Mr. Sportsknowitall, 11/9

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BY KEN HAMBLETON / Lincoln Journal Star

Dear Mr. Sportsknowitall:

Tell me about presidents and sports. P.D.

With President Obama you get a high school reserve player and a  college junior varsity basketball player and a pitiful bowler. George W. Bush was a college cheerleader and is an avid bicyclist. Bill Clinton was a jogger(?) and known for cheating at golf. He also played basketball and lacrosse in high school.   George H.W. Bush was a starting first baseman on the Yale baseball team that went to the College World Series.

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Jimmy Carter ran track and played baseball at Navy. One time when fishing, he said he was attacked by a wascally rabid rabbit. Gerald Ford was an All-America lineman at Michigan. Ronald Reagan played football at Eureka College and was a lifeguard. JFK played some touch football and had to swim a lot in the Navy. Dwight Eisenhower was a big-time college football player who hurt his knee tackling Jim Thorpe. He later was an avid golfer. Richard Nixon played some football in college and tried to send plays to George Allen when he was head coach at the NFL Washington franchise. He also was an avid bowler.

Warren Harding was good at golf and poker.

The least-athletic or nonathletic presidents were Martin Van Buren (unless you count drinking bourbon), John Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Harry Truman and William McKinley. Truman liked poker. James Garfield juggled clubs and Chester Arthur fished.

Woodrow Wilson played center field in college. Teddy Roosevelt was a big-game hunter, hiker, played tennis on the White House lawn, practiced judo and boxed. He helped get the NCAA going.

Ulysses S. Grant was a famous horseman. John Quincy Adams swam the Potomac River into his 60s and was the first president to put a pool table in the White House. But his dad, John Adams, hated sports, but was known, along with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, as an avid marbles player.

 William Taft, all 300 pounds of him, loved golf and baseball. He was the first president to throw out the opening pitch and it is said that, when uncomfortable at a game, he stood up, thus creating the seventh-inning stretch.

Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland loved to wrestle and fish. No word if they wrestled fish. 

Rutherford Hayes, Arthur and James Garfield played croquet. Millard Fillmore played in the bathtub, and William Henry Harrison and John Tyler apparently liked canoeing. James Monroe established bringing Latin American players to baseball. Zackary Taylor was a horseman but rode sidesaddle.

Washington was known as a wrestler, could throw silver dollars across the Potomac (expensive habit), was a horseman (who wasn’t in those days?) and loved to fish.  Andrew Jackson loved horse racing, and was known for being able to handle his fists.

Vote for Mr. Sportsknowitall at 473-7313 or khambleton@journalstar.com.