Sports and Politics:
Who's Got Presidential Game?

If we judge our presidents on their jock appeal, history still divides.

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Gerald Ford is widely considered the best athlete to ever hold office.

With Nov. 4 in the offing, each candidate is doing every last-minute pitch he can to persuade you that he's the one who should be given the keys to the American jalopy. Not surprisingly, they've reached out to everyone and everything they can. Most often this involves things like stale catch-phrases and back-slapping, populist appeals to swing-state plumbers. On occasion, though, we get sports.

You've probably seen the YouTube video of Barack Obama draining a three-pointer in front of the troops. Or maybe you heard about his cringe-inducing bowling score of 37 (more pins than Mondale had electoral votes!). You may have even heard John McCain invoke his days as a lightweight boxer in the Navy. Both candidates have their sporting pasts, and both have gone to some lengths to remind you of those pasts. That's because these things matter. Seriously.

Time was when we as a people demanded that our presidents own land, be Episcopalian and look dashing in powdered wigs. In the modern age, though, the "guy I'd like to drink a beer with" narrative of leadership has taken over. And what better way to show you're beer-worthy than to prove (or have proved) your mettle on our fields and courts of play. It's a political tradition as cherished as kissing babies and doing snow angels in piles of dirty money.

It follows, then, that the athlete-president is a very real phenomenon in America. The greatest of these, of course, was Gerald Ford, who was a center and linebacker for the University of Michigan's national-championship teams in 1932 and 1933. Distinguished in his own right was George H.W. Bush, who was a career .354 hitter as a first baseman for Yale and also played in the first two College World Series.

Teddy Roosevelt probably killed more critters than a ConAgra slaughter house, but let's be honest here: hunting isn't a sport. (We can say that because we're not running for president.) T.R. was, however, a boxing enthusiast. A standout pugilist at Harvard, he remained an avocational boxer even after he was president. Lore has it that Roosevelt suffered a detached retina while sparring with a member of his cabinet. (On the other hand, Roosevelt gets a points deduction for trying to criminalize the sport of football in 1905.) Woodrow Wilson played centerfield at Davidson College, but he was unable to make the Princeton baseball team after transferring there. In office, Wilson logged more than 1,000 rounds of golf, and even ordered members of his Secret Service detail to paint some balls black so that he could golf in the snow during Washington's winter months.

Dwight D. Eisenhower grew up dreaming of playing professional baseball, and some accounts—perhaps apocryphal—have it that he played one season of minor-league ball before entering West Point. What is certain is that Eisenhower, at West Point, failed to make the baseball team. He did, though, make the football team as a running back and linebacker and even tackled Jim Thorpe in a 1912 encounter. John F. Kennedy, besides those touch-football games on the lawn at Hyannisport, also swam for Harvard—a skill that would serve him well in World War II after the capsizing of PT-109.

Ronald Reagan was on the football and swim teams at Eureka College. Richard Nixon played a little football at Whittier College, and way back when even George Washington was a skilled, competitive horseman. Warren G. Harding, while not quite Wilsonian in his enthusiasm for golf, was still an avid duffer. He hit the links often, bet on almost every hole, and—to his enduring credit—drank cocktails on the course despite the fact that Prohibition was in full force.

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John Kerry would have been, easily, the most flexible Commander in Chief.

All of this is no surprise, really. Some of the skills you need in sports—teamwork, endurance, mental acuity, toughness, tenacity, grace under pressure, the ability to feign outrage—are also essential to the political process, be it campaigning or holding office. For some in the corridors of power, though, the games were better left unplayed. Their athletic endeavors wound up mirroring, however unintentionally, their political fecklessness. As president, Jimmy Carter, even though he'd run cross country at the Naval Academy, passed out midway through a 10K. Later, he was—no kidding—attacked by a crazed rabbit while fishing. As for George W. Bush, his most notable athletic moment (besides co-owning the Texas Rangers) was falling off his mountain bike and bruising his face (not that he can't pedal, and hard). And although he was never president, footage of John Kerry's windsurfing became a symbol of his Eastern-Seaboard elitism. Not to mention the political opportunism that was born of Kerry's dalliance with football.

For good or ill, sports can be a lingua franca for pols and voters who often have little in common when it comes to life histories and current straits. On this point, is it worth noting that Obama's favored sport—basketball—resonates far more deeply with younger voters—and maybe the preponderance of all voters—than does McCain's boxing matches from half-a-century ago?

Maybe, maybe not. But seeing the youthful-looking Obama besting, for instance, SportsCenter anchor Stuart Scott on the court makes the Democratic nominee seem that much more alive and vigorous than the 72-year-old McCain. It all adds to the story that Obama and his handlers are trying to tell.

In the end, when the time comes to cozy up to that Diebold contraption, sports should matter infinitely less than voting records and policy positions. But who's to say that how a prez reacts to the phone ringing at 3:00 a.m. isn't somehow traceable back to how he reacted to taking the clutch jump shot? Or, if you prefer, throwing the jab in the deciding round? Maybe that's nonsense, but campaigns and, ultimately, voters believe otherwise.

So let the games begin.

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