President Obama Doesn’t Care About Athletic People
Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via AP
That weary, displaced emotion is what I’ve been feeling about our president ever since the baseball All-Star Game. Something ain’t quite right. It’s unsettling. And it’s only getting worse.
I’m beginning to think that he isn’t really all that into sports.
On Monday, the WNBA champion Detroit Shock were the most recent in a long line of teams and athletes to visit the president’s house. During his speech to the team, Obama retold the story of his daughters watching him watching female basketball players on ESPN’s SportsCenter and how it taught his daughters that girls can be champions too.
There are three things wrong with this tale: 1) If Sasha and Malia were watching their father watching television, how can he be sure they weren’t learning a different lesson? Like “presidents can lazily watch sports highlight shows too.” 2) SportsCenter doesn’t cover anything but the Yankees and preseason football. They damn sure aren’t doing 45-second recaps of Shock games. 3) This weak recollection isn’t even new. It’s the same thing he told to the WNCAA Champion Connecticut Huskies.
If you’re going to regurgitate stories (something that almost everyone does), shouldn’t he come up with a better story to regurgitate?
But wait, it gets worse.
The NBA’s Shaquille O’Neal, in town to do some wrasslin‘, figured he was bigger than the Detroit Shock (Physically? Check. Egotistically? Check. Pop Culturally? Check.) so he tried to do a pop-in on the White House a few hours after the Shock left. It didn’t work and he was turned away by security, a site I would sell your first born to have seen. Alas, we can only assume that Obama, not unlike Jerry Seinfeld, like the pop-in.
NINA: (rolling eyes) This person does not believe in telephones, does she?
JERRY: She likes the pop-in. I’ve told her how I hate the pop-in.
(pointing to George) He likes the pop-in, too.
GEORGE: I just popped in now. I’m a big pop-in guy.
JERRY: Yeah.
GEORGE: How ’bout Kramer.
JERRY: HUGE pop-in guy!- from “Seinfeld” Season 3, episode 21: The Letter
If Obama’s our first “basketball president,” why not let the Diesel in to take a look around the Roosevelt Room or something?
Perhaps I’m being unfair. The guy is busy … the guy is our PRESIDENT, for cryin’ out loud. He can’t love everything and lord knows women’s basketball can be unlovable. So is O’Neal come to think of it. So maybe Monday’s actions were all just a fluke. I mean, he wouldn’t seem so half-hearted when it comes to his teams, the White Sox and Bulls, right?
Ugh. Listen to the end of that link. Sox outfielder DeWaye Wise makes the biggest catch of his career, the biggest catch of the season and one of the biggest catches of all-time and the No. 1 White Sox fan in the country calls him DeWayne Weiss. This is almost as tragic as the Bob Costas interview from two weeks ago in which Obama calls Comiskey Park, the stadium in which his favorite team played for over a century – Cominsky Park.
Cominsky Park? You can’t say that. That’s like David Ortiz wearing a Yankee cap or a Bulls fan acting graciously toward the worst basketball player in the history of the NBA …
Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via AP
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Is that Bill Laimbeer! Is Barack Obama shaking hands with the guy who spent five years elbowing Michael Jordan in the ribcage anytime he went near the basket?! You see? This is what I’m talking about. If Obama was truly a sports fan, more specifically a Chicago sports fan and most specifically a Chicago basketball sports fan, there’s just no way he wouldn’t have punched Bill Laimbeer in the face here. No way. Leader of the free world or not, a die-hard woulda given him five across the eyes. Look at his left hand in this picture. It’s slightly tense, ready to make a fist, like he knows what he should do with it.
Weak sauce, Barry.
Truth is, it’s unimportant to me (and many Americans) if Obama is uninterested in athletics. I need him to care about sports about as much as I need a new hole in the head. It’s the idea that he has (or we have) projected this basketball-playing, Southside-rooting, ESPY White House guest list listing character onto him and he’s played the part instead of being it.
Be the part, Prez or quit playin’.
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