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A colorful look at how modern presidents play sports, have used sports to play politics, and what our fan-in-chief can often tell us about our national pastimes. POWER PLAYERS tells all the great stories of presidents and the sports they played, loved and spectated as a way to better understand what it takes to be elected to lead a country driven by sports fans of all stripes. While every modern president has used sports to relate to Joe Q. Public, POWER PLAYERS turns the lens around to examine how sports have shaped our presidents and made for some amazing moments in White House history, including: Dwight Eisenhower played so much golf he had a putting green built outside the Oval Office!. (He also almost died on a golf course while in office.) How John F. Kennedy’s touch-football games with family were knowing plays to polish the Camelot mystique. People might not have related to the aloof and awkward Richard Nixon but, hey, he would bowl a few frames just like them. Ronald Reagan didn’t just play the part of “The Gipper” for the silver screen, but truly adopted the famous footballer’s never-say-die persona. George H.W. Bush once ran a horseshoe league from the White House – with a commissioner and brackets! (He would later claim to have come up with the fan expression, “You da man.”) Bill Clinton’s Arkansas Razorback fandom was so intense that he could be found shouting at the referees from a box at the basketball national championship game in 1994. George W. Bush’s not only owned the Texas Rangers but also threw out the most iconic first pitch ever in the 2001 World Series. What really went down when Barack Obama played pickup hoops with the North Carolina Tarheels. (He later won the state by .3 percent of the vote.) Donald Trump is the only president ever featured in a professional wrestling storyline—and everything real and fake that went with that. In the pages of POWER PLAYERS, a love of sports shines through as the key to understanding who these presidents really were and how they chose to play by the rules, occasionally bluff or cheat, all the while coaching the country into a few quality wins and some notorious losses.
"Looking at the athletic strengths, feats, and shortcomings of our presidents, John Sayle Watterson explores not only their health, physical attributes, personalities, and sports IQs, but also the increasing trend of Americans in the past century to equate sporting achievements with courage, manliness, and political competence."--Dust jacket [p. 2].
The book examines the relationship between the presidency and the sport, and argues through stories that the two naturally go together. Golf is the sport of presidents. It defines the presidency. It is a game of patience, concentration, focus, and moving forward toward a target. The job is about aim and guiding others toward an end goal amid the obstacle, and the job requires simplicity and making progress in as fewer moves as possible. Golf allows access to the president, and it is also a form of communication the leader uses to send subtle messages to the public.
The Presidents and the Pastime draws on Curt Smith's extensive background as a former White House presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the "most American" sport, and the U.S. presidency. Smith, who USA TODAY calls "America's voice of authority on baseball broadcasting," starts before America's birth, when would‑be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how baseball cemented its reputation as America's pastime in the nineteenth century, such presidents as Lincoln and Johnson playing town ball or giving employees time off to watch. Smith tracks every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, each chapter filled with anecdotes: Wilson buoyed by baseball after suffering disability; a heroic FDR saving baseball in World War II; Carter, taught the game by his mother, Lillian; Reagan, airing baseball on radio that he never saw--by "re-creation." George H. W. Bush, for whom Smith wrote, explains, "Baseball has everything." Smith, having interviewed a majority of presidents since Richard Nixon, shares personal stories on each. Throughout, The Presidents and the Pastime provides a riveting narrative of how America's leaders have treated baseball. From Taft as the first president to throw the "first pitch" on Opening Day in 1910 to Obama's "Go Sox!" scrawled in the guest register at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, our presidents have deemed it the quintessentially American sport, enriching both their office and the nation.
Offers an up-to-date overview of the developing and symbiotic relationship between the nation's Commander in Chief and some of the nation's most popular pastimes
From the author of Heart Over Height with 3x NBA Dunk Champ Nate Robinson and Forces of Character with 3x Super Bowl Champion and Fighter Pilot, Chad Hennings, comes a groundbreaking new project by Jon Finkel. For the first time in the history of the United States, this book compiles a comprehensive, complete and official ranking of our presidents based on their skills as athletes. Amazingly, in our never-ending quest to quantify, qualify, list and rank everything in the known universe, our best and brightest stat geeks have thus far ignored the athletic accomplishments of our commanders-in-chief. This egregious oversight ends now. Which president saved 77 lives as a lifeguard? Which one's lucky handball is still sitting in the Smithsonian over a century after he last played with it? Which president invented a sport? Or practiced jiu-jitsu three afternoons a week while in office? Or was an NCAA champion? The answers to these questions (in order: Reagan, Lincoln, Hoover, T. Roosevelt, Ford) don't even scratch the surface of the athletic information in this book, which is why I harnessed the power of statistics and the spirit of sabermetrics to create a system to properly crown one of our presidents king of the athletic arena. To maintain consistency with other ranking systems, and to compete with the likes of ERA, WAR, VORP and all the others, this ranking metric is called PAS, short for President Athlete Score. In conversation, it could be used something like, "Dude, no way Woodrow Wilson was a better athlete than Ronald Reagan, have you seen their PAS rankings? It's not even close!" The components of the PAS ranking are as follows, with each president receiving either a 1 (worst) or a 5 (best) in a particular category. The highest possible score is a 25. Executive Power: Ranks a president's physical strength. Running Ability: Ranks a president's physical fitness and cardio. Weighs and Means: Ranks how fit a president stayed once in office. Executive Experience: Ranks the athletic accomplishments of a president. Mettle of Honor: Ranks a president's athletic toughness and endurance (for many of our earlier presidents, this involved military accomplishments in lieu of organized sports). The book is divided into two parts: Part I: Off the Ballot The first part of the book features the presidents that fall in the bottom half of the rankings and they've been divided up into three chapters: Commanders in Beef, The Van Buren Boys, and Lame Ducks. Part II: The Contenders This section features the presidents in the top half of the rankings, culminating in the revealing of our most athletic president. This section will be divided into four chapters: Fit for Office, National Treasures, Sultans of the Smithsonian and Mount Rushmore - The Athletes.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Reilly pokes more holes in Trump's claims than there are sand traps on all of his courses combined. It is by turns amusing and alarming."-- The New Yorker "Golf is the spine of this shocking, wildly humorous book, but humanity is its flesh and spirit." -- Chicago Sun-Times "Every one of Trump's most disgusting qualities surfaces in golf." -- The Ringer An outrageous indictment of Donald Trump's appalling behavior when it comes to golf -- on and off the green -- and what it reveals about his character. Donald Trump loves golf. He loves to play it, buy it, build it, and operate it. He owns 14 courses around the world and runs another five, all of which he insists are the best on the planet. He also claims he's a 3 handicap, almost never loses, and has won an astonishing 18 club championships. How much of all that is true? Almost none of it, acclaimed sportswriter Rick Reilly reveals in this unsparing look at Trump in the world of golf. Based on Reilly's own experiences with Trump as well as interviews with over 100 golf pros, amateurs, developers, and caddies, Commander in Cheat is a startling and at times hilarious indictment of Trump and his golf game. You'll learn how Trump cheats (sometimes with the help of his caddies and Secret Service agents), lies about his scores (the "Trump Bump"), tells whoppers about the rank of his courses and their worth (declaring that every one of them is worth $50 million), and tramples the etiquette of the game (driving on greens doesn't help). Trump doesn't brag so much, though, about the golf contractors he stiffs, the course neighbors he intimidates, or the way his golf decisions wind up infecting his political ones. For Trump, it's always about winning. To do it, he uses the tricks he picked up from the hustlers at the public course where he learned the game as a college kid, and then polished as one of the most bombastic businessmen of our time. As Reilly writes, "Golf is like bicycle shorts. It reveals a lot about a man." Commander in Cheat "paints a side-splitting portrait of a congenital cheater" (Esquire), revealing all kinds of unsightly truths Trump has been hiding.