Team play got under way with an invitational tournament victory on Maui followed by five straight regular-season wins on Oahu before a one-point loss to University High School. Two victories preceded a defeat by rival Iolani School, then two more wins were followed by a second one-point loss to University High.
Throughout that schedule of games, Barry Obama got little playing time; some days only seven of McLachlin’s twelve players saw game action. At one point during those weeks, Obama, along with Alan Lum and Darin Maurer, made an appointment with McLachlin to request that they receive more playing time. McLachlin remembers the meeting as “nonconfrontational and respectful.” Barry “basically represented the group” and “spoke for them…. It was ‘Coach, what can we do to garner more playing time?’ ” Years later, though, Obama recounted a far angrier scene. “I got into a fight with the guy, and he benched me for three or four games. Just wouldn’t play me. And I was furious.” Lum had been surprised at how direct Barry was with Coach Mac, and McLachlin acknowledged that Barry was clearly “disgruntled.” But Obama was convinced the coach was treating him unfairly. “The truth was, on the playground, I could beat a lot of the guys who were starters,” he later claimed. To team manager Greg Ramos, that was just a “total rationalization…. My perception at the time was that people were where they should have been, and Barack always thought he should have played more than he did.” Even with that tension, Barry’s teammates all remember his usual sunny self. “Very happy, very outgoing,” “a very, very pleasant person to be around,” and “always” with “that smile on his face.”
Punahou was in second place in the AA standings prior to an early March league playoff in which the team defeated University High by one point in overtime before a crowd of more than twenty-two hundred. The student newspaper reported that Obama “gave the team a lift as a second half sub, scoring six points on offense and hustling on defense,” but the box score in the Honolulu Advertiser had Barry missing three free throws. That win gave Punahou top seed in the upcoming three-round Hawaii state tournament. A blowout 77–29 win in their first game included three points by Obama; he played briefly in the second and did not score, but the game still ended in victory for Punahou. The ultimate championship game, against Moanalua on Saturday evening, March 10, 1979, was preceded by a midday team meal at Dan Hale’s home. McLachlin’s wife Beth made “super burgers” that supposedly aided players’ ability to jump.
At Blaisdell Arena in downtown Honolulu, an astonishing crowd of more than sixty-four hundred awaited the contest. “The players majestically strode into the arena as their little admirers flocked around them as if they were blue-clad gods,” Punahou’s student newspaper claimed in its next issue. “They willingly signed autographs and received handshakes from parents and well-wishers,” including of course Stan Dunham. Punahou jumped out to an early lead of 18–4, then ran the score to 32–7. As Alan Lum remembered, “the game was over in the first half” and Coach Mac began substituting liberally. Barry Obama sank one field goal, missed his sole free throw, and finished with two points, but was ecstatic at the 60–28 victory.
“These are the best bunch of guys. We made so many sacrifices to get here,” he told Punahou’s student reporter. McLachlin was equally happy, telling the Advertiser that “we played as near-perfect a game as ever,” including how “the subs came in and played as great a team defense as the regulars.” Within the world of Punahou, winning the state AA championship was just “huge,” as Topo remembered. On the bus ride back to the school, Coach Mac told his team that they had just played “as good a game as I’ve ever seen a high school basketball team play. You played a perfect game, and that included everyone who stepped on that court. This is the finest effort by twelve young men that I have ever seen.”
To Barry Obama, the team’s championship was such an enormous achievement he wrote a tribute to their season for Punahou’s 1979 yearbook, a brief essay that somehow remained utterly undiscovered even a decade after dozens of journalists had traipsed their ways through all manner of various real and imagined details of Obama’s early life. Titled “Winner,” the piece is in no way remarkable, but it most certainly captures how central that team experience was for seventeen-year-old Barry:
A lot of words are thrown around in basketball: unity, character, determination, and sportsmanship. Well, this is a team that lived up to these clichés, both on and off the court. When the season started, we all felt the electricity of something special; through sacrifice, trust, hard work, and a lot of help from coaches and managers, a group of diverse individuals joined together to truly become a team. At times we’ve had problems playing together, but we’ve never had any difficulty getting along; I have never seen a closer bunch of guys. Each player carried his weight and supported the others when they were down; if Gabe wasn’t hot, then John would do it; if Danny’s dunks didn’t beat you, E’s defense would. Some people think that it’s the win/loss record that is important; others think that it’s how you play the game that is important; no matter how you think of it, though, this team was a winner in every sense of the word.
Obama’s memory of his role in the team’s season would grow rosy with age. “My senior year, when we won the state championship, there were a couple games where I think I was a difference maker.” He said his grandfather would recount how impressive a broadcaster had made Barry’s one successful jump shot in that final game sound, but he also acknowledged how those four months had taught him “a lot about discipline, about handling disappointment, being team oriented, and realizing not everything is about you.”34
The overall picture Obama would usually paint of his final year at Punahou bore no resemblance to that long-undiscovered essay in his senior yearbook or to the A- he earned in Ian Mattoch’s exceptionally demanding early-morning Law and Society class. “I’m playing basketball, I’m getting high, and I’m not taking my work seriously at all,” he recalled on one occasion. “We’d have basketball practice get over about six, maybe six-thirty, and we’d go get a six-pack … and go out to the park and just screw around…. Then you’d be waking up in the morning and you hadn’t done the reading.” In some tellings, Obama admitted to taking his schoolwork more seriously his senior year—“Man, I should try to go to college, so let me focus a bit more”—but then his senior year was the only one with afternoon basketball practice every day. In another version, he has his mother, ostensibly back in Honolulu early in his senior year, upbraiding him about his grades and his disinterest in applying to colleges, calling him a loafer and voicing her disappointment in him. Presented with that account, one interviewer responded that it made Barry sound like a hood, a hoodlum, to which Obama responded, “That’s basically it. In fact I think my mother referred to me as such at one point.” On another occasion, Obama went even further, claiming, “I think I was a thug for a big part of my growing up.”
The notion that anyone at Punahou or among his friends and other acquaintances ever thought of Barry Obama as a “thug” or hoodlum could not be further from the way he is remembered. Scores of them did see him as “a pretty good jock,” as Obama also called himself; tiny Annette Yee from their summer at Baskin-Robbins thought of him as “a basketball jock”; their mutual friend and ice cream coworker Kent Torrey likewise recalled Barry as “one of the biggest jocks on campus.” But his intense love of basketball, as his yearbook tribute vividly captured, carried no negativity, and anyone who experienced teenage bullying from one or more of Barry’s closest friends without exception recalls Obama as never manifesting any bad attitudes.
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