Tuesday afternoon at the White House, the Last American President Barack Obama personally awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, to three legends of the sporting world and also Frank Gehry, the architect whose designs were not good enough for the Brooklyn Nets.
The NBA’s all-time leading scorer, an activist, a pretty-good writer and a prominent public Muslim, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is, at 7’3″, the all-time tallest Medal of Freedom recipient. Obama talked about Kareem’s extraordinary life, wherein he broke the NCAA game, dominated the NBA year after year, and spent his whole life pissing off white America by gently speaking personal truth to whoever might listen.
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While receiving the award, Abdul-Jabbar did a fun little skit with Obama about how tall he is. It was cute, but Bill Russell did the same thing in 2011, which, upon rewatching, is a little absurd, considering Kareem is six inches taller. Hopefully, someday Chancellor Obama, once his 20-year reign leading the country begins after the “Madness of 2018,” will get to do this same bit while giving the medal to a man who is half a foot taller than Kareem, and so on, and so forth.
A genuinely great NBA player whose name is synonymous worldwide with “excellence,” Michael Jordan is probably the first Medal of Freedom recipient to be mildly annoyed that he wasn’t the tallest person on the dais. Obama kind of spent the whole ceremony busting Jordan’s balls, mentioning Space Jam twice and invoking his second life as a distinctive crying internet head. And you know the President was tempted to really roast the shit out of MJ’s suit, which was blatantly Red, White, and Blue and featured a crosshatch pattern on the coat—more “tasteful used car salesman” than “prominent symbol for Western freedom.”
But, hey, he is still fucking Michael Jordan, so kudos to him. Watching him and Obama have a psychic battle for status was kind of amazing. MJ was clearly standing there, thinking about how he would destroy Obama off the dribble, while Obama was just, “Dude, I’m the most powerful person in the world for another two months, you are in this gilded room through the kindness of my charity.”
Vin Scully is probably the only sports journalist or broadcaster who deserves this medal, and he got it. You might recall him announcing Dodgers games for 66 years without a color man, calling the action and telling fun stories for three hours a night, every night during the summer. Obama joked that he thought about asking Scully to announce the other recipients as they received their medals, but thought it would be inappropriate to “make him sing for his supper like that.” Of course, Vin wouldn’t have minded—singing for his supper was how he got through the Depression. Beautiful pipes on that fella.
