DON McDERMOTT MORE COLUMNS Barack Obama Advertisement

For the first time in United States history, an African American basketball player was the No. 1 draft choice for more than 63 million voters in the 2008 presidential election.

Barack Obama, who played high school basketball and occasionally mixed it up on the court during the seemingly endless campaign, will be the 44th president of the United States.

We know Barack can go left, but many people will wonder how strong he will be going down the center and occasionally, from the right.

So why is his victory on the sports page today?

Figure it out. Politics is America's toughest and sometimes meanest indoor sport. It's Rollerball with self-serving people blocking progress ... . It's Mixed Martial Arts with nasty comments, false accusations. It's beanball baseball ... spikes flying high into an infielder protecting against a steal ... It's a forearm shiver that even Jack Tatum would appreciate...

So Obama's victory belongs here. And besides, it's my 71st birthday today (and you thought John McCain was old...). Which means that I was born in the 20th Century, so I can base the following commentary on experience, revelations and observations.

Tuesday, when Obama -- an African American -- was elected the 44th president of the United States, I realized, and even commented to some friends, "Now ... I have seen it all."

World War II and the Korean conflict had become subjects of historical perspective when Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961. Yet to come: Vietnam, Grenada, the deaths of 283 American servicemen in Beirut, the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001 ... Iraq and Afghanistan (where I lost Mikey Murdock, my 22-year-old grandson, to the Taliban insurgents) and threats from Iran, Russia and other nations which mean the U.S. harm.

We have seen ... Man on the moon (an Ohioan, Neil Armstrong walked the walk) ... Flights to (and maybe even past) the final frontier of space (Star Trek lives) ... television (Ruffy Silverstein, the wrestler ... Huntley-Brinkley ... Walter Cronkite ... Laugh-In ... Hootenanny ... Jerry Springer ... Desperate Housewives) . ... the Internet (with its mindless and tasteless bloggers) ... iPods (yes, even I have one) ... electronic publishing. (I started doing this gig in the early 1960s using a 1926 Underwood typewriter ...

And, in sports ... Jackie Robinson ... Satchel Paige ... Don Newcombe ... Marion Motley ... Night Train Lane ... Gale Sayers ... Walter Payton ... Bill Russell ... Wilt Chamberlain ... Frank Robinson ...Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) ... Joe Frazier ... Sugar Ray Robinson ... Ernie Banks ... Oscar Robertson ... Julius Erving ... and Althea Gibson (this tennis great gave me a recipe for shrimp creole, while I was interviewing her in 1960).

That all of these above mentioned people were African Americans didn't matter to me then, and it's exciting to me now that I was able to either write about them or got to see them compete, either live or on television. The 1950s and 1960s were exciting times in sports, but dangerous in so many other avenues of life.

Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a civil rights leader in the tradition of Gandhi in the late 1950s and for a decade, this minister was the leader of a non-violent movement designed to improve an individual's civil rights.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was:

* Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), which offered individuals equal protection of the laws;

* Mississippi Burning. Three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi;

* On July 2, 1964, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964;

* On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcom X, a black activist who did not totally subscribe to non-violent action, was assassinated;

* On March 7, 1965, violence erupted on the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama.

* In March 1965, LBJ proposed the voting rights act, which was signed into law in August 1965.

* Race-driven riots raged across the land almost continously from 1965 through 1967. Who could forget Watts in 1965 or Detroit in 1967. Cities burned.

* On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. But the movement he and other African-American activists started was able to survive. The idea of creating equality in all areas of American life was becoming a political-, social- and cultural-driven idea.

Barack Obama is a child of the 1960s. Now he gets to compete on the biggest stage in the world -- as president of the United States and as the presumed leader of the free world. Let's see if the young left-hander can hit the 3-pointer in the clutch.