik, the Nuggets players were going to out-hustle and outwork their opponents virtually every night. They would play unselfishly and commit to defense, or they wouldn’t get back on the floor.

After one season with Bzdelik at the helm, playing in Denver no longer seemed like a death sentence to NBA players. Thanks to good fortune with the draft, a few of Vandeweghe’s trades panning out and - most importantly - the atmosphere of effort, selflessness and confidence built from the ground up by Bzdelik - the Nuggets were able to build off of Bzdelik’s energy and return to the playoffs the following season. Six seasons later, the Nuggets are one of just three teams in the Western Conference to have appeared in the postseason for five consecutive seasons.

Watching Barack Obama sworn in as our 44th President today, I couldn’t help but think back to 2002 (yes, I’m that pathetic of a Nuggets fan that I’m actually drawing a connection between the two, but please bear with me). Like the Nuggets that year, our country has also succumbed to a slew of incompetent, greedy, self-serving and lazy individuals - both Republican and Democrat - who failed to understand our financial system, deal appropriately with the world around them and the problems at home, or formulate worthwhile plans and programs that could pay off in the long run.

Like the Denver Nuggets of 2002, the United States of America is badly in need of a culture change and I believe Barack Obama could be our country’s Jeff Bzdelik.

In fact, I see Obama’s first year in office being similar to that 2002-03 Denver Nuggets season. We may not see a lot of immediate progress and a lot of mistakes will be made, but if President Obama can - at a minimum - establish an atmosphere of effort, selflessness and confidence (mentioned in today’s inaugural address, by the way) and catch a few lucky breaks along the way, I believe we can get through the various monstrous problems before us and come out much better on the other side.

So here’s wishing President Obama the best of luck (I know my stock portfolio needs it…yeeesh). May he do for our nation what Jeff Bzdelik did for Nuggets Nation.

Now that’s what I call the audacity of hope.

(From the Sporting Blog)

Though I am no presidential scholar, I dabble in the field, and armed with only my dilettante’s knowledge I feel safe in saying that to the many historic firsts that will be marked with Obama’s inauguration tomorrow, we can add that it will be the first time that a sitting President’s sport of choice will be the game of basketball.

Given that Obama is a child of mixed-race parentage and the first person of color to hold the highest of American offices, it seems fitting indeed that B-ball is his game, this sport that among other things has evolved into a symbol of hope to impoverished African Americans across the nation as a ticket to college and in some rare cases unimaginable wealth. That Obama, a symbol in and of himself of the profoundest hope, should be by all accounts a dedicated pick-up basketball player, well, it’s so appropriate that it couldn’t have been scripted better in a Hollywood screenplay.

Presidents have always been symbols, after all, and in this sports-mad nation that we live in, the games that presidents play have great significance in how we understand them as men and relate to them as leaders. As with so many tenets of modern political campaigns, you could trace back to John Kennedy the awareness that there is no greater way for a Presidential candidate to humanize himself than to allow the American public to witness him at play. Kennedy’s legendary family touch-football games not only presented a vivid image of health and vigor, but they aligned a man who at that point, as a Catholic, seemed alien to much of mainstream America into seemingly instant harmony with its core values. You see a man with a good head of hair throwing a football to a child in a verdant meadow and you can help but think to yourself, “there is a man I can trust.”

For the flipside of that equation, consider the worst sporting bungle in the history of Presidential elections, a most recent debacle involving another Senator from Massachusetts and water-sports. The infamous John Kerry windsurfing photo was an absolute disaster for his campaign, because at exactly the wrong moment it crystallized everything that the nation already suspected of him, and disliked; that he was an astronomically wealthy playboy of expensive leisure pursuits. It made W., progeny of one of the great sporting Presidents, seem masculine and down-to-earth by comparison. You think of the Bush family, you think of the lean George Sr. jogging or throwing horseshoes or smacking tennis balls on the run. For all his pasty, ineffectual blathering, by all accounts George Bush the elder was a hell of an athlete.

Far from the best athlete, however, who’s ever occupied the Oval Office. That prestigious award has to be considered a toss-up between two vastly different Presidents of the 20th century, neither of whom, ironically, was elected to his first term in office.

Teddy Roosevelt, who as Vice President ascended to the role of Commander-in-Chief after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, is today rightfully considered the founding father of the sporting Presidency, what with his emphasis on physical education and his overall aura of pugnacious virility. Roosevelt was a hunter, a wrassler, and a champion boxer in his Harvard days. He was the Presidential equivalent of Hemingway, multi-talented, much concerned with questions of manliness and on the whole spoiling for a fight at every turn.

In my estimation, however, the great T.R. is a narrow second to the greatest athlete ever to serve as President, and what a forgettable President he was, Gerald R. Ford, Nixon’s V.P. who took the helm after Tricky Dick resigned in 1974. Ford was a star linebacker at Michigan on two undefeated national championship teams in 1932 and 1933. He also holds the unlikely honor of being the only future President to ever have tackled a future Heisman Trophy winner, after taking down the winner of the very first Heisman, the University of Chicago’s Jay Berwanger, during a game in 1934. As a member of the College All-Star team, Ford also played in an exhibition against the Chicago Bears in 1935, the Monsters of the Midway-era team that featured Bernie Masterson and Bronko Nagurski. In 1994, Michigan retired his #48.

Admittedly, though he promises to be an infinitely more memorable President, Obama is simply not in Ford’s league in terms of his athletic credentials. Actually, in coming up with a sporting Presidential comparison for Obama, I’m afraid that Nixon’s name leaps to mind, but only in so far as Obama has expressed an interest in changing the way that college football crowns its national champion. You may recall that in 1969 the football-obsessed Nixon took it upon himself to congratulate Texas coach Darrell Royal in the locker room and anoint the Longhorns national champs by Presidential decree after they beat the Arkansas Razorbacks in a game that many still think is the greatest college football game ever played.

His college football predilections aside, however, I think that perhaps the most appropriate sports antecedent to Obama is his own personal Presidential hero, Abe Lincoln. Honest Abe was something of an amateur wrassler, and famously defeated the great Jack Armstrong, a feat that came to be quite an unexpected feather in his cap during his Presidential campaign.

It’s what that victory stood for that links Obama to Lincoln in my mind, for Lincoln, and to a certain extent Teddy Roosevelt as well, both occupied the Presidency during deeply troubled times and were called upon to confront giant symbols of corruption and greed in conflicts that threatened the very foundations of the nation. It’s no mystery that the image of them as strong, swarthy athletes who could stand toe-to-toe with any man was a central component of the mythology that surrounded them. Just like today, theirs were not times where America would tolerate windsurfing or any of its effete equivalents from its leaders.

Which brings me back to Obama, the guy who isn’t afraid to mix it up on the playground and throw a few ‘bows when tempers flare. Obama has a reputation for being as fiery on the basketball court as he is cool and articulate in his rhetoric, and this is exactly what the nation craves from a leader right now, a man who plays hard but keeps his head when the pressure is on. It’s almost too perfect that basketball is Obama’s game, really, and yet like so many things with this guy, it’s proven to be no affect but rather simply who he is, a whole package that now has the nation simply giddy with anticipation.

On that score, I’ll conclude by wondering if we now have leaked videos of White House pickup games to look forward to on the Nightly News. If so, let me put it mildly and say that if nothing else it will be a welcome change from the jogging Bushes and the cigar-chomping Bubba Clinton shots from the golf course.