President Trump has had a long association with sports, starting as a baseball player in his youth, and more recently as an avid golfer with something to say, often incendiary, about athletes and leagues.
Though President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has not worn his sports allegiances on his sleeve, as many politicians have, playing fields have often intersected with his life, going back to his childhood, when sports provided a universal language of communication while he managed a stutter. He spent his vice presidency under a noted sports fan, President Barack Obama, who this summer counseled N.B.A. players who boycotted playoff games in a protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake.
You see these two things happening in his life at the same time, Evan Osnos, the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, said, referring to Bidens high school days. One, hes breaking the back of the stutter, and two, hes finding his place on the football field. Those converged to give him this altered sense of himself, and thats really the beginning of what was at that point almost a ludicrously ambitious notion of what he might be able to do in life.
Still, even as athletes such as LeBron James and Draymond Green have celebrated his victory on Twitter, Biden, unlike Trump, has shown no taste for wading into the politics of sports.
Trump consistently used athletes as foils in appealing to his core supporters, blasting kneeling N.F.L. players, preemptively disinviting N.B.A. champions to the White House and falsely accusing the NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace of fashioning the apparent noose found in his garage.read more
Sports Helped Shape Biden. But Expect a Quieter Fan in the White House.
