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Obama’s never been known to play one-on-one, has he? That was the game we played most growing up in the early Seventies, when the NBA One-On-One Contest/halftime show was all the rage Sunday afternoons on ABC. So I reckon Barack could be taken by surprise in a game to 20 win-by-four w/ a combination of left-and-right-handed hookshots off the glass, to offset his slight height advantage. We’d even permit the three-point-shot to count!
Claude, the MidWestern basketball Obama embraced didn’t begin w/ the Bulls and newly-named Naismith inductee Michael Jordan. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal published this piece on the “best days of a fading region.”
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Keith, I guess one can argue that those were the “best days” but it’s all relative. For example, the evolution of media puts any modern day game into a much bigger spotlight than any games from the 1930s and 40s. Flipping that, if today’s media coverage had been around back then, it’s likely that the Franklin Wonder Five (as one example) would have been a bigger story than the Magic-Bird rivalry.
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Agreed. The first Magic/Bird duel took place as young Obama was finishing his senior season in high school. Wonder whom, if either, he rooted for? Barack’s vaunted shooting game reminds more of Bird than Magic, the playmaking king.
That same 1979 my own high school had a 6-9 star who was named Mr BasketBall and living a few miles from French Lick was likened to Bird as a big guy with an all-around game. So those can be our fortysomethings’ good old days. But if I had to choose the best era to see replayed, it would be the 1930s, when the Rens and Globies reached their peaks, many other barnstormers like the Savoy Big Five/Crusaders, Philly Commandeurs, Olson’s Terrible Swedes, House of David and industrial teams were strong, the AAU tourney in Denver got underway, and the MBC forerunner to the NBL/NBA emerged with Johnny Wooden as its leading light, capped by the first World’s Pro Tourneys.
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