Sure, Mitt Romney does not play tennis, but he certainly looks the part. Plus, his wife had considerable results on the country club circuit. Still, the Romneys have two courts on their New Hampshire estate, plus another home in tennis-happy La Jolla. Early pictures of the Romney clan show his sister toting a tennis racket. But recently it’s been Michelle Obama (a Washington Kastle fan) and the president who have drawn attention in terms of tennis.
When young Barry Obama (as he was then known) was a student in 1979 at Honolulu’s elite Punahou School, he was a tennis player of sorts. In his biography of the president, “Barack Obama,” David Maraniss writes:
[Obama] was a bit chubby, as obnoxious and any other boy [that] age, but also “a very decent tennis player” who wore the proper white tennis shorts and collared shirts and white tennis shoes to meet the dress code. …. Several friends who played with him or watched him later said tennis might have been his best game; he was not fast, but he had quick reflexes and sharp instincts, anticipating where the ball would be. His early tennis-playing years became notable, however, not for his skill on the courts but for a single disturbing memory of a racially tinged encounter with Punahou’s tennis pro, who, as Obama later described it, “told me during a tournament that I shouldn’t touch the schedule of matches pinned up the bulletin board because my color might rub off.
Maraniss spoke with Kristin Caldwell, who is now a businesswoman in Santa Clara, who was there that day and recalled the incident in more detail:
We were standing on the lanai, looking at the draw sheets that had just been posted … Everyone does the same thing. You look for your name, then run your fingers across the draw to see whom you might play as you advance to later rounds of the tournament. It’s a hypothetical; we all know you’re not supposed to think beyond the next match, but everybody does it. … Barry was doing what we all did, completely normal behavior. But [the pro] came over and told him not to touch the draw sheet because he would get it dirty. He singled him out, and the implication was absolutely clear: Barry’s hands weren’t grubby, the message was that his darker skin would somehow soil the draw. Those of us standing there were agape, horrified, disbelieving.
As Caldwell remembered it, she and Barry were 11 or 12, an age when they were not to talk back to elders. Her shock, she said, left her mute, but:
Barry handled it beautifully, with just the right amount of cold burn without becoming disrespectful. “What do you mean by that” he asked firmly. I could see in his eyes that [the pro] had gone too far – his remark was uncalled for; he had crossed a line – and there were witnesses. He fumbled in his response, ultimately claiming that he had only been joking. But we all knew it had been no joke, and it wasn’t even remotely funny.
“So much for tennis,” Maraniss writes. “Basketball soon was Barry’s sport.”
