Obama mystery at Occidental

LOS ANGELES – On his historic run to the White House, Barack Obama spent two years at Occidental College, the basketball-loving future president spending countless hours honing his game on the Eagle Rock campus north of downtown L.A. when he wasn’t studying.

A self-described gym rat who played basketball regularly on the campaign trail – he even played for two hours on Election Day last week in Chicago – Obama is remembered fondly by people who once challenged him on the Occidental courts.

What his fellow ballers don’t seem to recall, however, is whether Obama played for the Tigers in a more formal capacity, as a former coach insists and the media have reported, and no tangible proof seems to exist that he did.

Nothing has been found, school spokesman Jim Tranquada says.

Basketball coach Brian Newhall, who enrolled at Occidental the same year as Obama, says the president-elect does not appear in the JV team photo from the 1979-80 season, when Newhall and the future leader of the free world were freshmen.

Newhall was the starting point guard on that team. He says he clearly remembers Obama from pickup games – “I can say that I guarded Barry many a time in open gym,” notes the coach – but whether the left-leaning left-hander from Hawaii was part of a team that won the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship, Newhall can’t say for sure.

Nor can Galen Morton, who also played on the team. Morton can tell you that Obama eschewed the knee-length basketball socks that were popular at the time but can’t tell you for certain that Obama was a teammate.

Mike Zinn says he played.

“I coached there, and he definitely played for me,” says Zinn, a former Occidental athletic director and basketball coach.

Obama, he says, was his starting small forward in the 1979-80 season.

“He was really athletic, ran good, jumped good,” says Zinn, who left coaching about 20 years ago and is a partner in an Orange County sales agency. “He wasn’t a great outside shooter. In basketball terminology, he was kind of a slasher.”

And a natural leader?

“No, he was not,” Zinn says. “He was very quiet. … He wasn’t a leader or a captain-type kid. Whether he would have grown into that, I don’t know.”

He probably had an inkling.

In his 1995 autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote that he played basketball “with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent,” but he makes no mention of playing at Occidental.

Zinn, though, is adamant.

In 1980, Zinn was elevated to varsity coach and says he met with Obama “to tell him that I was interested in having him continue to play. I anticipated that he was going to contribute somewhere in the program throughout his career, if not as a starter than as a reserve.”

But when Obama returned for his sophomore year, Zinn says, he told the coach he no longer would be playing basketball because he wanted to concentrate on academics. Before his junior year, Obama transferred to Columbia.

“You could tell he was a really intelligent guy, a pretty deep thinker,” Zinn says. “Freshmen are goof-offs, in a lot of cases, but he was not like that.

“He was very serious.”