Ronald Reagan wasn’t the first United States President to recognize the advantages of aligning himself with competitive athletics. That tradition dates back to at least 1892, when Benjamin Harrison became the first President to attend a major league baseball game.
William Taft expanded on the theme, delivering the ceremonial first pitch that launched the 1910 season. Later that day, the 300-pound President inadvertently birthed the seventh-inning stretch when he stood up to stretch his legs. Thinking he was leaving, fans stood up out of respect. Seeing that he wasn’t, they sat back down.
Dwight Eisenhower expanded the presidential sports horizon beyond the baseball diamond, golfing the 1950s away. John Kennedy was a touch football maniac. Richard Nixon had a bowling alley installed in the White House basement, and diagrammed a play for Washington Redskins coach George Allen, suitable for use in Super Bowl VII. Gerald Ford played a game resembling golf, only far more violent.
Jimmy Carter jogged.
They knew, as Reagan came to find out, that even the most superficial connection with sports gave them a healthy and vigorous sheen. It provided vitality by association. They also understood the diversionary benefits of shaking hands with Walter Johnson, knocking it around with Billy Casper and trying to embellish the home team’s Super Bowl game plan.
They helped pioneer the concept of the presidential sportsman. Reagan perfected it.
And he began long before he even considered a career in politics. Reagan, according to legend and lore, worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park in Tampico, Ill., as a young man. He may not have had David Hasselhoff’s supporting cast, but his rescue numbers were nothing to sneeze at.
Young Master Reagan, it says in the history books, saved 77 people from drowning.
His first paying job after graduating from Eureka College in 1932 was as a sportscaster with NBC working in Iowa. One of his assignments was to re-create Chicago Cubs games from a studio, using accounts of the game delivered by telegraph.
Telegraphy was nearly as unreliable as the Cubs’ starting pitching in those days. During one game late in the 1934 season the line went dead with Augie Galan at the plate in the ninth inning of a tie game between the Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals. Reagan had no choice but to launch into the kind of seat-of-the-pants, long-winded oration that every aspiring politician eventually must master.
“I had a ball on the way to the plate and there was no way to call it back,” he recalled later. “So, I had Augie foul this pitch down the left field line. He fouled for six minutes and forty-five seconds. My voice was riding in pitch and threatening to crack and then, bless him, (the telegrapher) started typing. I clutched at the slip. It said ‘Galan popped out on the first ball pitched.’ “
In 1937, while in California covering spring training, Reagan signed with Warner Brothers and began a career in acting another vocation that would serve him well in politics.
“One day at Catalina, Charlie Grimm, the Cubs’ manager bawled me out for not even showing up at the practice field,” Reagan said. “How could I tell him that somewhere within myself was the knowledge I would no longer be a sports announcer?”
Reagan’s first big role as an actor was playing ill-fated Notre Dame football star George Gipp in the 1940 classic, Knute Rockne, All-American.
Gipp did for Reagan what Augie Galan never could, spring-boarding the young actor to fame and prominence. Reagan even appropriated Gipp’s nickname. Half a century after release of the movie, Reagan was still being referred to as The Gipper.
Less celebrated was Reagan’s role as pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander in the 1952 movie, The Winning Team. The studio described it as the story of a man who, “through determination and the love of a good woman, overcame alcoholism, illness and misfortune.”
Forty years later, of course, that would be the perfect career synopsis for half the members of Congress. In the innocent 50s, it earned Reagan accolades for his athletic prowess. Several major leaguers had cameos in the film, and all praised Reagan for his ability to pass himself off as a ballplayer.
In time, Reagan left acting for politics, was elected governor of California, and later President. Here is where he hit his stride as American’s First Fan.
Reagan liked to surround himself with champions. He invited scores of newly minted championship teams to the White House Rose Garden.
Invariably they showed up with one of their own uniforms, bearing No. 1 and the name “Gipper” on the back.
He also popularized the congratulatory telephone call to the winning locker room. When Baltimore beat Philadelphia to win the 1983 World Series, Reagan called the triumphant (and lubricated) Orioles in their clubhouse.
The phone was passed around until it came to catcher Rick Dempsey, apparently several bubbles deep into his celebration.
“Mr. President,” Dempsey said, “you tell those Russians we’re having a great time over here playing baseball.”
Five years later, the Berlin Wall fell. Coincidence? Or just another example of life imitating baseball? In 1984, Reagan addressed the opening ceremonies at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
In 1988 he came full circle. On Sept. 30, he threw out not one but two ceremonial first pitches before a Cubs-Pittsburgh Pirates game. He broadcast an inning and a half, then left after three innings.
“You know,” he told announcer Harry Caray, “in a few months I’m going to be out of work and I thought I might as well audition.”
He never did return to broadcasting. But he finished his second term as President without incident.
His retirement was marred almost immediately by the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, which detracted from his quality of life and contributed to his death Saturday at age 93.
Looking back over Reagan’s life as a presidential fan, and a sportsman in the truest horse-riding, wood-chopping sense of the word, Rick Dempsey’s sentiment resonates as powerfully now as it did then.
Mr. President, you tell those people where you are that we’re having a lot of fun down here playing baseball.Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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