Mario Cuomo was a vicious pick-up basketball player
Former New York governor Mario Cuomo died of natural causes on January 1, leaving a legacy as an icon of the Democratic Party and willing standard-bearer of many progressive causes. The remembrances have come early and often in the days since his death, with many highlighting his speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. It was in that moment that Cuomo, not yet two years into his tenure as governor, announced himself as a tough and not afraid to fight on the issues that mattered to him most.
It appears that Cuomo also brought those qualities to the basketball court. In an article for the New York Daily News, New York strategic consulting firm executive Charlie King remembers the intensity that Cuomo brought to a supposedly casual league after his time in office (via Deadspin):
The Mario Cuomo I knew best was not a soaring orator. He was an architect of gridlock who delighted in creating rules and then breaking them. He was ambitious and ruthless to the point of embarrassment. He was Mario Cuomo the basketball player.
I had the privilege (if you can call it that) of playing basketball with the governor every Saturday for the first eight years after he left Albany. There were three teams (red, white and blue), and we played two games each Saturday for eight seasons, six seasons a year, for 48 seasons over the eight years.
Of course, the teams were formed by the commissioner of the league, Gov. Mario Cuomo, and all talented players were, as he told us, distributed “fairly” among the three teams. (Really? In the 48 seasons, the governor’s team won 40 times, my team won three and the white team won five.) […]
On the court he was no orator, because he wore a mouthpiece. When there was a vigorously disputed call or foul, I have to admit pleasure at watching the greatest speaker of our time passionately defend his point unintelligibly until he remembered to take the mouthpiece out. […]
I had the honor (if you can call it that) of guarding the governor for eight years. Even in his 60s, his body was like a majestic oak tree. His style of play, however, was not majestic at all. He was grabby, pushy and intense.
Invariably, whenever you called a foul on him his eyes would grow wide with cherubic altar boy innocence that conveyed “who, me?” His look could be so convincing that even though you called the foul, you doubted yourself for an instant whether the gash on your arm was self-inflicted instead of caused by him.
King provides many details on his experience in Cuomo’s league, including the apparently self-appointed commissioner attempting to engineer unfair trades even if they involved dumping his own son for a better player. The overall picture is pretty hilarious — it looks as if Cuomo, public figure of supreme integrity, was an unscrupulous league organizer and participant who took any challenge to his authority as an act of aggression.
Of course, as we’ve learned from Kevin Durant and many others, an extreme competitive spirit does not preclude someone from being a perfectly nice guy. In fact, King ends the article by speaking to how much Cuomo meant to his life as a friend and confidant. It’s also not terribly difficult to imagine that a very successful politician would be especially concerned with winning at all costs. Cuomo was committed to achieving various ends, not necessarily the means to get there.
The great pleasure of King’s article, regardless of its consistency of character, is that it helps flesh out Cuomo as a man rather than as an avatar of a particular political perspective. It remains to be seen if anyone has a similar take on George Pataki.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
