Rick Telander, author and Sun-Times columnist described how Obama saw him in a crowd and called him out as the author of "the best book I've ever read about basketball." Telander wrote that he was "startled and embarrassed" but then realized that Obama found in the book the "historic essence of the game he loved.That I wrote about Brooklyn ballers in the 1970s meant nothing. Obama, of course, saw the universal in the specific."