Rising Star Page 15

  As school ended, Barry wrote another flirtatious message in Kelli Furushima’s 1978 yearbook. Tom Topolinski wistfully recalled that Kelli was so popular “there was a line for her” and that Barry “wasn’t very forward” with girls. But to Kelli there had been no change in Barry’s demeanor. “He was very funny. He was really warm, friendly,” she recalled. “He just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time.”

  Over the summer, Barry worked at a newly opened Baskin-Robbins at 1618 South King Street, less than two blocks from his grandparents’ apartment. Owners Clyde and Teri Higa remember him clearly as “a very good-natured young man, quick with a smile.” He worked alongside Punahou classmate Kent Torrey, whose dad had just taught Obama’s junior-year U.S. history course; rising junior Annette Yee worked there as well. Clyde Higa said Barry was “the tallest employee we ever had” and thus “seemed to have great difficulty bending over and reaching into the ice cream cabinets to scoop the ice cream.” Obama also remembered it was “tough work” behind the counter, and he did not like the mandatory uniform and the accompanying paper cap. He did have an easier time than tiny Annette Yee, who never forgot falling “head first into the near tub” and how Barry “hauled me out.” Teri Higa remembered seeing Barry “gazing out the front store window at times” as if “wishing he was at the beach instead of working.” One customer who recognized Barry behind the counter was Frank Marshall Davis’s dear friend Dawna Weatherly-Williams. “He was a wonderful kid” and even behind the counter, he always “had this beautiful grin on his face.”

  By the beginning of Barry’s senior year, Punahou’s tuition and fees stood at $2,050. For a senior, one semester of economics was required; Barry and Mark “Hebs” Hebing both had it with instructor Stuart Gross. But Barry also enrolled in Punahou’s most demanding senior year elective, Law and Society, which was taught by Honolulu attorney Ian Mattoch at 7:15 A.M., three mornings a week. Punahou’s catalog said the course would “enable students to conceptualize the legal framework of his society, to analyze the terms of the social contract between the individual and the society. Emphasis on the study of the various rights afforded the individual in the Bill of Rights and Constitution and consideration of the bases and characteristics of the executive, judicial, and legislative processes.” Mattoch, a member of Punahou’s class of 1961, had graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1965 and Northwestern University’s law school in 1968. He had begun offering the course in 1970, and as its syllabus readily revealed, the content was “about a sophomore in college level because Punahou students are eminently capable of doing work at that level,” Mattoch explained years later. A 1976 article in Punahou’s student newspaper had noted that there were also “optional ‘law labs’ held on Saturday mornings at Mr. Mattoch’s law office” in addition to field trips to courtroom trials. Mattoch said his goal was for students “to understand that law is a product of men and institutions.”

  Punahou alumni who went on to successful careers in the law testified that Mattoch’s class had been directly helpful to them during law school. Mattoch began by asking “What is law?” with readings ranging from Roscoe Pound to Sigmund Freud. Then he moved to “the organizational basis of the legal system,” with students expected to master the first hundred-plus pages of a text by a well-known University of Wisconsin law professor. A midterm exam might have as many as seven questions; optional “extra reading reports” on books such as Benjamin Cardozo’s The Nature of the Judicial Process could earn students additional credit. “How a bill becomes a law” and “basic techniques of legal research” were followed by a study of notable Supreme Court constitutional decisions ranging from Griswold v. Connecticut’s 1965 recognition of a right to privacy to criminal procedure rulings. Students then submitted reports comparing the Warren Court of the 1960s to the Burger Court of the 1970s. The final exam lasted ninety minutes and featured more than two dozen questions.

  Mattoch remembered Obama as “relatively shy and nonassertive” in class, but he showed up early each morning and did first-rate work. His Punahou transcript indicates an A- in Law and Society, perhaps the single best grade he earned during his high school years. Barry also took a creative writing class that included poetry that fall of his senior year, and in mid-December, the student newspaper published a poem he had written entitled “The Old Man”:

  I saw an old, forgotten man

  On an old, forgotten road

  Staggering and numb under the glare of the

  Spotlight. His eyes, so dull and grey,

  Slide from right, to left, to right

  Looking for his life, misplaced in a

  Shallow, muddy gutter long ago

  I am found instead.

  Seeking a hiding place, the night seals us together.

  A transient spark lights his face, and in my honor,

  He pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,

  And walks a straight line along the crooked world.

  While it is hard to imagine seventeen-year-old Barry being inspired to take up poetry by the example of grandfather Stan, his regular visits to see Frank Marshall Davis, a well-published poet of considerable repute, and by 1978 a man of seventy-two, are a more plausible inspiration, even if Davis’s personal history would prevent his role from ever being fully acknowledged.33

  In December 1978, Barry finally played his way onto the twelve-man roster of Punahou’s top AA varsity basketball team. The coach was thirty-two-year-old Chris McLachlin, a 1964 Punahou graduate with a master’s degree from Stanford who was a devout student of the highly structured style of play that had been successfully pioneered by UNC Chapel Hill’s Dean Smith and especially UCLA’s John Wooden, with whom McLachlin had personally conferred several years earlier. McLachlin’s 1975 team had won the Hawaii state championship in his first year as head coach, and Punahou’s student newspaper commended the “high quality, hustle-oriented basketball which has become a McLachlin and Punahou trademark.” The 1979 team featured seven returning seniors, including starting guards Larry Tavares and Darryl Gabriel and forward Boy Eldredge (Pal’s nephew), plus star junior forward John Kamana and six-foot-five-inch sophomore Dan Hale at center. Tom Topolinski was often the first man off the bench. The four new members also included Barry’s best friend Greg Orme and junior guard Alan Lum.

  Mike Ramos had left for college on the mainland, but his younger brother Greg was an AA team manager. Mike’s departure led to both Greg and his best friend Keith Peterson spending more time with Barry, and Greg immediately saw that just because Barry was taking a class like Ian Mattoch’s, it did not mean the Choom Gang had gone on hiatus or lost its connection to Gay Ray. “When Mike went to college, the first thing Barack did was take me up to the mountains to try to get me stoned, because Mike protected me,” Greg confessed years later. But from December through mid-March, basketball dominated their lives on a daily basis.

  A Punahou student newspaper profile of “Coach Mac” said that McLachlin possessed a “great ability to get along with students” and quoted him as explaining that “my obligation is not only to teach the skills and strategy, but also to build character and to develop a sense of team and individual pride.” Practices were six days a week, two hours each time, but, unlike the A team’s, they took place in the late afternoon rather than at dawn. Games ran just thirty-two minutes: four eight-minute quarters. The veteran players understood and respected McLachlin. He was “a very tough coach who knew a lot about the game and made sure that we knew about it as well,” Topo explained. McLachlin told the student newspaper: “I’d like to think of myself as a teacher first and a coach second. A ball team is like class after school. I try to teach things like punctuality, industriousness and honesty,” as well as relaxation techniques, “since relaxation is very important in situations when the pressure’s on, like at the free throw line.”

  As Topo put it, Punahou’s 1979 team was “just loaded with talent,” and while McLachlin acknowledged that Punahou�
�s reserves “could have started for any other team in the state,” he also “did not have an everybody plays approach,” Dan Hale remembered. Like so many others, McLachlin had seen Barry dribbling his basketball and shooting baskets whenever possible, and he respected Obama’s “real love and passion for the game.” Ironically, though, Obama’s many hours of pickup game experience on local courts worked against him with McLachlin. As Alan Lum described it, Barry was “a very creative player,” but “his game didn’t really fit our system. . . . We ran a structured offense. We were very disciplined.” Obama would later assert, “I had an overtly black game,” but that misstated the core of basketball’s deep appeal to him, which he expressed far better when he compared his favorite sport to his favorite music, jazz. “There’s an aspect of improvisation within a discipline that I find very, very powerful.”

  Team play got under way with an invitational tournament victory on Maui followed by five straight regular-season wins on Oahu before a one-point loss to University High School. Two victories preceded a defeat by rival Iolani School, then two more wins were followed by a second one-point loss to University High.

  Throughout that schedule of games, Barry Obama got little playing time; some days only seven of McLachlin’s twelve players saw game action. At one point during those weeks, Obama, along with Alan Lum and Darin Maurer, made an appointment with McLachlin to request that they receive more playing time. McLachlin remembers the meeting as “nonconfrontational and respectful.” Barry “basically represented the group” and “spoke for them. . . . It was ‘Coach, what can we do to garner more playing time?’” Years later, though, Obama recounted a far angrier scene. “I got into a fight with the guy, and he benched me for three or four games. Just wouldn’t play me. And I was furious.” Lum had been surprised at how direct Barry was with Coach Mac, and McLachlin acknowledged that Barry was clearly “disgruntled.” But Obama was convinced the coach was treating him unfairly. “The truth was, on the playground, I could beat a lot of the guys who were starters,” he later claimed. To team manager Greg Ramos, that was just a “total rationalization. . . . My perception at the time was that people were where they should have been, and Barack always thought he should have played more than he did.” Even with that tension, Barry’s teammates all remember his usual sunny self. “Very happy, very outgoing,” “a very, very pleasant person to be around,” and “always” with “that smile on his face.”

  Punahou was in second place in the AA standings prior to an early March league playoff in which the team defeated University High by one point in overtime before a crowd of more than twenty-two hundred. The student newspaper reported that Obama “gave the team a lift as a second half sub, scoring six points on offense and hustling on defense,” but the box score in the Honolulu Advertiser had Barry missing three free throws. That win gave Punahou top seed in the upcoming three-round Hawaii state tournament. A blowout 77–29 win in their first game included three points by Obama; he played briefly in the second and did not score, but the game still ended in victory for Punahou. The ultimate championship game, against Moanalua on Saturday evening, March 10, 1979, was preceded by a midday team meal at Dan Hale’s home. McLachlin’s wife Beth made “super burgers” that supposedly aided players’ ability to jump.

  At Blaisdell Arena in downtown Honolulu, an astonishing crowd of more than sixty-four hundred awaited the contest. “The players majestically strode into the arena as their little admirers flocked around them as if they were blue-clad gods,” Punahou’s student newspaper claimed in its next issue. “They willingly signed autographs and received handshakes from parents and well-wishers,” including of course Stan Dunham. Punahou jumped out to an early lead of 18–4, then ran the score to 32–7. As Alan Lum remembered, “the game was over in the first half” and Coach Mac began substituting liberally. Barry Obama sank one field goal, missed his sole free throw, and finished with two points, but was ecstatic at the 60–28 victory.

  “These are the best bunch of guys. We made so many sacrifices to get here,” he told Punahou’s student reporter. McLachlin was equally happy, telling the Advertiser that “we played as near-perfect a game as ever,” including how “the subs came in and played as great a team defense as the regulars.” Within the world of Punahou, winning the state AA championship was just “huge,” as Topo remembered. On the bus ride back to the school, Coach Mac told his team that they had just played “as good a game as I’ve ever seen a high school basketball team play. You played a perfect game, and that included everyone who stepped on that court. This is the finest effort by twelve young men that I have ever seen.”

  To Barry Obama, the team’s championship was such an enormous achievement he wrote a tribute to their season for Punahou’s 1979 yearbook, a brief essay that somehow remained utterly undiscovered even a decade after dozens of journalists had traipsed their ways through all manner of various real and imagined details of Obama’s early life. Titled “Winner,” the piece is in no way remarkable, but it most certainly captures how central that team experience was for seventeen-year-old Barry:

  A lot of words are thrown around in basketball: unity, character, determination, and sportsmanship. Well, this is a team that lived up to these clichés, both on and off the court. When the season started, we all felt the electricity of something special; through sacrifice, trust, hard work, and a lot of help from coaches and managers, a group of diverse individuals joined together to truly become a team. At times we’ve had problems playing together, but we’ve never had any difficulty getting along; I have never seen a closer bunch of guys. Each player carried his weight and supported the others when they were down; if Gabe wasn’t hot, then John would do it; if Danny’s dunks didn’t beat you, E’s defense would. Some people think that it’s the win/loss record that is important; others think that it’s how you play the game that is important; no matter how you think of it, though, this team was a winner in every sense of the word.

  Obama’s memory of his role in the team’s season would grow rosy with age. “My senior year, when we won the state championship, there were a couple games where I think I was a difference maker.” He said his grandfather would recount how impressive a broadcaster had made Barry’s one successful jump shot in that final game sound, but he also acknowledged how those four months had taught him “a lot about discipline, about handling disappointment, being team oriented, and realizing not everything is about you.”34

  The overall picture Obama would usually paint of his final year at Punahou bore no resemblance to that long-undiscovered essay in his senior yearbook or to the A- he earned in Ian Mattoch’s exceptionally demanding early-morning Law and Society class. “I’m playing basketball, I’m getting high, and I’m not taking my work seriously at all,” he recalled on one occasion. “We’d have basketball practice get over about six, maybe six-thirty, and we’d go get a six-pack . . . and go out to the park and just screw around. . . . Then you’d be waking up in the morning and you hadn’t done the reading.” In some tellings, Obama admitted to taking his schoolwork more seriously his senior year—“Man, I should try to go to college, so let me focus a bit more”—but then his senior year was the only one with afternoon basketball practice every day. In another version, he has his mother, ostensibly back in Honolulu early in his senior year, upbraiding him about his grades and his disinterest in applying to colleges, calling him a loafer and voicing her disappointment in him. Presented with that account, one interviewer responded that it made Barry sound like a hood, a hoodlum, to which Obama responded, “That’s basically it. In fact I think my mother referred to me as such at one point.” On another occasion, Obama went even further, claiming, “I think I was a thug for a big part of my growing up.”

  The notion that anyone at Punahou or among his friends and other acquaintances ever thought of Barry Obama as a “thug” or hoodlum could not be further from the way he is remembered. Scores of them did see him as “a pretty good jock,” as Obama also called himself; tiny Annette Yee
from their summer at Baskin-Robbins thought of him as “a basketball jock”; their mutual friend and ice cream coworker Kent Torrey likewise recalled Barry as “one of the biggest jocks on campus.” But his intense love of basketball, as his yearbook tribute vividly captured, carried no negativity, and anyone who experienced teenage bullying from one or more of Barry’s closest friends without exception recalls Obama as never manifesting any bad attitudes.

  By the onset of Barry’s senior year, Greg Orme was unquestionably his closest friend. Many days after basketball practice, they did not “get a six-pack . . . and go out to the park and just screw around,” but instead walked down to 1617 South Beretania. “It was Tut and Gramps in this small apartment and us two six-footers,” Orme recalled. “We’d raid the refrigerator and then go to his room. He’d put on his earphones. He liked to listen to Stevie Wonder and jazz, like Grover Washington. So he’d have the earphones on and read his books.” Tom Topo came over “once or twice a month.” He remembered that visitors could barely “set foot in his room—he lived off the floor—everything was on the floor. . . . He always had a Stevie Wonder record on the phonograph,” like Songs in the Key of Life, and sometimes “like a week-old pizza under his bed . . . he was a messy person.”

  But the Choom Gang was no less active than the year before. Indeed, come January 1979, Punahou’s student newspaper, in a humorous survey of different student “species,” profiled one it called “Cravius Cannabis.” Recognizable from “their bloodshot eyes . . . Cannabi migrate in vans to ‘country,’ where they indulge in enlightening tribal rituals. They have developed specialized language to deal with their common interests: agriculture and commerce.” Years later, on the one occasion when anyone was able to ask Madelyn Dunham about Barry’s high school drug use, she admitted, “I had a few hints, and I think I talked to him a little about it. But it didn’t seem overwhelming or prolonged.” Obama would later make light of chooming, readily admitting, “I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes I smoked” all through those years.