<SNIP>
Let's consider the evidence. According to news accounts and biographies, Bush doesn't much like to lose--hates it passionately, in fact. Here's a portrait by journalist Gail Sheehy of the president as a young man:
When Barbara Bush took her 13-year-old son and his best friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf at her Houston club, George would start cursing if he didn't tee off well. His mother would tell him to quit it. By the third or fourth hole he would be yelling "Fuck this" until he had ensured that his mother would send him to the car.
Sheehy continues: "Even if
loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him." Or, as Doug Hannah, a tennis partner of Bush during the 1970s, succinctly told U.S. News and World Report, "The game wasn't over until he was ahead."
Other sports stories tend to support this view. At Andover, Bush was enthusiastic enough about basketball to get yanked off the court on one occasion when frustration with a referee's call prompted him to hurl a ball at an opposing player. At Yale, one of the young Bush's more competitive moments while playing rugby was immortalized in a photo that made it into the Yale yearbook. The caption read: "George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying right hook to opposing ball carrier." (See the photo here.) Even victory didn't always dampen his ardor. After a Yale win over Princeton in football, Bush got in trouble for helping to destroy the goal posts at Princeton's stadium. Not really post-Wimbledon-handshake material.
<SNIP>
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=frank110104
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
