Oba-ller

Jodi Kantor: If one were somehow to play a highlight reel of Mr. Obama's on-court exploits, it would start in Hawaii, with a pudgy junior high school student in short shorts and high socks who had a Julius Erving poster plastered on his bedroom wall.

It might include the time he and several Harvard Law School classmates played inmates at a Massachusetts prison; the students were terrified to win or lose, because the convicts lining the court had bet on both outcomes. ("I got two packs on you!" they called out.)

Cut to the future Mrs. Obama asking her brother to take her new boyfriend out on the court, to make sure he was not the type to hog the ball or call constant fouls. The reel might then show Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, playing with former NBA stars in a tournament fund-raiser for his Senate campaign, and at the family gatherings that always seem to end with everyone out by the hoop next to the garage.