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As Easter continued on the White House lawn this morning—and back to the dude-what-about-female-athletes beat—I was heartened to read this from Lynn Sweet’s pool report on the basketball station of the White House Easter Egg Roll:
At one of the baskets, the president is shaking hands with the girls from Woodson, when he spots number 50. “Didn’t I just see a story about you in the newspaper?” Obama says to Johnson.
“Johnson” is Jenice Johnson, a 6-foot-6 18-year-old female hoops phenom, profiled in the Washington Post this March. And later:
Obama tells a youngster he wants to “see you shoot a little game.” Tells another “he’s got good form.” Encourages a kid who misses to “keep on going till you make it.”
One small boy got special attention from the president. Obama lifted up the youngster, extending his arms to lift him high enough so that the boy dunked the ball in the basket.
Obama, concerned that no girls were lining up to shoot, asked, “where are the ladies?” That brought some young girls up. He told one, “you gonna be a star some day.”
Cute! For all the attention the New York Times Magazine lavished on little Allonzo Trier (also check out Jason Zengerle’s great TNR profile of Lance Stephenson and the NYC child hoops industry), it’s nice to see the president shower some encouragement on ladies that can handle the rock.
*Post title cribbed from Ryan Lizza's great campaign postmortem, in which the president talks hoops, and flashes a little of that famous ego.