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One Place Where Obama Goes Elbow to
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By JODI
KANTOR

Published: June 1, 2007

Last Christmas, Senator Barack
Obama flew to Hawaii to contemplate a presidential bid in the peace of his
childhood home. But there, on a humid playground near Waikiki Beach, he found
himself being roughed up by some of his best friends. It was the third and final
game of the group’s annual three-on-three basketball showdown, and with the
score nearly tied, things were getting dirty.

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“Every time he tried to score, I fouled him,” Martin Nesbitt recalled. “I
grabbed him, I’d hit his arm, I’d hold him.” Michael Ramos, another participant,
explained, “No blood, no foul.”

Mr. Obama, like everyone else on the court, was laughing. And with a head
fake, a bit of contact and a jumper that seemed out of his range, Mr. Obama sank
the shot that won the game.

From John
F. Kennedy’s sailing to Bill
Clinton’s golf mulligans to John
Kerry’s windsurfing, sports has been used, correctly or incorrectly, as a
personality decoder for presidents and presidential aspirants. So, armchair
psychologists and fans of athletic metaphors, take note: Barack Obama is a wily
player of pickup basketball, the version of the game with unspoken rules, no
referee and lots of elbows. He has been playing since adolescence, on
cracked-asphalt playgrounds and at exclusive health clubs, developing a quick
offensive style, a left-handed jump shot and relationships that have extended
into the political arena.

If one were somehow to play a highlight reel of Mr. Obama’s on-court
exploits, it would start in Hawaii, with a pudgy junior high school student in
short shorts and high socks who had a Julius Erving poster plastered on his
bedroom wall.

It might include the time he and several Harvard Law School classmates played
inmates at a Massachusetts prison; the students were terrified to win or lose,
because the convicts lining the court had bet on both outcomes. (“I got two
packs on you!” they called out.)

Cut to the future Mrs. Obama asking her brother to
take her new boyfriend out on the court, to make sure he was not the type to hog
the ball or call constant fouls. The reel might then show Mr. Obama, an Illinois
Democrat, playing with former NBA stars in a tournament fund-raiser for his
Senate campaign, and at the family gatherings that always seem to end with
everyone out by the hoop next to the garage.

Basketball has little to do with Mr. Obama’s presidential bid — in fact, he
has trouble finding time to shoot baskets anymore — but until recently, it was
one of the few constants in his life.

At first, it was a tutorial in race, a way for a kid with a white mother, a
Kenyan father and a peripatetic childhood to establish the African-American
identity that he longed for. In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described
basketball as a comfort to a boy whose father was mostly absent, and who was one
of only a few black youths at his school. “At least on the basketball court I
could find a community of sorts,” he wrote.

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Craig Robinson, Mr. Obama’s brother-in-law, said: “He didn’t know who he was
until he found basketball. It was the first time he really met black people.”

Now, Mr. Obama’s friends say, basketball has been his escape from the sport
of politics, but also a purer version of it, with no decorous speeches, no
careful consensus — just unrestrained competition.

“He can be himself, it’s a safe haven, he can let his competitive juices flow
and tease his buddies,” Mr. Nesbitt said. “It’s just a relaxing respite from the
every-moment and every-word scrutinization that he gets.”

Before Rickey Green, a former NBA all-star, played with Mr. Obama in a 2004
Senate campaign fund-raiser, “I didn’t think he could play at all, to be honest
with you,” Mr. Green said. But “he’s above average,” for a pickup player, Mr.
Green said. “He’s got a nice little left-hand shot and some knowledge of the
game.”

Mr. Robinson, now the coach of Brown
University’s men’s team, said the 6-foot-2 senator is too skinny to be an
imposing presence, but he is fast, with good wind even when he was a smoker. Mr.
Obama is left-handed, and his signature move is to fake right and veer left,
surprising players used to guarding right-handed competitors.

On the court, Mr. Obama is confident, even a bit boastful.

“If he would hit a couple buckets, he would let you know about it,” said
Alexi Giannoulias, who played in the late 1990s with Mr. Obama at the East Bank
Club, a luxurious spot in downtown Chicago.

He is gentleman enough to call fouls on himself: Steven Donziger, a law
school classmate, has heard Mr. Obama mutter, “my bad,” tossing the other team
the ball.

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