Basketball may be the most frequently mentioned athletic endeavor in the recently published memoirs of Michelle and Barack Obama, “Becoming” and “A Promised Land,” what with Michelle’s older brother a star high school and college player, and Barack an ardent fan and practitioner of the sport, but the bicycle offers a pleasant counterpart to the ball sport in their books. Bicycling has been enough of a feature of their lives to earn more them half a dozen mentions in both of their highly detailed and personal reflections on their time in the White House and before.
If the bicycle hadn’t won a significant place in their regard, their highly-attentive editors scrupulously managing their word count would have found reason to take a scalpel to such seemingly incidental references. Barack had so much to squeeze into his book, his one-book deal within Crown Publishers turned into two books. The first was over 700 pages, taking him up to the capture of Osama Bin Laden, eight months before the end of his first term. Michelle managed to hold her book to 426 pages, but only had one less bike mention to his eight. With a higher per page percentage, she may take the honor of holding the bicycle in higher regard than her husband.
Neither of the Obama’s recount that seminal moment when they learned to ride a bike, nor does either offer that of their daughters, but Michelle at least writes of riding her bike in her early years, unlike her husband. She liked to swing over to a girl friend’s house on her bike, where they’d watch boys ride past on the sidewalk trying to attract their attention. Barack made no mention of his early days of biking in this book nor previous books either, so I sought out the biography of his mother, “A Singular Woman,” hoping to find a mention of it there.
The only bicycling relating to Barack was of him being transported by bike to school by his mother’s servant during the four years he spent in Indonesian before his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents to have access to better schooling. She knew he was brilliant, calling him a combination of Einstein, Gandhi and Bellafonte. She was a very proud mother, who thought he could become president one day. She remained in Indonesia with her Indonesian husband and Barack’s sister, nine years younger than him, working for an aid organization while pursuing a PhD in anthropology.
Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, Michelle was quite taken aback when she went to Princeton for college and saw students leaving their bikes unlocked. Among the other cultural shocks were the variety of sports she was barely familiar with (lacrosse, squash, field hockey), not knowing what the hell it meant when asked, “Do you row?” Unattended bikes tempting thieves had an added impact on her, as her brother was once nabbed by a Chicago police officer on the bike path along Lake Michigan not far from their home, as he was riding a brand new bike his parents had just bought him and the officer thought it had to have been stolen. It was particularly galling, as the officer was African American.
Michelle wrote that her mother really gave that officer an earful. Her mother is a strong presence throughout her book, a stay-at-home mother while she and her brother were growing up, while their father, a Democratic precinct captain, worked for the city’s water department. She accompanied the Obama’s to the White House to help look after her two granddaughters, as she had been widowed a few years before, her husband dying at 52 from MS. She is rock solid, dispensing valuable advice, and always being there for Michelle. Barack too comments on lessons learned from his mother throughout his book and how pleased she would have been with various things he accomplished as president, though she didn’t live to see him even elected Senator, likewise dying at 52 from cancer.
Barack three times mentions riding with his daughters. He longingly reflects back on the lazy Sunday afternoon rides they can no longer indulge in at the White House, and the rides they once took from their summer vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard into the nearby town. During his presidency their rides had to follow a tightly prescribed loop monitored by the Secret Service. He wrote that his daughters rode it exactly once before declaring it “kind of lame.”
Michelle recounts being let down by her daughters too, when they declined to come down from their rooms at the White House to hear Paul McCartney sing. Barack writes of McCartney’s appearance as well, but doesn’t mention the absence of his daughters, rather Paul singing “Michelle” to his wife and wondering what her parents would have thought back in 1965 when the song came out if someone had told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage. Michelle curiously declines to mention the serenade.
Both dwell upon being prisoners of the White House, Michelle not even allowed to open her windows or sit on her balcony. She once managed to escape out a side door with her daughter to witness a celebration going on outside the White House. Barack tells of a recurring dream in which he’s able to ride his bike and no one recognizes him and he has no security detail. He feels like he’s won the lottery.
When writing of his campaign crisscrossing the country, he establishes local color with the insertion of seeing kids on bikes on three occasions—in Toledo, in a farm town in Minnesota and in a Nevada housing development. And thrice he invokes the Little League as an allusion to wholesome Americana. It’s not unique to this book, as people coaching Little League turn up in his previous two books multiple times as well. His indexer didn’t hold Little League in the esteem he does, as it doesn’t turn up in the index. Whoever it was may have had a bias against baseball, as Jackie Robinson is similarly ignored though Barack twice cites him, once for stealing home and once for someone having the similar good looks of the young Jackie.
Basketball is listed in the index under subjects relating to Barrack, (along with “smoking habit”), but it only lists a quarter of the nearly thirty mentions, among which is coaching his daughter Sasha’s team. Ralph Nader will be relieved that Barack didn’t write anything about his picking games in the NCAA tournament, as he liked to chide Barack for taking time from his presidential duties for such activities. Barack drops the names of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, none of whom are listed in the index, nor is the mention of Sarah Palin having been a basketball player listed under “basketball.” Mike Ditka at least made the index, despite just a passing mention as a potential rival for the Senate when the Republicans were having a hard time to find someone to run against Barack.
Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weatherman Underground, who was a neighbor and friend of Barack, is another neglected by the index. Barack writes of him twice, but he is only noted once in the index, ignoring the instance of Trump calling him the likely author of Obama’s first book, claiming Barack didn’t have the intellectual capability to write such a good book.
Besides his strong affinity for basketball, actually putting up rims on the White House tennis court so he could go out and shoot hoops whenever the urge struck, he was also known to be drawn to the golf course, which his critics liked to harp on. He pretty much avoids writing about his golf outings. The only mention is admitting to getting in a quick nine holes while he is waiting for the raid on Bin Laden’s compound to get underway. Michelle too avoids the subject, just writing that if Barack was lucky he could squeeze in a round at Andrews Air Force Base.
Both harp on their conflict over how much time Barack was able to spend with the family, though golf isn’t given any blame. Michelle devotes two pages to some marriage counseling she dragged Barack to back before he ran for Senate, a subject Barack ignores. He devotes almost as many words to learning to correctly salute as Michelle did to their counseling. She grew frustrated over being neglected, with it coming to a head when he was serving in the Illinois state senate, having to drive down to Springfield and back, and being away for three days at a time. When he’d call and say he was leaving and would be back by such and such a time, he’d rarely make it by the appointed time, stopping to talk to some colleague on his way out the door or stopping in at the gym. He was much more faithful to their dinner hour as president, since his office was a quick walk away.
One can’t find lapses in Michelle’s index because there isn’t one. If there had been, one might be surprised to discover twice as many mentions of their dogs in Barack’s book as in Michelle’s. The only evident oversight of Michelle’s editors was the location of Chicago’s City Hall. Michelle ventures to the fortress of a building to meet with Valeria Jarret about coming to work for the city, having grown weary of working for the nearby corporate law firm that she started with after college and where Barack served as her intern. She describes the grand building and says it fills a full block between Clark and LaSalle Streets “north of the Loop” even though it’s well within the confines of the Loop. I hope it’s not to late to have it corrected in the paperback edition.
Both books acknowledge Barack’s addiction to ESPN. Barack wrote that he would begin his day in the White House gym with its “wall-mounted TV reliably set to ESPN’s Sports Center.” Michele added that he’d frequently stay up until one or two a.m. reading memos and replying to email “while ESPN played low on the TV.” He was known to play golf with ESPN stalwarts Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, but those moments don’t make the book. There must have been anecdotes galore from those outings that he would have liked to share.
Some of the best come from his interactions with Rahm Emmanuel, his chief of staff until he resigned to run for mayor of Chicago. Emmanuel was well known for his profanity and forceful personality, “badgering, cajoling and threatening as only he could.” Barack wrote that it was almost a miracle he’d lasted as long as he had “without either killing somebody or dropping dead from a stroke.” He could have been a bicycling buddy, as the first thing Emmanuel did after he ended his two terms as mayor of Chicago was to take a one thousand mile ride around Lake Michigan, but Barack says nothing about them going off on their bikes together, just strolling the White House grounds. Barack’s descriptive prowess shone when he compared Emmanuel’s office to “the over-caffeinated atmosphere of an air traffic control center...littered with coffee cups, cans of Diet Coke and the occasional half-eaten snack.” But the distinction of the “most slovenly desk” Barack ever set eyes on went to Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who’d been a colleague of his at the University of Chicago Law School.
Though they comment on racial injustice from time to time, only once does Barack invoke the n-word, writing that during the Iowa primary his staff heard people say from time to time, “Yeah, I’m thinking about voting for the nigger.” Michelle offers just one instance, and of its abbreviated form, recalling that during her freshman year at Princeton she had a roommate from Louisiana “who had been raised in a home where the n-word was part of the family lexicon.” Her roommate’s mother was utterly appalled that her daughter been assigned to room with a black and was able to move her out of the triple into a single, though Michelle didn’t learn why until years later.
Both poke fun of Barack’s semi-slovenly ways. Michelle’s most beloved roommate at Princeton would pile her clothing in heaps and had no compunction of folding her clothes, which prepared her for Barack. One of her pet peeves was Barack hanging his suit coat on a doorknob. At the White House Barack was proud to show Michelle his well-organized closet, thanks to his three military valets. “See how neat I am,” he said. She replied, “You get no credit for any of it.”
Barack’s book distinguished itself as the first I’ve come upon that twice spins out the numbers 5-6-7, my identity as a bicycle messenger. On the campaign trail it grew tiresome to “say the exact same thing the exact same way five or six or seven times a day.” He lamented that at the White House he was “still smoking five (or six or seven) cigarettes a day...the lone vice that carried over from the rebel days of my youth.” But he does eventually quit, the day after he signed the Affordable Care Act into law, choosing the day for the symbolism of it and also in response to a frown from daughter Malia a few days before smelling a cigarette on his breath.
From start to finish both books flow with stylish prose and stirring, often heart-touching, moments. These books are fairytales of a sort. Both Obamas express great wonder and gratitude for their untold good fortune. Throughout Michelle’s life she was continually asking, “Am I good enough?” Both express humility, Michelle acknowledging she gained entrance to Harvard Law School from the wait list, and Barack crediting his success at Harvard Law for being older than most of his fellow students, having spent three years as a community organizer in Chicago after graduating from Columbia. I won’t mind at all if Barack’s next book goes on for another 700 pages. I’ll be eager to read what more he has to say about riding the bike and if he feels compelled once again to mention the Little League multiple times.
