This is Gerald Ford’s time of year--football season in a nonelection year, when he can concentrate on the games. He knows that the University of Michigan, his beloved alma mater, is six and three and that the Wolverines beat the Spartans 34-31. He’s led a long life; he’s 92 now. He survived Squeaky Fromme, football without a helmet, and assorted other stray hits--political and athletic. I went to see him in his office in Rancho Mirage, in the California desert. I like sports--I make my living writing for Sports Illustrated--and I came to the thirty-eighth president of the United States curious to learn this: Late in his fourth quarter, which games lingered most vividly in his mind: the ones he played with his fellow pols or his fellow ballers?Football was his best sport. He was a bench player on two undefeated Michigan football teams and the MVP of a terrible one. Golf was his worst. He’s still at it, though, playing a quiet six holes from time to time, in a cart. A minor stroke at the 2000 Republican National Convention seems not to have slowed him down mentally. And, still, he’s an athlete. He swims most every day, his slappy crawl showing more resolve than strength, his Secret Service detail doubling as his lifeguards. The boys all speak football, too. In his college days, Ford played in two celebrity football games: the East- West Shrine Game in San Francisco and the Chicago Tribune All-Star Charity Game, in which college stars played the Chicago Bears in front of over 75,000 people at Soldier Field. It is true that Ford is the only U.S. president never elected to office, but it is also true that he’s the only president to make a national all-star team by fan vote. Andrew Jackson was a horseman, Teddy Roosevelt a boxer, William Howard Taft a wrestler. The list of presidential athletes is long. But Ford stands out. Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian, calls him “our great athlete president.” Yet he’s remembered as a klutz. “It’s sad and ironic that, because of Chevy Chase, people see Ford as bumbling, falling down stairs, or bumping his head on Air Force One,” Brinkley told me. But, if Chase’s bit bothered Ford, he never let on. Ford had two offers, from the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions, to play professional football when he graduated from Michigan in 1935. Bush 41 was a nice fielder for Yale in the postwar 1940s, but was anybody looking to sign a skinny 23-year-old first baseman? Please. Ford could have gone league. “I wish I could’ve played one year for either the Lions or the Packers,” Ford told me. He reminds you--maybe you didn’t know--that, back in 1935, the United States was in the throes of a depression. Ford turned down his pro offers for Yale, where he earned a regular paycheck as an assistant varsity football coach and a freshman boxing coach and where he went to law school. “I had to make a tough decision,” he said. “I think I made the right one, but I’ve wondered if one year of playing pro ball might have been a good thing--good for the resume.” William Proxmire, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin who invented the “Golden Fleece” awards, was a boxer and a football player at Yale, class of 1938. Ford coached him in both sports. Proxmire is 90 now, suffering from Alzheimer’s. His wife, Ellen, told me that her husband and Ford never viewed each other as enemies, even though their parties stood for wholly different things. “Bill and Jerry were always fond of each other,” she said. “They were on the Hill in a time when things were much less partisan, much less vicious. To people like Bill and Jerry, sports were a metaphor for politics. You needed viable competition in your life.” Ford told me that the man who gave him his single greatest piece of advice was his Michigan coach, Harry Kipke: Work the job. That is, keep your focus on the one critical thing you must do. In college, that meant stopping a particular defensive lineman. As president, it meant pardoning Richard Nixon. “I wanted to get that mess off my desk,” he said. “The only way to do it was to grant the pardon.” Ford, who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, said the roots of his racial tolerance came from the playing fields of his boyhood. His high school was integrated--it was 12 percent black, Ford said--and he played football with a black teammate named Silas “Siki” McGee. “Siki and I were very good friends,” Ford said. “He was sort of a jokester.” They walked home together after practice. You can see them standing together in Ford’s high school yearbook. McGee went on to become a longshoreman in San Francisco, and, when Ford was president, he invited McGee and the rest of his high school team--winners of the state title in 1930--to visit him in the White House for a reunion. Speaking of his Grand Rapids South team, Ford, in his stolid way, said, “I learned that African Americans and whites can get along and work together. I saw the benefits of it.” His reunions are all but over now. Siki McGee is dead. So, too, are Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan-- and all of Ford’s old coaches. His New York Times obituary has been ready for decades. When it runs, it will be all about the pardon and Israel-Egypt peace negotiations, and maybe the WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons and the oddness of being the only American president who was never elected. If he could write it himself, though, I bet he’d get into his sporting life pretty high up. I struggled to figure out how to word the question I had come to ask, and then finally, as he was tiring, I did: When you lie awake at night, Mr. President, waiting for sleep to come, which name is more likely to run through your mind: Siki McGee or Anwar Sadat? His answer was immediate. “Probably Sadat, “ he said. “I have wonderful memories of Siki, but that was a long time ago. Sadat was a great world leader.” I had actually thought he might say Siki--he talked about him so easily and happily. Still, in a way no box score could ever capture, over 75,000 fans at Soldier Field helped get Sadat and Ford to the same table.