December 1, 2008, 4:48 pm
Obama’s ‘Dream Team’
By Michael Falcone
Barack Obama in May, 2008. (Photo:Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Besides their impressive resumes and political star-power, a few of President-elect Barack Obama’s top cabinet choices have something else in common — hoop dreams.
Though these days Eric H. Holder Jr., Susan E. Rice and Gen. James L. Jones, may be more comfortable handling policy memos than shooting free throws, at one point they were very much at home on the court.
And as the basketball-loving president-elect assembles his so-called team of rivals, it appears he may have – coincidentally — put together a pretty competitive group of players.
As a teenager, Mr. Holder, the president-elect’s nominee for Attorney General, was co-captain of the basketball team, the Peglegs, at Stuyvesant High School in New York. And he stayed on top of his game as an undergraduate and a law student at Columbia University. In an interview with The New York Times that was published Monday, he trash-talked his new boss a bit, saying of Mr. Obama and basketball skills, “I don’t know if he’s ready for my New York game.”
Ms. Rice, who long-ago traded the thrill of hitting a three-pointer for scoring big on the world stage, was a star player at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., where she also excelled in her studies. Her athleticism reportedly earned her the nickname, Spo, short for Sportin’. She’ll be the Obama administration’s ambassador to the United Nations.
And along with the announcement of Mr. Holder’s and Ms. Rice’s cabinet positions on Monday, Mr. Obama also called General Jones up from the bench to be his national security adviser. At 6-foot-4, Mr. Jones was a forward for the Georgetown Hoyas during his college years.
Though they may scrupulously avoid mixing metaphors in their new jobs — a Bush-era reference to a “slam dunk” comes to mind — their talents on the court, might earn them the distinction as the White House’s first “team of dribblers.”
Nearly superstitious, Mr. Obama became well known for playing hoops on the day of almost every primary contest. While that season may be past him, the White House carries its own series of quarterly tests, long before the next election cycle.
And, as everyone learned during the six-week lead-up to the Pennsylvania primary in May, Mr. Obama doesn’t excel at another sport — bowling. So the incoming Obama team may find, as the president-elect suggested long ago in Indiana, that the bowling alley in the White House might well become a victim of renovations to make way for a hoop court.
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