Voila_Capture690So, our basketball-playing President was a Sixers fan.

Speaking to a group at Magic Johnson’s house as part of a fundraising tour in LA, Barack Obama, randomly, admitted that, at least at one time, he was a Sixers fan.

From Wall Street Market Watch:

On a fundraising tour out West, President Barack Obama on Monday stopped by the house of basketball great Earvin “Magic” Johnson. According to a pool report, Obama revealed that he was being tailed on the trip by New Yorker editor David Remnick, who asked the president about the significance of meeting Johnson.

“First of all, understand that I was a 76ers fan,” Obama said, to boos from the audience.

Huh.

Obama has always marketed himself as a Bulls fan and we’ve never heard anything from him about the Sixers. I imagine that he and Biden would’ve attended a game at some point if he was actively together building with Sam Hinkie.

Steve Goldstein of WSJ has a theory about Obama’s shifting allegiance:

A hypothesis: The past tense used Monday suggests a few things — for instance, that he no longer is a fan of the team. The fact that he was relaying the anecdote about being a Sixers fan in the context of talking about Magic suggests that the president was a fan back when the two teams battled in the early 1980s for the NBA title. One could surmise that Obama was a fan back when Julius Erving wore the red, white and blue of Philadelphia, and then went all red soon after Michael Jordan arrived in the Windy City in 1984, about the same time the future president arrived in Chicago.

If true, that’s a violation. I’d say someone needs to blow the whistle on Obama’s faux fandom… but nowadays that sort of thing will get you thrown in a cold, dark jail cell without legal representation for 2-3 years. So, with that in mind, thanks for once being a fan of the Sixers, Mr. President?

Devote Republican Spencer Hawes, however, doesn’t share that sentiment: