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President Obama: “I Knew About Jeremy Lin … Before Everybody Else Did”

Yesterday, President Barack Obama talked to Bill Simmons for Simmons’ B.S. Report podcast (upwards of four years after originally planned). The two mainly talked sports, as one might expect, leading to Obama revealing that he has NBA League Pass on his iPad, he played HORSE with the UConn women’s team when they visited, and that he “did some coaching” of his daughter’s basketball team. Cute. Oh, and he mentioned watching SportsCenter, which made ESPN happy.

But what we’re really interested in is the part when Simmons brings up that point guard on the Knicks who played his college ball where Obama went to law school. And Obama wants you to know, he knew about that guy way before he was cool:

Obama: Jeremy is —

BS: Jeremy Lin.

Obama: — doing good. And I knew about Jeremy before you did, or everybody else did, because Arne Duncan, my Secretary of Education, was captain of the Harvard team. And so way back when, Arne and I were playing and he said, I’m telling you, we’ve got this terrific guard named Jeremy Lin at Harvard. And then one of my best friends, his son is a freshman at Harvard, and so when he went for a recruiting trip he saw Lin in action. So I’ve been on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon for a while.

Man, he laid the “I knew about him before you” stuff on pretty thick, didn’t he? So thick, in fact, that it didn’t take long for this to pop up…

And after seeing that, we really couldn’t resist… and speculate on what POTUS might reveal about himself next:

The Prezzy’s ’2 kool 4 skool,’ bb!

UPDATE: Wait: Obama also, when asked for his favorite Wire character, chose Omar. Soooooo lamestream. Safe. Politician answer. Thought ‘u were different’ :-(.

The Obama-Simmons shot is an official White House photo, by Pete Souza, via Grantland