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    Steve Garvey is part of a never-ending flow of baseball players turned politicians

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    On 5 March, former baseball star Steve Garvey made it into the runoff for the US Senate seat from California vacated by the late Dianne Feinstein. Garvey, a conservative Republican, will face Democrat congressman Adam Schiff in the November general election.Garvey faces an uphill battle in deep-blue California. During debates and public appearances, he’s revealed little knowledge of the issues. He’s relying on his 19 years (1969-87) in the major leagues with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres to propel his campaign. “It’s time to get off the bench. It’s time to put the uniform on. It’s time to get back in the game,” he said in October when he announced his campaign.Garvey is one of several hundred former major league ballplayers who have run for public office since the late 1800s. More than 100 of them have been elected to a variety of positions, from city councilman to state legislator. A few former players have even become congressmen, US senators, and governors.From the late 1800s through the late-1900s, baseball was America’s most popular sport. Then, as now, ballplayers’ celebrity was a real asset for aspiring politicians.Some excelled in both realms. The best known is Jim Bunning. During his major league career (1955-71) he won 224 games, pitched two no-hitters (including a perfect game), and was a seven-time All-Star. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1996. As a player, Bunning was a leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association. He helped recruit Marvin Miller, the MLBPA’s canny executive director, who transformed it into one of the nation’s most powerful unions.After retiring from baseball, Bunning, a Republican who had led Athletes for Nixon in 1968, returned to his native Kentucky, was elected to the Fort Thomas city council, served in the US House of Representatives from 1987-99, and then was elected to the US Senate in 1998, where he served two terms.Despite his union activities as a player, in Congress Bunning was an ardent foe of organized labor, earning a meager 12 (out of 100) lifetime score from the AFL-CIO for his votes on workers’ rights issues. He also backed gun owners’ rights, tax cuts, and the Iraq war, and opposed abortion and same-sex marriage. The National Journal often ranked Bunning as one of the three most conservative senators.Bunning wasn’t the only Hall of Fame player to run for office, but all of the others – Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Roger Bresnahan, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Walter Johnson, and Ernie Banks – struck out as politicians.Anson, the Chicago White Stockings’ first baseman and manager from 1876 to 1897, was a superstar of his era. But off the field history does not remember him as fondly. Anson led the successful effort to exclude African Americans from big league baseball, which lasted until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Judge Edward Fitzsimmons Dunne, the Democrats’ candidate for Chicago mayor in 1905, put Anson on his ticket as a candidate for city clerk to garner votes from local baseball fans. They both won, but the following year, Anson lost his campaign for sheriff, finishing last among four candidates. That ended his political career.Wagner, the great Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop (1897–1917), lost his race for Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County sheriff in 1928. Lajoie, a star infielder from 1896 to 1916, lost his campaign for Ohio’s Cuyahoga County sheriff in 1924. Bresnahan, one of baseball’s best catchers in the early 1900s, failed in his bids for Lucas County (Ohio) sheriff in 1932 and county commissioner in 1944.Johnson, the extraordinary Washington Senators pitcher (1907-27) and manager (1929-32), was a lifelong Republican. After he retired, he lived on his farm in Germantown, Maryland. In 1936, he was elected Montgomery County commissioner. Two years later, Rep Joseph Martin recruited him to run for Congress. Johnson told voters he would “study up on them issues” if he got elected, but he lost. As Martin later explained, “I got some of my boys to write two master speeches for him – one for the farmers of his district and the other for the industrial areas. Alas, he got the two confused. He addressed the farmers on industrial problems, and the businessmen on farm problems.”View image in fullscreenBanks, the Chicago Cubs’ first Black player, was so popular that fans called him “Mr Cub.” But that didn’t give Banks the boost he need when he ran for the board of aldermen in 1963. A Republican in an overwhelmingly Democrat city, Banks failed to unseat the incumbent in the city’s south side. He came in third, winning only 12% of the vote. He told a reporter: “Politics is a strange business. They try to strike you out before you ever get a turn at bat.”Pirates infielder Bill Mazeroski hit the game-winning home run in Game 7 against the Yankees to win the 1960 World Series. But he couldn’t get to first base in politics, failing to win the Democratic nomination for county commissioner in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania in 1987.Many players emphasized their baseball backgrounds when running for office. The headline in the Muncie (Indiana) Morning Star in April 1936 read, “Vic Aldridge, Ex-Pirate Hurler, Seeks State Senate Nomination.” Aldridge, a Democrat, won the seat and won subsequent reelection bids. In 1944, Republican Mordecai Brown, another Indiana native, and a far superior pitcher, failed to defeat Aldridge. Five years later, however, Brown won another election – to the Baseball Hall Fame.In 1976, when Pat Jarvis, a former Atlanta Braves pitcher, ran for DeKalb County sheriff in Georgia, he promised to be a “team player” with other law enforcement agencies. Concerned about overcrowding, in 1989 he persuaded voters to pass a bond to build a new county jail. Jarvis served as sheriff until 1995. Four years later he was charged with using his office for financial gain, including $200,000 in kickbacks. He pleaded guilty and served 15 months in federal prison.After pitching for Brooklyn from 1907 to 1916, Nap Rucker returned home to Roswell, Georgia, and launched a successful business career. He owned a bank, a plantation, a wheat mill, and cotton farms. During the Depression, in 1935 and 1936, Rucker, a Democrat, served as Roswell’s mayor and judge of the police court, all for $100 a year. He brought running water, paved the sidewalks, opened new schools and playgrounds, and created the town’s sewage system, then later served as the town’s water commissioner. He later said, “There is more skullduggery in the average baseball league then there is in small town politics.”Most of the ex-ballplayers who won public office were hometown heroes, not big stars. New Hampshire native Fred Brown played local semi-pro baseball before playing in the major leagues from 1901-02. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Boston University law school, he was elected mayor of Somersworth from 1914 until 1922, then served as New Hampshire governor from 1923-25. A Democrat, he failed to get his proposals for a progressive tax, abolishing the women’s poll tax, and a 48-hour work week through the Republican legislature. From 1932-39 he represented his conservative state as a pro-New Deal Democrat in the US Senate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohn Tener played in the majors from 1885-90, worked as a banker, was elected to Congress in 1908, then served as Pennsylvania’s governor from 1911 until 1915. One of his claims to fame is having organized the first congressional baseball game in 1909 – now an annual competition that raises money for charity.A major league pitcher from 1952-62, Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell became a broadcaster for Winston-Salem’s minor league team and worked in public relations for Pepsi-Cola. He was elected chair of the Davidson County Board of Commissions, then served three terms as a Republican congressman from North Carolina. Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush appointed him to jobs in their administrations, including executive director of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.A so-so major league player (.212 batting average) from 1977-1982, Randy Bass was a big star (.337 batting average) in Japan from 1983-88, one of the few foreign players elected to Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame. When his baseball days were over, he returned to Lawton, Oklahoma, was elected to the city council in 2001, and then to the state senate from 2005 to 2019. A liberal Democrat in a conservative Republican state, in 2018 Bass was the lone vote (out of 43 senators) to oppose the Self-Defense Act, allowing people to bring guns into houses of worship.Some players who never went beyond the minor leagues in baseball hit the big leagues in politics.Frank Lausche played 58 games in the minors in 1916 and 1917, compiling a .218 batting average. He served in the first world war, then quit baseball to attend law school in Cleveland, his hometown. After practicing law, he was elected Cleveland’s mayor (1942-44), Ohio’s governor (1945-47 and 1949-57) and US senator (1957-69). In 1951, baseball’s owners talked to Lausch about becoming baseball commissioner, which paid $65,000 a year, far more than his $13,000 salary as governor. Lausche turned them down.In 1952, a Pittsburgh Pirates scout, impressed with a young outfielder playing for St John’s University, reported that Mario Cuomo was a great prospect who could “go all the way.” He described Cuomo as “aggressive and intelligent” and “very well-liked by those who succeed in penetrating the exterior shell,” but he “will run over you if you get in his way.” Cuomo dropped out of college to play for the Pirates’ minor league team in Brunswick, Georgia. He was batting .244 after 81 games when he was hit in the head by an errant pitch at a time before players used batting helmets, ending his baseball career. He returned to St John’s, earning undergraduate and law degrees. A liberal Democrat, he was elected New York’s lieutenant governor in 1978 and governor in 1982, serving three four-year terms.In 1954, Pete Domenici went 0-1 in three relief appearances for the Albuquerque Dukes in the West Texas-New Mexico League. After earning a law degree and practicing law, he was elected to the Albuquerque city commission in 1966, served three years as the city’s mayor, and was elected as a Republican to the US Senate from New Mexico, serving from 1973 to 2009.George Hurley played in the minors for one year (1927) when he lost sight in his left eye after he was struck by a fastball. Instead, he went into politics and was an outspoken progressive in the Washington State House of Representatives from 1942-46. During the second world war, he introduced a bill to fund nursery schools for children of defense workers and sponsored another bill to prohibit racial discrimination in hotels and other businesses. His left-wing views, including his support for nuclear disarmament during the cold war, got him labeled as a communist sympathizer and thwarted his reelection bid in 1946. In 1948 he broke away from the Democrats by supporting the Progressive Party’s candidate for president, former vice-president Henry Wallace. He lost five more elections between 1950 and 1963, but in 1974, he was elected to represent Seattle in the legislature and served two more terms as a champion of equal pay for women, a strong opponent of the Vietnam war, and an advocate for unions, protecting state forests, rent control, and government-sponsored health care.Roger Williams, a Texas Republican, is the only former pro ballplayer currently in Congress, although he never got beyond the low minors. The Atlanta Braves drafted Williams in 1971 after his junior year at Texas Christian University. After three years with Braves’ farm teams, he left to coach the TCU baseball team and take over the family’s car dealership from his father. In 2012 he won a race for Congress and has been reelected five times. Williams is the coach of the Republican team for the annual congressional baseball game.
    Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College and author of Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America, published in 2022.
    Isabella Flad and Sarah Jageler provided research assistance for this article. More

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      Aaron Rodgers denies he believes Sandy Hook murders were an inside job

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      Aaron Rodgers has denied he believes the murder of 20 children in the Sandy Hook school shooting was an inside job by the US government.The New York Jets quarterback has been under increased scrutiny this week after the New York Times reported he is a potential running mate for Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent presidential campaign.On Wednesday night, CNN ran a report in which one of its journalists said Rodgers told her in 2013 that he believed the Sandy Hook tragedy was staged. CNN quotes another person who said that Rodgers said the 2012 shooting “never happened … All those children never existed. They were all actors.” The person alleges the quarterback said the parents of the murdered children were “all making it up. They’re all actors.”Conspiracy theories around the shooting have circulated for years and have been disproven. Parents of the victims have suffered harassment by people who do not believe the murders took place.On Thursday, Rodgers issued a statement outlining his beliefs on the shooting.“As I’m on the record saying in the past, what happened in Sandy Hook was an absolute tragedy,” he wrote on X. “I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place. Again, I hope that we learn from this and other tragedies to identify the signs that will allow us to prevent unnecessary loss of life. My thoughts and prayers continue to remain with the families affected along with the entire Sandy Hook community.”Rodgers is known for promoting widely disproved fringe theories around subjects such as Covid-19, immigration, vaccines, the September 11 attacks and masking.The 40-year-old has spoken of his admiration for Kennedy, and last week called him “presidential”. Kennedy says he will announce his running mate on 26 March. In a podcast last month, Rodgers said he does not support Joe Biden or Donald Trump for president.“Trump got four years. I don’t know how much this swamp got drained,” he said on Look Into It With Eddie Bravo. “It seemed like there are certain members of the establishment who stayed in power or got to power. Biden. I mean, he’s a puppet. I don’t know who’s actually running the country, whether it’s somebody else, but he can barely put his sentences together.”Rodgers has yet to comment on whether he would be interested in being Kennedy’s vice-presidential candidate. He is guaranteed $38m in salary next season from the Jets, who would presumably object to him campaigning during the NFL season, which starts in September. In his prime, Rodgers was one of the most talented players in the NFL but he tore an achilles tendon in his Jets debut last year and missed the rest of the season. More

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      Why do so many Americans believe the Taylor Swift and Joe Biden conspiracy? – podcast

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      Just under a fifth of Americans believe Taylor Swift is part of a conspiracy to help Joe Biden win re-election in November, a new poll found this week. The global pop star has been a regular feature at NFL games since September, when she was first spotted linking arms with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
      Before the Chiefs won the Super Bowl on Sunday, rightwing commentators had suggested the championship was rigged by the Biden administration and Swift was secretly helping in order to sway the election in November.
      So where did this conspiracy theory come from? Why are conservatives so obsessed with Swift? And did the Biden team do the right thing by jokingly feeding the conspiracy? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Nikki McCann Ramírez of Rolling Stone magazine to try to figure it out

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Peru, Pelé and Grimsby: Henry Kissinger and his curious football links

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      It was the final game of the second group phase. Earlier in the day, Brazil had beaten Poland 3-1, which meant Argentina had to beat Peru by four goals to make it to the 1978 World Cup final. Before kick-off, the Peru team were visited in their dressing room by Jorge Videla, the leader of the military junta that had seized power in Argentina in 1976, and Henry Kissinger, who had been the US secretary of state until the previous January. This, Peru’s players felt, was deeply odd.Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, loved football and often attended games. In 1976, for instance, after flying to Britain to discuss the crisis in Rhodesia, he went to Blundell Park for Grimsby’s win over Gillingham with the foreign secretary, Tony Crosland, a passionate Grimsby fan.Eight months later, Crosland took him to watch Chelsea draw 3-3 with Wolves in the old Second Division. Then, too, he had visited the dressing room, to widespread bewilderment.“He said he loved soccer,” the Chelsea striker Steve Finnieston said. “The players’ comments ranged from ‘All right, mate?’ to ‘Who’s that wanker?’ … Not a lot of respect was shown.”But what happened in Rosario was more sinister. “It seemed like they were there just to greet and welcome us,” said the then Peru captain, Héctor Chumpitaz. “They also said that they hoped it would be a good game because there was a great deal of anticipation among the Argentinian public. He wished us luck, and that was it.“We started looking at each other and wondering: shouldn’t they have gone to the Argentina room, not our room? What’s going on? I mean, they wished us luck? Why? It left us wondering …”Kissinger’s office said he had “no recollection” of the incident.Argentina went on to win 6-0, which raised eyebrows. There is much circumstantial evidence of a fix – unproven allegations that the Argentina government shipped 35,000 tons of grain and possibly some arms to Peru, and that the central bank released $50m of frozen Peruvian assets.Most disturbing were the allegations made by a Peruvian senator, General Ledesma, to Buenos Aires judge in 2012 that the match was rigged as part of Operation Condor, a grim plan that meant South American dictatorships tortured each other’s dissidents in which Kissinger was implicated, with Videla accepting 13 prisoners from Peru in return.“Were we pressured? Yes, we were pressured,” the midfielder José Velásquez told Channel 4. “What kind of pressure? Pressure from the government. From the government to the managers of the team, from the managers of the team to the coaches.”Perhaps that is true, but anybody watching the game in search of an obvious fix will be disappointed. Peru hit the post in the first half and their goalkeeper, Ramón Quiroga, made a string of fine saves. To an eye not looking for a fix, it seems that Peru, with nothing to play for, just wilted in the second half under the pressure of relentless Argentina attacks and a ferocious home crowd.As to Kissinger’s presence, he was an ally of Videla – “If there are things to be done, you should do them quickly,” he reportedly told him after the coup in 1976 – and he did love football.As a boy growing up in Bavaria, he had been a fan of his home-town club, Greuther Fürth, who were German champions three times between 1916 and 1929. When he became security adviser to Richard Nixon in 1969, staff would include reports on the team’s games in his briefing papers on a Monday morning.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe played football as well, first as a goalkeeper and then, after breaking a bone in a hand, as an inside-forward. He devised new tactics that, in the account he gave to Brian Kilmeade in The Games Do Count, he claims were a forerunner of catenaccio, although it sounds more like just massing players behind the ball. “The system was to drive the other team nuts by not letting them score, by keeping so many people back as defenders,” he says. “It’s very hard to score when 10 players are lined up in front of goal.” That the ends were more important to him than the means comes as little surprise.Although his family’s flight to the US to escape Nazi persecution took him away from football, Kissinger continued to find it a useful tool of diplomacy, particularly with Leonid Brezhnev with whom he had a lengthy discussion about Garrincha at a summit in Moscow in 1973. It was seeing football pitches on spyplane photos in Cuba in 1969 that led him to realise Soviet troops were stationed on the island – “Cubans play baseball,” he reportedly snapped at Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff. He helped João Havelange unseat Stanley Rous as Fifa president in 1974 and to arrange Pelé’s move to New York Cosmos a year later, both as part of a broader plan to improve relations between the US and Brazil.Havelange, though, fell out with Kissinger, seemingly over the USA’s doomed bid to host the 1986 World Cup, and accused him of having fixed the second-phase game at the 1974 World Cup when the Netherlands beat Brazil 2-0. By then, his reputation was such that wherever there were wheels within wheels, he could credibly be accused of turning them.And why, given he was one of the first senior figures to recognise the potential of the world’s sport in politics, would he not be turning them in football? More

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      Orlando Magic NBA team donated $50,000 to Ron DeSantis super PAC

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      The Orlando Magic NBA team has donated $50,000 to a super PAC supporting Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid.According to Federal Election Commission records, the Never Back Down super PAC received the donation made by the basketball team on 26 June. Further results showed the team making donations to other political causes in past years, with $500 going to Conservative Results in 2016, $2,000 to Maverick PAC USA in 2014 and another $500 to Linda Chapin for Congress in 2000.In an initial statement to Popular Information, a Magic spokesperson said: “We don’t comment publicly on political contributions.” However, in a later follow-up statement, a spokesperson clarified the donation, saying that the check was “dated/delivered on May 19”, five days before DeSantis declared his presidential bid.“This gift was given before governor DeSantis entered the presidential race. [It] was given as a Florida business in support of a Florida governor for the continued prosperity of Central Florida,” the spokesperson said.According to Never Back Down’s website, the super PAC describes itself as a “grassroots movement to elect governor Ron DeSantis for president in 2024”.The donation has drawn criticism online, particularly given the Magic’s claims of supporting “diversity, equity and inclusion all year long” and DeSantis’s culture wars in which he announced plans to block DEI programs in state colleges among other legislation targeting minority and marginalized groups including LGBTQ+ communities.The Orlando Magic team is under Amway North America, a multi-level marketing firm co-established by Richard DeVos, the late father-in-law of Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos.Over the years, the DeVos family has made multiple donations to conservative organizations. In 2006, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation made a $540,000 donation to Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based organization that opposes same-sex marriage and abortions, HuffPost reports. In 2008, Richard DeVos donated $100,000 to Florida4Marriage, a group that campaigned to add a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriages.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s just a sacred issue of respecting marriage,” Richard DeVos said in a 2009 interview in reference to his donation. More

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      US government prepares to look into LIV-PGA merger amid sportswashing claims

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      The leader of a US Senate subcommittee is demanding the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf present records about the negotiations that led to their planned merger.Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, sent letters on Monday to PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and LIV CEO Greg Norman.“While few details about the agreement are known, PIF’s role as an arm of the Saudi government and PGA Tour’s sudden and drastic reversal of position concerning LIV Golf raise serious questions regarding the reasons for and terms behind the announced agreement,” Blumenthal wrote in a letter to Monahan.The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) will pour huge sums – confirmed by its governor, Yasir al-Rumuyyan, as running into billions – into a newly formed entity to run top-tier golf. The PIF has assets of more than $700bn and will lead efforts to move Saudi Arabia on from its reliance on its oil assets.Blumenthal, who is chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he also wanted to hear the tour’s plans to retain its tax-exempt status.Last week, LIV and the tour stunned the golf world by agreeing to merge the PGA Tour and European tour with the Saudi golf interests, while also dropping all lawsuits between the parties. Al-Rumuyyan will join the PGA Tour board of directors and lead a new business venture as its chairman. The PGA Tour itself will remain a tax-exempt entity.It was a move expected to receive scrutiny from US federal regulators and lawmakers, and the launch of a Senate investigation is among the first dominoes to fall.Among the uncertainties is how LIV Golf goes forward after 2023.In his letters to Monahan and Norman, Blumenthal wrote about the skepticism critics hold over the Saudis’ intent “to use investments in sports to further the Saudi government’s strategic objectives.”“Critics have cast such Saudi investments in sports as a means of “sportswashing” – an attempt to soften the country’s image around the world – given Saudi Arabia’s deeply disturbing human rights record at home and abroad,” the letter said.Blumenthal asked for a a huge trove of documents – essentially all communications between LIV and the tour beginning in October 2021 through to the present.Al-Rumayyan said last week that Norman was not apprised of the deal until shortly before it was announced. More

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      ‘Trump’s not a good sport’: Chris Cillizza on presidents at play

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      From The Big Lebowski to Alice on The Brady Bunch, depictions of bowling abound in American pop culture. The sport’s real-life adherents included Richard Nixon, who installed bowling lanes in the White House and was known to play between seven to 12 games late at night. Characteristically, he played alone. This is one of many athletic accounts from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a new book, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency, by the longtime political journalist Chris Cillizza.Bowling solo personified “Nixon the loner”, Cillizza says. “He didn’t play tennis or golf with friends. He did enjoy bowling by himself. It’s a powerful image, a telling image.”Tricky Dick’s love of bowling also helped with a crucial voting bloc: “Nixon viewed it as the sport of the Silent Majority – white, blue-collar men who sort of made up his base. He was very aware of this.”A Washington journalist for four decades, most recently for CNN, Cillizza pitched the book as about “the sports presidents play, love, spectate, and what it tells us about who they are and how they govern. That was the germ of the idea, the seed going in.”Power Players surveys 13 presidents of the modern era, from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Some of its narratives are well-known – think Ike’s extensive golf-playing, John F Kennedy’s touch football games or Barack Obama’s pickup basketball on the campaign trail. The book explores less-remembered sides of these stories, including a scary moment on the links for Eisenhower.While golfing in Colorado in 1955, he fielded multiple stressful phone calls from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After eating a hamburger with onions and getting yet another call from Dulles, Ike felt too angry to keep playing. Chest pains followed that night. The White House initially claimed indigestion but an electrocardiogram found something more serious – a heart attack. At the time, there was no 25th amendment specifying the chain of command if a president became incapacitated. Fortunately, Ike never lost consciousness during the episode.Golf was a popular sport for many presidents, as reflected in a previous book about White House athletics, First Off the Tee by Don Van Natta Jr, whom Cillizza interviewed. Yet the list of presidential pastimes is long and diverse, from Nixon’s bowling to Jimmy Carter’s fly fishing to George HW Bush’s horseshoes. Yes, horseshoes. In addition to Bush’s well-known prowess on the Yale University baseball team, he was a pretty good horseshoes player who established his own league in the White House, with a commissioner and tournaments. The White House permanent staff fielded teams; Queen Elizabeth II even gifted Bush a quartet of silver horseshoes.In the greatest-presidential-athlete discussion, Cillizza lands in Gerald Ford’s corner.“No debate, he’s the best athlete ever, I think, with [George HW] Bush a distant second, among modern presidents.”Ford sometimes lived up to the bumbling stereotypes made famous by Chevy Chase and Bob Hope – including when he accidentally hit people with golf balls. Yet he was an All-American center on the national-champion University of Michigan football team and received contract offers from two NFL squads, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.In addition to the sports presidents play, Cillizza’s book examines how presidents use sports to connect to the public.Calling sports “a common language that lots and lots and lots of Americans speak”, Cillizza says: “I think politicians are forever trying to identify with the average person … I think sports is a way into that world for a lot of presidents.”There’s the practice of inviting championship teams to the White House, which Cillizza traces to Ronald Reagan, although instances date back decades. While not much of a sports fan, Reagan came from a sports radio background, played the legendary Gipper in the film Knute Rockne, All American and understood the importance of proximity to winners, Cillizza says.There’s also the tradition of presidential first pitches at baseball games, arguably the most iconic thrown by George W Bush at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Cillizza notes Dubya’s baseball pedigree as president of the Texas Rangers, and that he reportedly contemplated becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball.Of the presidents surveyed, Cillizza says George HW Bush had the most sportsmanship, thanks to early lessons about fair play from his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, a strong tennis player herself. The least sportsmanlike, according to the author? Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump. Cillizza cites an account of Trump’s time on the Fordham University squash team. After a loss to the Naval Academy, he drove to a department store and bought golf equipment. He and his teammates vented their frustration by hitting golf balls off a bluff into the Chesapeake Bay, then drove away, sans clubs.“That’s Trump, in a lot of ways,” Cillizza says. “He’s not a good sport who’s going to be genteel.”The author notes similar behavior throughout Trump’s career, including bombastic performances in World Wrestling Entertainment storylines and a whole recent book about his alleged cheating at golf, as well as a recent news item about the former president going to Ireland to visit one of his courses.“He hit a drive, and said Joe Biden could never do this,” Cillizza recalls. “It went 280ft right down the middle of the fairway. He talks about his virility, his health, through the lens of sports.”Not too long ago, two ex-presidents from rival parties teamed up as part of a golf foursome. George HW Bush joined the man who beat him in 1992 – Bill Clinton – en route to an unlikely friendship. Rounding out the foursome were the broadcasting legend Jim Nantz and NFL superstar Tom Brady.“It’s remarkable what sports can do to bring presidents together,” Cillizza says. “This day and age, it’s hard to consider … I don’t think Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be playing golf together anytime soon.”
      Power Players is published in the US by Twelve More

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      ‘I relied on hard work’: Brittney Griner on coping with Russian detention

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      Brittney Griner got emotional quickly.Speaking to reporters for the first time since a nearly 10-month detainment in Russia on drug-related charges, the WNBA star had to take a moment to compose herself after being asked about her resiliency through the ordeal.“I’m no stranger to hard times,” Griner said Thursday from the lobby of the Footprint Center, home of her new team the Phoenix Mercury and the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. “Just digging deep. You’re going to be faced with adversities in life. This was a pretty big one. I just relied on my hard work to get through it.”Griner’s first news conference drew more than 100 people, including Arizona governor Katie Hobbs, members of the Mercury organization and her wife, Cherelle.Griner was arrested in February 2022 at a Moscow airport after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. She later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years in prison.She said her abilities as an athlete helped her cope. “I know this sounds so small but dying in practice and just hard workouts, you find a way to just grind it out, just put your head down and keep going and keep moving forward,” she said.“You can never stand still and that was my thing; just never be still, never get too focused on the now and looking forward to what’s to come.”After nearly 10 months of strained negotiations between Washington and Moscow, Griner was exchanged in the United Arab Emirates for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout on 8 December.Griner kept a low profile following her return to the US while adjusting to life back at home, outside of appearances at the Super Bowl, the PGA Tour’s Phoenix Open and an MLK Day event in Phoenix.But she said she never doubted she would be back playing professionally again.“I believe in me,” Griner said. “I believe in what I can do. I know if I put my mind to it I can achieve any goal.She added: “I’m not trying to sound big-headed, but I bet on me. I have all the resources here to help me get to that point where I can play, and it was no question to be back in the WNBA, back in Phoenix playing.”Griner also said her management team has been in touch with the family of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter detained in Russia who has become a symbol of attacks on the press in Russia.“No one should be in those conditions,” she said.She added: “You’re in foreign territory and you’re in unknown waters. So there’s a lot that we might know that they didn’t know so there’s been a lot of communication between both teams.”
      Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Griner release is cause for relief but Viktor Bout transfer tough to stomach

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      AnalysisGriner release is cause for relief but Viktor Bout transfer tough to stomachDavid Smith in WashingtonCritics label Biden’s decision to release Russian arms dealer ‘deeply disturbing’ – even if Brittney Griner’s freedom is excellent news Last month, the Russian parliament mounted an unusual art exhibition with subjects ranging from the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to a sentimental image of a kitten. They had been produced in prison by Viktor Bout, serving 25 years in America.Brittney Griner freed from Russian prison in exchange for Viktor BoutRead moreHistory has shown that a sideline as an amateur artist is not much guarantee of moral integrity. Bout, known as “the merchant of death”, was the world’s most notorious arms dealer, selling weapons to rogue states, rebel groups and murderous warlords in Africa, Asia and South America.That, for many, was what made his release on Thursday in a prisoner swap for US basketball star Brittney Griner difficult to stomach. Joe Biden has done a deal with the devil. But he may also have saved a woman’s life. As the president found in Afghanistan, the big decisions are seldom morally clearcut.On the credit side, Griner’s release is spectacularly good news. She was arrested in February after vape canisters containing cannabis oil were found in her luggage. Against the backdrop of war in Ukraine, her nine-year prison sentence was wildly disproportionate. Her transfer to a penal colony, with its promise of sexism, racism and homophobia in medieval conditions, raised fears for her survival.But on the debit side, despite Vladimir Putin’s effort to portray Bout as painter and classical music lover with a sensitive soul, the arms dealer has blood on his hands. He armed militias in Sierra Leone, the Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor and the Taliban in Afghanistan. His life helped inspire the 2005 Hollywood film Lord of War, starring Nicholas Cage.Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, captured the ambivalence in a statement on Thursday. The Democrat welcomed Griner’s release as a “moment of profound relief” but warned that “releasing Bout back into the world is a deeply disturbing decision”.He added: “We must stop inviting dictatorial and rogue regimes to use Americans overseas as bargaining chips, and we must try do better at encouraging American citizens against traveling to places like Russia where they are primary targets for this type of unlawful detention.”Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee, also expressed relief but warned that “trading Viktor Bout – a dangerous convicted arms dealer who was in prison for conspiring to kill Americans – will only embolden Vladimir Putin to continue his evil practice of taking innocent Americans hostage for use as political pawns”.Predictably, there was a less measured response from Donald Trump’s wing of the Republican party. Some cried foul over the fact that while Griner was coming home, the former US marine Paul Whelan, convicted in 2020 of spying, will remain in a penal colony.Cory Mills, an Afghanistan and Iraq war veteran and congressman-elect from Florida, tweeted: “Biden clearly showed his priority is celebrities over veterans. I guess Brittany’s basketball career in WNBA was more important than Paul Whelan’s service to our nation as a marine.”Family of US man held in Russia lament ‘catastrophe for Paul’ after Griner swapRead moreIn a phone interview from his penal colony, Whelan told CNN he was glad Griner had been released but “greatly disappointed” that the Biden administration has not done more to secure his own freedom. According to the White House, Russia is treating Whelan’s case differently because of his espionage conviction and was not willing to include him in the deal.Not even Republicans, however, were accusing Biden of being “soft on Russia”, given his success in rallying the west against Putin in Ukraine – a vivid contrast from Trump’s embrace of the autocrat. The war has been unusual in its lack of ambiguity between right and wrong.After meeting Griner’s wife, Cherelle, in the Oval Office, it was clear Biden had no doubt he had done the right thing despite the understandable ethical qualms.“It’s my job as president of the United States to make the hard calls,” he said. “And I’m proud that, today, we have made one more family whole again.”TopicsJoe BidenUS foreign policyUS politicsRussiaViktor BoutBrittney GrineranalysisReuse this content More