Sporting edge goes to Obama

The teaser on Sportspages.com -- "He's much more than Obama's brother-in-law" -- was intriguing Sunday morning.

A couple of weeks ago I started wondering about the presidential candidates as athletes. Sad to say, none seemed, well, very athletic.

Maybe decorated Navy veteran John McCain competed in swimming. The scrawny Barack Obama looks like a cross country runner. Mike Huckabee might have been a sumo wrestler before losing 100 pounds. Hillary Clinton probably protested something at some high school sports event.

No offense to those activities, but they aren't the image I want to have of a president.

Give me candidates who carry themselves like they could post up al-Qaida, throw a forearm shiver into the Taliban, or hurl a high hard one at Hugo Chavez.

As a last resort after diplomacy didn't work, of course.

The original Bush was OK on this subject because he played baseball in college. Gerry Ford played football before he started falling down on "Saturday Night Live." Part of JFK's zesty appeal was that he played touch football. Ike was liked because he was an avid golfer, which not even I ever held against him.

There was an athletic presence about those guys. America seemed to appreciate that in their presidents.

Now we get the likes of Bill Clinton, who preferred playing other indoor games, and the current Bush, who in his prime owned a major-league baseball team instead of playing shortstop for one.

No wonder I was attracted to Obama's name under "College sports: Basketball."

It turns out Obama's wife's brother is Craig Robinson. He played basketball at Chicago Mt. Carmel and Princeton and is back in the Ivy League as head coach at Brown.

Robinson tells the story of when his sister Michelle started dating Obama. She asked her brother to test his character by playing pickup basketball with him.

"You can tell if a guy is a phony," Robinson is quoted as saying of pickup games.

At best, Obama was a benchwarmer for his high school in Hawaii. So any test of his playing ability wasn't going to be successful.

Obama did just fine on the character level, however. He also did just fine at other times on the court -- during games with friends on the South Side of Chicago and at a 2004 fund-raiser that included Chicago prep legend and former NBA player Rickey Green.

"I didn't think he could play at all, to be honest with you," the New York Times quoted Green. "(But) he's got a nice little left-handed shot and some knowledge of the game."

Another scouting report indicates Obama could trash talk, throw a wayward elbow and tug at an opponent's shirt -- whatever a skinny 6-foot-2 player had to do against larger guys.

All this made me think that maybe I missed something about the other candidates.

What I learned through Google was not much about McCain's athletic background; Huckabee seems to prefer the guitar but has martial-arts master Chuck Norris as a supporter; and Clinton was portrayed on a baseball trading card as Morganna the Kissing Bandit.

So, so far Obama is the leader in the clubhouse when it comes to athletic prowess, which isn't saying much when it comes to this group.

It's surprising the Obama campaign hasn't placed video on YouTube of him dunking over both the Clintons.