Tom Landry and Don Shula hardly needed much help. Between them, the two coaches would win 617 games in the NFL. And in 1972, they had led strong teams to Super Bowl VI. Still, a couple of presidents determined that neither man could capture their championship without their assistance.

So Lyndon Johnson, America's 36th president, telegrammed Tom Landry to wish luck to the Cowboys coach.

Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, couldn't stop there — even though, as the sitting president, Nixon had plenty of other pressing responsibilities.

The former reserve at Whittier College was a Redskins fan, and had even suggested a play to Washington coach George Allen, a reverse that had lost 13 yards in a playoff game against the Los Angeles Rams. Nixon also happened to be a part-time South Florida resident, so she called Shula's home at 1:30 a.m to suggest some strategy:

Direct quarterback Bob Griese to hit receiver Paul Warfield on a down-and-in pattern.

The pass went incomplete.

The Dolphins went down 24-3.

"Nixon once said that if he lost in politics, he would want to be a sportswriter," said John Sayle Watterson, author of The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the American Presidency. "Of course, he said it to a group of sportswriters."

In that case, you couldn't necessarily call it pandering.

It was probably heartfelt.

Many presidents, after all, have acted as if they'd rather be leading a team than the free world, and that may not change in 2009. Barack Obama and John McCain are avid sports fans. Viewers of Game 1 of the World Series heard each reading inspirational quotes about baseball, words originally uttered by former presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Special feature Sports and politics Presidential candidates take a break from campaigning to meet professional athletes.

Obama, a former reserve forward on a Hawaii state champion basketball team, held campaign events from sports bars where he watched the NCAA Tournament and he even participated in a workout with the North Carolina basketball team. He roots for Chicago teams, but prefers the White Sox to the Cubs, and has spoken of adding a rim and backboard to The White House. His athletic hero was Julius Erving and his brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, is the basketball coach at Oregon State.

McCain, in addition to holding season tickets to the Arizona's pro teams and selecting a "Hockey Mom" as his running mate, has taken a strong interest in sports-related issues throughout his long legislative career. As an Arizona senator and the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain has sponsored and supported bills designed to reform boxing, has taken on corruption at the International Olympic Committee, and spearheaded a bill to ban casino gambling on college sports. (The latter failed to win passage.) He also has pressured Major League Baseball to purge itself of performance-enhancing drugs, an approach that differs with that of Obama, who recently said on ESPN that he would prefer the sport police itself without Congressional intervention.

Stefanos Kouratzis / AFP - Getty Images Jimmy Carter is one of the few presidents that got involved in serious sports issues, having the U.S. boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

Sports owners give money to political candidates — more often Republicans than Democrats — with the hope that it will help them with antitrust and stadium financing issues, and help them avoid any additional regulation. Presidents have the power to set the agenda, and to veto Congressional bills.

When it's come to sports, however, presidents have more often played the role of fan, rather than policy maker.

"Sometimes, the controversies in sports are high-profile, and they can get into it, and they can say something or do something," Watterson said. "It becomes useful politically for them to do that. But there have been so few of those situations that have come up."

Watterson said that an interest in sports — either as observer or participant — has proven useful to presidents and presidential candidates in the sense that it has made them more "relatable to the public." He cites George H.W. Bush, who was a college baseball player, "but was looked down upon as a wimp as a vice president. He made an effort to portray himself as the athlete he was. He did all kinds of sports, very publicly, his first two years in office, until he had some physical problems. Here was someone trying to show himself as one of the guys."

Yet a sports obsession can also backfire, "if a president tries to make himself something that he isn't through sports."

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Watterson isn't sure if Nixon's football fetish backfired, but he does believe that tales of Bill Clinton's cheating on the golf course reinforced negative impressions of the 42nd president — impressions created in part by Clinton's cheating on his wife. Watterson also points to the curious case of Gerald Ford, caricatured as clumsy by comedian Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live. Ford had been an All-American center on the Michigan football team.

"Sports there took the form of people questioning whether he was smart enough or just a big dumb jock," Watterson said.

Other presidents might not have minded that characterization. It certainly wasn't the worst thing any of them would be called.

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