= a thousand words

[lollardfish]

Picture here, protected from embedding.

This picture, alone, is worth a percentage point in Texas, I bet.

The hat was a gift. This is not posed, I think.

Comments

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

He used to play pickup with my brother at Harvard. I've lost the link to the article another guy who used to play wrote about it a few years back, but perhaps my brother will chime in.

Ok, I'll bite

[regularpapi.livejournal.com]

That SI story is funny to me--a small, personalized example of the way the media crafts its stories in a presidential election. Or, maybe he's improved his shot. But I doubt that. Obama was a middling player in an intense grad school pickup game. I basically remember him as skinny and tall without the muscle to play inside or the shot to be killer outside. When I first became aware of him as a political figure, in 2004, I said to myself "that guy looks familiar: could he have been one of the Harvard law school contingent who came to the gym?" But I didn't trust my memory until I read this, from a friend of mine (Marshall Poe, who is now an Associate Prof in the History Dept at Iowa):
http://www.memoryarchive.org/en/Playing_B-Ball_with_Barack_Obama%2C_1988/1989%2C_by_Marshall_Poe