Bill Clinton cheered on the Arkansas Razorbacks in 1994 during their run to an NCAA championship. David Burnett/Getty Images
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President Bush made the sports pages several times this week, once for calling the U.S. Olympic snowboarders "dudes and dudesses." That's nothing new for this sports-minded president, a former Texas Rangers owner who denounces steroids in State of the Union addresses and defends steroid cheat Rafael Palmiero with equal fervor. Still, W. isn't the first resident of the Oval Office to make an impact on the world of sports while in office. Here are some others:

1. Richard Nixon: He installed a bowling alley in the White House, but football was his real passion. Even Nixon-hater Hunter S. Thompson conceded that Nixon was a "damn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football." The former scrub lineman at Whittier (Calif.) College wasn't just an observer. Before Super Bowl VI, he called Dolphins coach Don Shula at 1:30 a.m. to suggest a down-and-in to receiver Paul Warfield. The pass, on the game's eighth play, fell incomplete and the Cowboys won easily, 24-3. (Playcalling wasn't Nixon's strength; a few weeks earlier he had encouraged Redskins coach George Allen to use a flanker reverse to Roy Jefferson that lost 13 yards.) He also liked college football. In those pre-BCS days, Nixon attended the late-season showdown between No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Arkansas in 1969 and unilaterally anointed Texas the national champions after a 15-14 victory. That infuriated No. 3 Penn State, which was also undefeated. "How could he know so much about college football," Penn State coach Joe Paterno later asked, "and so little about Watergate?"

2. Herbert Hoover: The only president with a sport named after him. Hoover took office with 210 too-soft pounds on his 5-11 frame, so White House physician Admiral Joel T. Boone invented a game that became known as Hoover-ball to downsize the presidential paunch. Hoover-ball was a mix between volleyball and tennis in which teams of two to four players tossed a six-pound medicine ball over a net. The president and administration officials played every morning on the South Lawn from 7 to 7:30 a.m. to earn the label of the "Medicine Ball Cabinet." Hoover lost 25 pounds and found a new passion: "Stopping a six-pound ball with steam back of it, returning it with similar steam, is not pink-tea stuff." A Hoover-ball national championship is still held every year in Hoover's hometown of West Branch, Iowa.

3. William Howard Taft: The portliest President (at about 330 pounds) probably could have used his own sport but instead started another tradition. Though Benjamin Harrison was the first President to attend a major league game in 1892, Taft went one better by throwing out the first pitch on Opening Day in 1910 for the Senators. Legend has it that he started another ritual the same day when he got up to stretch his legs in the seventh inning. Thinking that he was leaving, the fans stood up out of respect, thus giving rise to the seventh-inning stretch. (Alas, we can't pin the Wave on Taft.) As a sportsman, Taft preferred the more leisurely pursuits of fishing and golf. He even had his favorite fishing rod transformed into a driver.

4. Bill Clinton: The former Arkansas governor became the first President to attend the Final Four, when his beloved Razorbacks won the 1994 championship. He was so engrossed in the team that season that he landed on the cover of SI. Clinton was a regular on the Opening Day circuit and also hopped up to Baltimore to watch Cal Ripken Jr. break Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played. First Lady Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, threw out the first pitch at a Cubs game to cement her bona fides as a lifelong Cubbies booster, at least until she suddenly started sporting a Yankees hat while running for Senate in New York in 2000.

5. Dwight Eisenhower: The most avid golfing President has a tree named for him at Augusta National, the home of the Masters. Club member Eisenhower hit into the huge loblolly pine on number 17 so often that at a club's governors meeting in 1956 the sitting President lobbied for its removal. Club chairman Clifford Roberts promptly ruled Ike out of order and adjourned the meeting. (Take that, Martha Burk.) Ike irked Senators owner Clark Griffith in 1953 when he skipped Opening Day for a round of golf at Augusta. (The game was rained out and Eisenhower did throw out the first pitch the next day.) Eisenhower had also been a promising football player at West Point until he was trampled by Carlisle Indians running back Jim Thorpe and broke his leg.