"One Place Where Obama and Elbows Still Meet" (with video)

NY Times, with video (5:14):

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.

“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.

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.

But “he knew how to get in the mix when he needed to,” Mr. Giannoulias said. “There are always elbows, there’s always a little bit of jersey tucking and tugging,” he said, continuing, “Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to win.”

The men — and it is generally men — who play with Mr. Obama are not, they will have you know, the paunchy, lumbering type. “Most of the guys who played in our little circle are former players in college or pros,” said Mr. Robinson, who is still Princeton’s fourth-leading scorer of all time. “They’re real high level.”

Mr. Obama cannot match their technical prowess, say those who played regularly with him. But he is fiercely competitive, and makes up for his deficits with collaboration and strategy. “He’s very good at finding a way to win when he’s playing with people who are supposedly stronger,” Mr. Nesbitt said.

At country clubs across the land, politicians network and raise money over rounds of golf, a sport Mr. Obama also plays. But Chicago is a basketball town, and over the years, Mr. Obama’s gymmates have become loyal allies and generous backers.

Mr. Nesbitt, an owner and executive at an airport parking company and chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority’s board of commissioners, helped Mr. Obama get to know Penny Pritzker, who is now his national finance chairwoman.

Arne Duncan, a top Chicago public school official, is helping with Mr. Obama’s education platform.

Mr. Giannoulias met Mr. Obama on the court, and thanks in part to his backing, is now the Illinois state treasurer. Other regular gymmates include the president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health and several investment bankers who were early and energetic fund-raisers.

Though some of these men could afford to build courts at their own homes, they pride themselves on the democratic nature of basketball, on showing up at South Side parks and playing with whoever is around. At the University of Chicago court where he and Mr. Obama used to play, “You might have someone from the street and a potential Nobel Prize winner on the same team,” Mr. Duncan said. “It’s a great equalizer.”

It is a theme that runs throughout Mr. Obama’s basketball career: a desire to be perceived as a regular guy despite great advantage and success. As a teenager, he slipped away from his tony school to university courts populated by “gym rats and has-beens” who taught him “that respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was,” Mr. Obama wrote.

Later, the Harvard game against the prison inmates, said Hill Harper, who organized it, was intended to show them that “we support you, we’re not removed from everything going on.”

But the easy friendships Mr. Obama once struck up on the court are a thing of the past. Lately, the rule in the family is “No more new friends,” Mr. Robinson said. “You don’t know what people’s real agendas are.”

Now, for exercise, Mr. Obama pounds treadmills at hotel gyms. He played a bit last year, with American troops on military bases in Kuwait and Djibouti, and again at Christmas. His staff members laugh when asked if the senator has had any playing time since coming to Washington or hitting the campaign trail. (“I dream of playing basketball,” Mr. Obama said in a television interview on Tuesday.) Before the first Democratic debate in South Carolina, Mr. Robinson reserved a court and a slot on Mr. Obama’s schedule, hoping the candidate could blow off some steam before the big night. It did not happen.

The solution, Mr. Obama’s friends say, is for him to win the presidency, so they can all play together at the White House.

“I always tease him about that,” Mr. Nesbitt said. “If you win, you gotta have a hoop.”