President Barack Obama's love for basketball is legendary, but what can we learn from it? Celebrated sports writer Alexander Wolff attempts to answer that in a new, beautifully illustrated book, "The Audacity of Hoop," which examines our president through the game he loves so much.
In his conversation with Charity, Wolff says a critical moment in the young Obama's life was the last time he saw his father. When he was ten and living in Hawaii with his grandparents, Barak Obama Sr. brought his son a basketball. Wolff says at that point, the future president fell in love with the game and started playing pick-up hoops with a group of older kids. This, the author says, helped him survive his adolescence. Unfortunately, there were many good players on his high school team and Barak didn't make the cut. But Wolff says his "unrequited love" of the game meant he was determined to keep playing basketball all the way to the White House. Even a bad cut on the lip requiring many stitches hasn't deterred the president from an occasional game with his friends.
"The Audacity of Hoops: Basketball and the Age of Obama" is published by Temple University Press.
