by Love, Reggie
The back-and-forth struck me as bizarre. Like a great many Americans, I had reasonably assumed that the elite African-American bloc would automatically be on the senator’s team. But, like everyone else he would come to meet during the campaign, they wanted to know who was going to carry their water. The men in that meeting—they just didn’t know Barack Obama. They weren’t yet aware of his depth, his core values. In a nutshell, they made the case that while the candidate might be black, he might not be black enough.
As I watched the scene unfold, it was hard to keep my jaw from falling open. I was like, The guy’s running for president and he’s qualified, he has a chance, and he looks like you! This is amazing! In my mind there was no scenario where another African-American would have doubted for a second that Obama was the right person for the position. Not black enough? How was that even possible?
The event was scheduled to last forty-five minutes. It ended up lasting two and a half hours. The entire meeting was uncomfortable for me because (1) of all people, I thought these guys would be easy, or at least relatively easy, and (2) there I was, some wild-eyed kid in charge of moving Senator Barack Obama along to the hotel before 12 A.M. so that he could get some semblance of a night’s sleep before continuing on the campaign trail the next day, and I had no clue how to pull him out or if I even should. (I didn’t.)
That was the day I learned that in politics, as in life, there are no easy plays. If you want someone in your corner, you have to earn his or her support.
Even when you think you have all the right factors in your favor, in other words, you still manage to find out that not all layups are easy.
The senator closed the meeting by saying, “If I’m out there running for president as Barack Hussein Obama, African-American, regardless of whether I win or lose, that in itself does more for your cause than anything we’ve spoken about today. It takes the roof off the glass ceiling for all our children. There ends up being nothing our children feel they can’t do.”
Everyone in that room would ultimately throw his support behind the senator’s campaign, but it took some time to win the love.
That night when I went back to the W Hotel at 49th and Lexington, a place that would became very familiar over the campaign, I finally exhaled. I wanted to process what had just happened, but there was no time. So it would be for the next several years. I knew I felt a peculiar sense of purpose and destiny, but I also had to curate and respond to hundreds of emails and print out the briefings for the next day. The Barack Obama for President train had officially left the station. And it was now my job to help it run on time.
4
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YOU CAN’T TEACH HEIGHT
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I was a lucky kid. For starters, my parents, Lynette and Richard Maurice Love Sr., stayed married. That was not the case for many of my friends. I was raised Southern Baptist at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church on Beatties Ford Road in Charlotte, where Pastor Jones not only preached the gospel but showed me the value of the strength of community. My parents put a premium on keeping promises, particularly ones made in front of God.
I can see, looking back, how the solidarity between my mother and father, their example of sticking it out through the tough times, equipped me for success, and especially for taking risks. I grew up knowing two things for certain. First, my parents loved me. Second, their unconditional love was not the same as having their respect. That needed to be earned, not taken for granted.
When I was about six and still had training wheels on my bicycle, I decided to take them off myself. My older brother had a two-wheel bike, so I wanted one as well. I used my father’s wrench to detach the training wheels, then taught myself how to ride without them (though for the first month, I could only ride in a counterclockwise circle). When they came home from work, I proudly showed my disbelieving parents what I had done.
Even then, I liked challenges. That remains true today. Every time I meet one goal, I crave another. I am one of those people who always want to figure out the limitations of any situation. What can I do? What can I get away with doing? When I was a kid, if no one bothered to tell me the rules, I would push the boundaries until I found the line. Often, I crossed it.
In Newell Elementary School, where I struggled with sitting still and staying focused, I found what I thought was an opportunity to sell cigarettes to my classmates. My mother brought them home from her job at the Philip Morris tobacco company. No one in our immediate family was a regular smoker, so cartons of perfectly good cigarettes were languishing in the garage and her car. In the early nineties there was no shortage of kids in the fourth and fifth grades who believed smoking was cool. It didn’t take long for me to do the math.
When I finally got caught—well, ratted out by a classmate who had been busted by his parents—my mom sat me down and lectured me about the evils of tobacco. I explained to her that I didn’t smoke, then politely asked why I should be punished because other people did.
My logic went over with Mom about as well as you might expect, but I wasn’t being clever. At school, I’d seen an entrepreneurial opportunity. A window to step through. And that excited me. It still does.
I believe in the saying that success is where preparation meets opportunity. You never know when or where the opportunity will come—but when you do get the chance and your number is called, you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say, “Hey, I was prepared, I gave it everything I had and put in the work.” (Even if that work is peddling smokes on the playground.)
That said, no matter how much preparation I did, I was never a great student. I got average grades. My parents felt that a more demanding environment might inspire me, so after middle school, they enrolled me in Providence Day, a private prep school on the other side of town, in southeast Charlotte. Tuition was about $12,000 a year. More than we could afford. But my folks were determined to give me the best opportunities they could.
Because my grades weren’t the best, I had to sign up for remedial math courses over the summer just to get caught up for my first day of ninth grade. I hated it. All I wanted to do was play basketball. I may have been an outcast on my block and in my new largely white classroom, but sports, at least, was a reliable equalizer in both neighborhoods. Every hour spent working at math was an hour not spent working on my game. My parents, my mother especially, made sure I stayed focused on the long game of academics.
When I was in seventh grade and still in public school, basketball and popularity were for me synonymous. I’d been cut from my junior high team. Two seventh graders made the squad, and I wasn’t one of them. My only option was to play in the recreational league during the winter season, while all my friends got to represent their school teams. I complained and cried to my father that it wasn’t fair. He listened for a while, but then, fed up with my self-pity, he flatly stated the truth: “You’re not that good.” And then he asked the only relevant question, “Do you want to play basketball or not?”
I insisted I did, and he said, “Then play your best on the team that you can play on.”
I didn’t know it then, but that recommendation would carry me through decades of decision making. If anything, having something to prove made me work harder.
I made the school team the following season, my eighth grade year. I kept excelling, eventually becoming the leading scorer. By the end of high school I was named Male Athlete of the Year by The Charlotte Observer. It was such a gratifying feeling to start at the bottom and pull myself up rung by rung.
My father used to tell me all the time, “Reggie, you gotta do the work. Sports or school, it doesn’t matter. The work won’t do itself, and if you choose not to do the work, then you should never be surprised about the outcome, because you chose to leave it up to chance.”
All of that was true, of course. But there was something else he told me that struck an even deeper chord.
After getting cut in sevent
h grade, I practiced more than any other kid in my neighborhood. My friends made fun of me for having to play on a rec league team, which only made me want to play and practice all the more. I improved, I grew, getting both taller and stronger. But not enough. When my AAU squad didn’t qualify for a national tournament, the teams that did qualify picked up players from teams that hadn’t, to fill out their roster. Being my team’s leading rebounder and scorer, I was confident my name would be called. But it wasn’t. I was passed over for a thirteen-year-old kid who was six-foot-five.
I was stunned.
“But I was the best player,” I said to my father.
He listened and nodded slowly. “Reggie, you know it’s tough. I think you are better than the other kid, but you can’t teach height.”
I didn’t get it at the time, but eventually, I saw that my dad was imparting to me that life isn’t fair, and even when you perform at your peak, it may not be enough to overcome the circumstances on any given day.
I have since seen my father’s adage play out in many arenas. You can substitute “height” for “race,” “gender,” “income,” “geography,” “legacy,” “class.” Just because you work harder doesn’t mean everything is going to go according to plan.
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That you can’t teach height certainly became clear in the early stages of the campaign when the Obama team couldn’t get unbiased media coverage. After the senator announced, he did the living room tour. We traveled the country, and he sat in people’s homes and listened to them describe what they wanted from their government and from a leader. It was glaringly obvious that Americans were hungry for something different. They wanted fresh ideas. Passion. In every town, people would come at him with a barrage of questions and needs. Obama was consistently surprised at the intensity. Everywhere, people wanted the same thing: something new.
Even so, the powers that be would not support the candidate because it was too early, or he was too green, or they were already backing Hillary Clinton. We got beat up in the press on similar grounds. Dismissed. Never more so than in 2007, after the New York Times ran a column suggesting that Clinton was going to be the party nominee, and Obama should face the inevitable, pack his bags, and go home to Chicago.
We’d spent the night before in West Palm Beach, Florida. An old friend I knew from Duke was in Miami, and she’d come to visit me. She ended up staying the night.
The next morning, the senator let himself into my room using the Secret Service keys that accessed every room, including, when need be, his. I was up and getting all my things together, but my friend was still in bed. I remember the most peremptory of knocks, the sound of his voice talking even as he walked in. The stresses of the campaign, the piece in the Times—he was charged up, going a mile a minute.
“Hey, Reggie, we need to go over the schedule”—at which point the senator finally noticed my friend in bed, covers pulled to her throat, mortified.
“Oh,” he said. “I apologize.” Then he turned around and hurried out.
“Was that?” she asked, face red.
“Senator Barack Obama,” I said sheepishly.
Later, the team was piled into a small plane, another day of grueling campaigning ahead of us, when the candidate turned to his senior advisor David Axelrod and began venting to him about getting his ass kicked in the media and how exhausting the entire process was in every imaginable way and all for so little reward. Everyone was quiet, so I chimed in from the seat behind him, “You know, sir, if it’s any consolation, I’m having the time of my life.”
And the senator said to me, “Well, Reggie, it’s actually not a consolation to me that my campaign for president can help subsidize your love life.”
There was weak laughter from Axelrod, Robert Gibbs (our communications director and future White House press secretary), and Marvin Nicholson, but none from Obama.
For the candidate, the death march of the campaign was punishing. He was away from his wife and daughters. He was risking everything and getting zero payoff. Instead, he was being written about as a neophyte on a fool’s errand. I tried again.
“Actually, sir, I got way more action in college.”
A round of groans rose up from the whole staff. If nothing else, I was providing a distraction from the gloom. I’d uncovered another facet to the bodyman role: that of court jester.
Reading the news coverage, the evidence was clear. My father had been right. You can’t teach height. We couldn’t sway the national press to our belief that we had more to offer than an eminent political family. That our Bad News Bears, ragtag team would in fact turn out to be the best option for a new America. So, after those initial defeatist days, we stopped paying attention to the pundits who counted us out.
We quit reading the negative coverage. It was what I learned playing sports: You don’t listen to the chatter about your team or your game. The guy who can’t play at all and probably never played always has the most to say about the guy who is actually on the court. You stay informed, but you don’t let the criticism sink in or sink the team. Never believe how bad or how great people say you are. My coach would say that when you go back to watch the tape of a game, you see that you were never as great as you remember or as bad as you remember.
When our efforts were questioned, the candidate would say, “Come see us in Iowa.”
And what do you know? They did. They really, really did.
5
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NEVER GET TOO COMFORTABLE ON THE BENCH
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I enrolled at Duke in the summer of 2000 with a full football scholarship as a wide receiver. My mother was never a fan of the game of football, believing that it was too violent. She always stressed the importance of education, and I was sure to get that at Duke. And after four years at Providence Day, surrounded by wealth and the evidence of the opportunities that it affords, I was also ready to leverage my athleticism. Football was my ticket. I was in great shape. I knew the Blue Devils playbook. Sure, I was eager to embrace the freedom of living in a new town, away from family. Mostly, however, I was ready to play football.
I was recruited by Clemson, Florida State, USC, Florida, and Tennessee, but I chose Duke for their academics (I knew how injuries happened) and because their basketball program was decent. I knew they didn’t think I was good enough for the hoops team, but in the back of my mind I thought, maybe if I was on campus, I could make a miracle happen.
I showed up freshman year primed and pumped, eager to compete, with an ego the size of Texas. But I hardly played at all in the first eight games. My roommate played, which stung, but not as much as the fact that the football team I’d selected to pin my future on didn’t win a single game all season. It was, in a word, a letdown.
Five weeks into the season, I still wasn’t getting any snaps, but the schoolwork had filled the void by kicking my butt. I was surprised by how demanding the classes were. So there I was, struggling on two counts, not exactly the BMOC I’d imagined I would be. I found myself sliding into what I look back on as a mild depression.
Up until then, I’d derived all my value from winning. Now I wasn’t just losing; I wasn’t even qualified to play with a team that couldn’t win a game. I was down because, well, as much as it pained me to admit it, I’d thought I was better than I was.
The struggle would turn out to be great preparation for the exploratory primary days of the campaign with Senator Obama, when we all had such high hopes and boundless conviction and were treated as if we were party crashers, literally. There was a gulf between how we perceived ourselves, and our chances, and what the outside world felt. Those were the days when every newspaper headline was telling the Obama camp to concede defeat, that the team lacked the track record to succeed, that we were a drain on political resources, and that the whole Democratic Party would thrive if all the candidates would just step aside and usher the next Clinton president all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.<
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When I played football at Duke, the vibe was similar, but of much less national importance. We didn’t win a game for two seasons. But we still had to show up as if the last loss hadn’t happened. We had to refuel and believe. We prepared with the faith that every game we played in we had a chance to win. It was the same story on the campaign. No one outside the team thought we were going to win. We were good—just not good enough in the eyes of mainstream media.
It was not until the second to last game, Duke at Georgia Tech, that I saw real playing time. We still hadn’t nabbed a win, and starter Jeremy Battier (my roommate) was about to go in, when he couldn’t find his mouthpiece. Bam, just like that, I was finally up.
We ended up losing that game as well. But I caught my first career touchdown pass, one of only a few for our team that season. It was a small beacon of light that showed me that maybe I wasn’t as bad as I was starting to believe. Maybe there was hope for me yet.
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The silver lining throughout that tough freshman year was hoops. Basketball has been a constant in my life. Whenever times feel daunting—in college, on the campaign, during my stint in the White House, even now—I know I can always turn to the basketball court to set my head straight.
Some nights after a long practice, I’d let myself into the Brodie Gymnasium near my dorm on Duke’s east campus and shoot alone for hours. It was my meditation. My church. My home away from home.
I would play hoops until 11 P.M., midnight, later. The football coaching staff knew I was there, and I think at times they questioned my commitment to Duke football. I understood their concerns, but it wasn’t about my commitment to football; it was more about my passion for basketball.