Subject: It pays to play hoops

5/28/08

 

Two weeks ago I witnessed a hole-in-one on a 364-yard par-4. The guy hit a beautiful drive that bounced twice before hitting the pin and disappearing in the cup. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.

 

Until last night.

 

There I am at the Denver Athletic Club shooting hoops during my dinner break as I usually do. All of a sudden, the gym is littered with members of the Secret Service. What the … ??

Why it's Barack Obama. He's in town for some type of educational forum. And he and several members of his staff wanna play some pick-up basketball.  I know he's a big hoops fan.  He was a heckuva high school player in Hawaii. I know he likes to play every chance he gets. So he asks me to round-up a couple more guys so we can run some full-court 5-on-5. Of course, I oblige.

 

Five minutes later, I'm guarding the man who might very well become the leader of the free world!!! And he's guarding me. And we're going at it like two kids on the playground. The Senator has a couple inches on me and he wasn't bashful about using that advantage underneath the basket.  He posted me a couple times and I really didn't know how to react. Normally, if I'm guarding a bigger guy under the basket, I start hacking away like a human meat cleaver. But I can't hack the Senator. I don't wanna be the guy ultimately responsible for breaking the orbital bone of a future president!  So I let him score. Twice.  After that, the competitive animal in me took over.

 

I'm not going to tell you who won or who outscored whom. Irrelevant. I can tell you Barack Obama likes to share. He had several opportunities to shoot the ball. Instead, he passed it around and kept his teammates involved in the game.

 

Me?  I shot the rock every time I touched it. Had to. It's Barack Obama.

 

You don't talk politics when you're on the basketball court.  That's worse than "trash talk".  Instead, the Senator queried me on the Nuggets. He asked me if the Nuggets were really serious about trading Carmelo Anthony.  I told him, "I dunno. Call George Karl. He's a registered democrat. And once he tells you, please tell me".

 

We played for a good 45 minutes. Afterwards, he posed for a picture on my camera phone (cbs4denver.com <http://cbs4denver.com/> ), and he was off on the campaign trail.

 

 

Tomorrow, I'm playing flag football with the Pope.