Home Court. Sixty thousand square feet, and inside it is a full N-B-A regulation basketball court. Free. Open to the public, seven days a week, noon till eight.
There is a reason a basketball court got built into a presidential campus, and it is one of the great documented superstitions in American politics.
January, two thousand eight. Obama had just won the Iowa caucuses, and on the morning of that vote he'd gone and played a pickup game with friends and staff, the way he always did. New Hampshire came next. On the morning of the New Hampshire primary, he didn't play.
He lost New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton.
And he decided — jokingly, but not entirely jokingly — that the missed game was why. From that point on, he played basketball on the morning of every single election day. Primaries. General elections. Midterms. Both of his own presidential elections, and the ones after he'd left office. In twenty twelve he played the morning game with Scottie Pippen, which is the kind of thi
ng you can do when you're from Chicago and also the president.
He never skipped again. Not once, in eight years.
And these were not gentle games. In twenty ten he took an elbow to the mouth during a pickup game with friends and staff. Twelve stitches in his lip, put in by the White House doctor, on a Friday afternoon. The man who threw the elbow was a member of his own administration. The White
