by Love, Reggie
That summer ended up being the start of an entirely new path in my life. The pivot point that would take me on a completely uncharted course. And I would never have stumbled onto it if I hadn’t thrown out the playbook.
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COURT CONNECTION
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Tramping through New Hampshire in the dead of winter redefines cold. It feels like you are packed in ice and someone turns a fan on. There are no major highways that run east to west, and the north-south roads are serpentine, so travel takes hours more than you’d like it to, which means you stay cold longer. For a Southern guy like me, it was no picnic. But what I recall even more than the freezing temperatures is that New Hampshire was the place where Obama and I first started playing hoops together.
I like to believe that learning to handle my responsibilities as his personal aide earned me Barack Obama’s trust, but I also know that the strength of our friendship grew out of our shared love of basketball. Our age difference meant we were on different cultural pages, and in different life stages, but basketball was the common ground we could come together on. Hoops was also something we could talk about that didn’t drain him the way his other daily conversations could. Sports permitted him to escape the grind of the campaign, and it was an icebreaker. Basketball modified the tenor of our interactions and took us from boss and underling to something more like friends. It began with the 2007 NBA playoffs.
I’ll never forget the night I got an email in my inbox from the candidate consisting only of Tony Parker’s stat line.
I chuckled, then typed back, “Those are good numbers. But it was against a weak team.” Then I added Chris Paul’s stat line.
And with that little exchange, something just shifted in our relationship. The communication didn’t involve a to-do list or a complaint or a question about the schedule. It was purely fun. And spoke of a touch of competition between us. Who was going to be right? The debate went on for years. (After Chris Paul won All-Star Game MVP in 2013, Obama conceded, reluctantly.) Though Tony Parker’s NBA championship ring collection (four in all: 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2014) may make the President’s case for him a little better than mine for Chris Paul. A discussion for a later date, though.
It was Matt Rodriguez, then state director for New Hampshire, who first suggested we should shoot hoops on the campaign. He thought it could help build relationships. Clinton had a throttlehold on the state. The logic was basic: If you don’t find a way to connect with voters, you have very little chance of earning their support. But if you can connect with them, there’s a chance they’ll like you and carry that enthusiasm back to their organizations.
It was a solid idea. For me, playing H-O-R-S-E or playing in pickup games was something I lived for, it energized me. You’d come away feeling good about the run, as long as you didn’t get your butt kicked. Basketball was also a true passion for the candidate, similar to how it was for my college coach; on the court he was a guy you wanted to play with, and he always made anyone he played with better. Hoops was also a natural way for people to get a window into the candidate as I knew him.
Obama loved the idea of connecting with the locals through sports. As a former community organizer, he knew the value of that kind of informal interaction, how it built bridges and made connections with people who, typically, would have been the least likely to support him.
Our first on-court event was with local New Hampshire firefighters. We were barely into the game when it became clear it was going to be a rout. We were burying them.
After I had managed to steal the ball and take it for a quick layup, the senator walked over to me and said, “Reggie, we want to win. But we also want to win their support.”
I was twenty-four, just over a year from having trained with the Dallas Cowboys. And no one had ever coached me to play at half speed. My competitive instincts didn’t have a lower gear.
“Let’s just settle down a little bit,” the candidate whispered, passing me the ball.
It was a tricky balancing act. It didn’t help the senator if we played too well and it looked like we came in with a bunch of ringers. But it also didn’t serve the campaign if we played and lost. The ideal scenario was to win gracefully, without humiliating the opposition. This is not to say that games were thrown, but there wasn’t a lot of dunking by our team when we played with future voters.
When we started playing basketball just among the campaign team and our friends, it was a very different story. Obama’s initial directive was straightforward: “No one takes it easy on me.”
So we didn’t. We all played full-on, no mercy. (This worked great until, after the election, the President took an elbow from another player that resulted in him getting more than a dozen stitches in the lip, and the first lady promptly reminded him, “You aren’t twenty years old.”)
Mrs. Obama had a point; the leader of the free world shouldn’t be showing up to press conferences with black eyes, random bruises, or on crutches. In my years of playing competitive sports, I’ve sprained both ankles, fractured teeth, dislocated fingers, gotten staples in the head, stitches in my arm, torn my MCL and PCL, broken my foot, torn a hamstring, torn ligaments in my fingers, received stitches in my chin twice, the second time in 2010 during a game of hoops with the President.
That injury was courtesy of my older brother, Richard Love Jr.—though his high school friends nicknamed him Sleepy, because his eyes looked like those of a pot smoker. Richard, a beautiful gospel singer and a gifted scholar, has always been an exceptionally smart guy; as a seventeen-year-old he would beat our parents at Jeopardy. He was innately better than me when it came to the classroom, so he owned the category of academics. I remember my parents wishing my academic performance were a fraction of his. But I was into sports; in high school that is where I distinguished myself.
The day Richard sent me to the White House ER was the Saturday morning prior to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is like the Political Academy Awards. He was living with me at the time, working in D.C. for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and had been needling me about wanting to join a game. Usually when he asked to play in the morning games I would say no, explaining, “The guys I play with get up at 5 A.M. to hoop. They’ve all played in college. These guys want to win. They are not okay with losing.” He didn’t understand. His feelings were hurt. So on the morning of the dinner, I relented, and he joined us on the court.
An hour into the game, my brother was guarding someone coming off a screen I was setting, when he turned to get through my screen and slammed his forehead into my chin. The skin split on impact. Blood sprayed everywhere. It looked like an NBA-themed episode of CSI.
The President jogged over to inspect the damage.
“Whoa!” he said, shuddering. “Well, you know, Reggie, I have to admit, it’s better you than me.”
The game was called, and I was shuttled to the White House, where Dr. Ronny Jackson gave me fifteen stitches. I still made it to the dinner. I wore a bandage under my chin to keep the blood from dripping onto my tux. The President could only chuckle when he saw me prior to the event.
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Even though playing basketball was a thousand times more fun than anything else we did on the campaign, we were never allowed to substitute a game for an event. Games were viewed as “add-ons.” If Obama could have substituted a game for a town hall, nine out of ten times he would have said, “Let’s hoop!” Instead, he’d do several town halls and try and squeeze in court time before, at like 5:30 or 6 A.M.
Off the court, we’d do what felt like an endless number of house parties a day. There would be events at community centers, group homes, university campuses, and retirement homes, along with stops at every mom-and-pop diner to ask customers for their support.
Obama would stand up and introduce himself, explain why he wanted to be president, why he thought he’d make a good leade
r. And then he would open the room to questions. They were usually about local issues, which were often politically complex and toxic.
There were a lot of concerns about his age: “You seem awfully young.” “Are you seasoned enough for the highest office?”
He’d unpack his history of Chicago politics, point out they were as rough as anywhere. He’d argue that his short history in the Senate freed him from years of baggage, grudges, and the rain checks old-timer incumbents inevitably owed to their base of supporters and their colleagues. He believed his newness to the game would make him more effective, not less.
I wouldn’t sit during these events. I stood off to the side or toward the rear of the room. I needed to be ready, but not intrusive. Seen and not heard. Like a child in Victorian England, if that child were six-foot-five and carrying a Tide stain remover pen. The most important thing was having eye contact with the candidate all the way from the back of the room, so that I could cue him when we were out of time.
“Sir, you have time for one more question,” I’d say. Then we’d leave the event and go do the whole thing again.
When I reflect on that time in my life, the word that most often pops into my head is “crazy.” Obama was logging four, five, six, seven campaign stops a day. Hillary? Maybe she was doing two or three. At most. Ours was not a typical campaign. We fought hard. And we played hard. Especially on primary days, when we played pickup games.
The tradition started in Iowa on January 3, 2008. It had been Obama’s idea. A bunch of people had come in for the caucus, and the senator suggested that since we couldn’t campaign on voting day—it was against the rules for a candidate to show up at a precinct—we should get a game together.
We did, playing with staffers, Secret Service, friends who flew in from Chicago, and lo and behold, we won Iowa.
The day of the New Hampshire primary, we didn’t organize a game, and we lost. From then on, every election day in every state, we played basketball. It was a bit eerie. When we skipped Nevada, we lost there, too. The candidate and the team grew very superstitious. “Primary day? We’re playing.” End of debate.
As much as I loved hoops, Marvin hated it. But we were often short a player, so he’d have to lace up. The same way you have to play golf with your boss even if you’d rather not.
One day in Milwaukee, the candidate was speaking at a high school. He was dribbling a ball offstage. We’d played earlier in the day, and the competitive energy of the court was still alive. I said to Obama, “You know that’s a girl’s ball you’re dribbling, right?” And he said, “Yeah, I know.” Then he tossed the ball to Marvin and said, “Hey, maybe this will help your game.”
It was meant in fun, but, ruffled, Marvin strutted over to the senator.
“With all due respect, I will take you to the hoop. I will beat you,” he said. “Reggie might be able to take me one-on-one, but sir, there is no way you could beat me.”
Obama pushed back, calling Marvin out on missing multiple crypts when we played on Super Tuesday. I felt like I was back in school, watching my teammates go at it on the playground.
“At least I didn’t get my shot blocked by a fourteen-year-old boy,” Marvin cracked.
“He was fifteen,” Obama snapped back without hesitation.
Just as the candidate was about to open his mouth again and permanently shut Marvin down, the announcement came over the loudspeakers, “And now, here he is, the next President of the United States, let’s welcome Senator Barack Obama!”
The candidate was mid-sentence in his response to Marvin as the noise of the crowd hooting and applauding swept over us, and without missing a beat Senator Obama took the stage.
Later, he said to me that all he could think about during the speech was how fired up he was at Marvin thinking he could beat him in basketball. I could only laugh.
The series of games on primary days took place just about two years after I had moved into my crummy apartment on Capitol Hill. The senator and I had come a long way since our chilly beginnings. We’d gotten to know each other beyond boss and assistant. By then, there was trust, even friendship. Basketball provided something additional, something that went beyond the campaign. For two years he had observed my work ethic. He’d seen me own my mistakes and learn from them. On the court, however, he saw my desire to win. He also saw my love of the game, my commitment to it, which mirrored his own.
This new bond was never more tested than when we joined forces to coach Sasha’s team of nine- and ten-year-old girls on how to pick and roll (well, to be honest, we were happy if they just set the pick).
The official coach of Sasha’s team was Lisa Horowitz, a researcher from NIH and the mom of one of the players. She was a very congenial coach, but although she was a former college athlete in two other sports, her previous basketball experience went all the way back to high school varsity. The girls were in fourth grade, nine years old, and had some basic skills, but needed a little more structured guidance. Sometimes they were uncertain where to pass the ball or when to shoot. They needed to learn some tried-and-true plays.
The president would go to the games, watching with a running commentary to Michelle: “They should be playing a zone,” or “They need to run a play on offense.” After listening to him grumble about the situation, Michelle finally said, “Why don’t you teach them how to play basketball?”
“Fine,” he said. Next thing I knew, we were coaching girls’ basketball.
When we met the girls on the court, I realized that as talented and smart as we thought we were about basketball, and life in general, teaching fourth graders the art of hoops was like herding cats; correction—herding giggling cats.
Like the President, I was used to sharing the court with players who loved the game and played with skill. These nine-year-olds would throw the ball over their teammate’s head, directly out of bounds, and then just laugh about it. It was tough to convince them there wasn’t anything funny about turnovers or air balling a shot seven feet from the basket.
In these circumstances the powers of the President’s office were useless, but he had all the powers of an engaged and interested parent. He would see me getting frustrated and would interject himself, telling the girls firmly, “This is not a slumber party. You have to run hard, throw the ball hard, stand tall and be strong. You have to listen to your coach.”
During the basketball season, Obama and I were actually courtside for a few games, he as head coach, me as his assistant. Michelle would come to cheer on the team.
We came to see that while Sasha’s team might not love the mechanics of the game, like everyone else on the planet, they hated losing.
One afternoon we played the best team in the league. It was a tight score, head-to-head the whole time. During the competition I couldn’t help myself and started shouting at the referee, trying to force a call to go our way. And then it happened: our team perfectly executed the pick-and-roll. We pulled out a 12–10 squeaker! Hysteria all around!
What coaching those girls, playing with constituents, and sharing the court with Obama revealed to me was that nothing connects people like athletics. Being on the same team wipes away all pretense. It gets to what’s real, real fast. You feel what it is like to be a part of a bigger organism. You invest in other people. You work hard. You net measurable gains. Sports accomplishes all of this, whether you are tossing a ball in the backyard, swishing three-pointers in the league, or clapping like a maniac for a group of little girls as they race down the court.
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DRESS THE PART
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I began my stint as bodyman dressing in a half-dozen wrinkle-free, wash-and-wear dress shirts from Jos. A. Bank. I paired them with cotton pants and a few business-standard neckties you’d forget two seconds after you saw them. My humdrum wardrobe was a source of great amusement for my friends, especially my old college roommate and close friend Chris Duhon, who was playi
ng point guard for the Chicago Bulls while I was learning the ropes on the Obama presidential campaign trail.
Whenever we landed in Chicago, Chris would let me crash at his place on North Kingsbury Street. His apartment became my second home. I did my laundry there. I was able to get my best meal of the week, prepared by Chris’s chef at the time, Bryan Stotland, or, as everyone called him, B-Money. I would joke with Chris that if it weren’t for B, he’d eat McDonald’s three meals a day; I know during the campaign I ate there at least five times a week, and in some of the towns, it was considered fine dining. At Chris’s apartment, I could spend time with friends who weren’t involved in the Democratic primary. It was my periodic oasis.
Every Sunday watching me hanging up and stretching out my wrinkle-free Jos. A. Bank button-downs, Chris would crack up.
“Shit, man, those are some wrinkled-ass shirts.”
I’d explain that when they air dried, the wrinkles would fall out. He’d just keep laughing. “Tell yourself whatever you have to, but that shit is wrinkled.”
I think he felt sorry for me. So, on my twenty-fifth birthday, on April 29, 2007, Chris had his tailor Jamal Ali make me a suit, along with some dress shirts and elegant matching ties. The clothes were a step up to say the least, immaculately fitted and undeniably high class. He’d given me a man-style makeover. And people noticed. Even the candidate.
“I like that tie,” Obama said the first time he saw me in my new suit. “I may want to wear that at some point.” (He ended up borrowing it for the YouTube debate three months later.)