Everyone could learn a little from Gerald Ford
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By Bob Ford
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Posted on Wed, Jan. 03, 2007
(MCT)
Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States, never got to play in the Rose Bowl, but if there were any regrets from a life that had very few, he probably would have wished to see his beloved Michigan Wolverines take the field on Monday for one more big game.
Ford, who died last week at the age of 93, will be remembered most as a longtime respected member of the U.S. House of Representatives and as the brief, "accidental" president who pardoned his predecessor, but he was also among the greatest athletes to ever work in the Oval Office.
The lesson of his life is that we may always be in better hands when led by those who took their own lessons from organized sports and competition. You can have your career politicians, your lawyers and your movie stars. Give me a football center every time.
"Ford was a team player, always a team player," said John Sayle Watterson, whose recent book, "The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency,'' ranks the presidents by their athletic prowess.
Watterson, a professor at James Madison University, put Ford fourth on the all-time list, behind George H.W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower, but has a small regret about that placement.
"He probably should have been third," Watterson said. "It was very close."
The Bowl Championship Series has similar ranking problems, so that's a somewhat fitting epitaph for Michigan's biggest fan, a man known to lock himself into his Palm Springs, Calif., den with the phone off the hook when the Wolverines were playing.
Although he was spoofed later in life as a klutz in a series of Chevy Chase skits on Saturday Night Live - something the president didn't much like - Ford was anything but. He was a good golfer, competitive tennis player and competent skier. His real athletic claim to fame, however, came when he was a much younger man, and few presidents, or anyone else, can match it.
Ford starred on a state championship football team at Grand Rapids South High School and earned a partial scholarship to Michigan. The rest of the tuition he made by waiting tables and washing dishes.
As a sophomore and junior, Ford played second string behind the best center in the country - and Michigan won back-to-back national championships. He got his chance to start as a senior in 1934 and was the team's most valuable player, all-Big Ten and selected for both the East-West Shrine Game and the College All-Star Game at Soldier Field against the Chicago Bears.
The Packers and Lions offered him contracts at the elegant sum of $200 per game, but he thought becoming a lawyer was a better option. Ford coached boxing and was the assistant coach for the Yale football team - future senators Robert Taft Jr. and William Proxmire were among his players - before being admitted to law school.
"Thanks to my football experience, I know the value of team play," Ford said once. "It is, I believe, one of the most important lessons to be learned and practiced in our lives."
There isn't much that is glamorous about playing center, but it is vital, and the same goes for pounding the back corridors of Congress to make a piece of legislation work. It might be simply irony, or it could be the nature of his personality, but Ford's politics always tended toward the center, too. He played well with others.
Watterson's list and his book are interesting looks at the way our presidents, and the country, have been shaped by sports.
Bush the elder, captain of a Yale baseball team that went to the College World Series, is a reasonable first choice. Kennedy, a great natural athlete and part of an undefeated swim team at Harvard, fits in, too. Eisenhower played semipro baseball before acquitting himself well as a freshman halfback at West Point. A knee injury ended that career, but he became an avid golfer later in life.
Behind Ford, Watterson has Harvard boxing champ Teddy Roosevelt and outdoorsman Ronald Reagan tied for fifth, followed by Jimmy Carter, who jogged and played tennis, but who also loved a good game of pickup hoops.
The findings are subjective, of course, and perhaps the greatest presidential athlete is still to come. If Bill Bradley, Jim Bunning or Jack Kemp had made his way to the White House, there would have to be a new list.
"I think at some point, we'll have a president who really made his name first as an athlete," Watterson said. "In the past, military generals have ridden into office, but that doesn't happen too much any more. Maybe athletes will be the new counterpart to that."
The country could do worse, and often has.
It could do worse than to find another Gerald Ford, a decent guy who accepted being smacked around for the good of the team and who never fudged his golf score.
Keep the other guys. I'll vote for the football center and take my chances.
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© 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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