Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon played football. George H.W. Bush played baseball. His son was a cheerleader.

Bill Clinton played the sax. Jack Kennedy played touch football and sailed. Harry Truman played poker. Jimmy Carter farmed peanuts.

If only Bill Bradley, ex-Knick and Basketball Hall of Famer, had won the Presidency, the sides would be a little more even on the President-as-athlete scale.

Barack Obama will change that a little.

He played basketball and the man can still shoot.

Shooters never die, or at let’s hope not.

Only that’s not really the athletic story that runs through our next President. Apparently, he was quite good on the court, but the athlete he most resembles is not that of his younger self. The athlete he most resembles remains one of the best ever to play the game, even if the comparison is all about how that particular athlete handled himself beyond baseball’s white lines.

When Branch Rickey decided he was going to break baseball’s color barrier and found his man in Jackie Robinson, he saw in Robinson exactly the kind of strength few even recognize as such.

Because if Robinson was to endure racial slurs, as he would and did, he had to be strong enough to not respond. If he was to be out and about, his behavior had to be exemplary, perfect, or he would risk the major league dreams of all those in line behind him; and, for that matter, Rickey’s of being the historical integrating force that was his destiny.

In all things away from the plate, where Robinson only had to hit about .300, he had to hit a thousand. There was no other way.

Whether you voted for Barack Obama or not, give him credit for batting somewhere near a thousand. Because there could be no other way.

Could he be where he finds himself if he’d stayed at Occidental College? Probably not, yet he worked and studied his way into the Ivy League, first at Columbia and then, later, after community organizing, to Harvard Law, where he wasn’t simply a member of the law review, but its president.

So it cost him an elitist tag here and there.

But what if he’d gone to a different university every year of his collegiate life? He would have been pained as undisciplined. And what if he’d finished about five spots from dead last in his collegiate class? He would have been painted as lazy.

What if he’d even rolled his eyes once at John McCain in one of those debates. Or blinked so hard, incredulous his opponent would dare give an answer he didn’t see coming.