Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the choice for Republican vice presidential candidate, is known in Alaska for being a political outsider, a basketball hero and an intense leader.

She may be the first woman elected governor in Alaska and the youngest (elected at age 42), but there's more to her than that.

As National Public Radio said after her election in 2006, "She's also a moose-burger-eating, snow-mobile-riding maverick who's not afraid to take on fellow Republicans she disagrees with."

She was selected as the runner up in the 1984 Miss Alaska contest, but as her brother told author Kaylene Johnson in "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down," she was never the beauty pageant type.

"I remember asking Sarah why she would enter a beauty pageant when that seemed so prissy to the rest of us," Chuck Heath Jr. said. "She told me matter of factly, 'It's going to help pay my way through college.'"

It's a tossup in Alaska whether she is more well-known as governor or a state basketball hero. As Sarah Heath, the senior point guard and captain led the Wasilla High School Warriors to the state small-school basketball championship in 1982.

She earned the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" because of her intense play and both her critics and friends say that nickname still fits her today.

"The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah," pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign, told the Weekly Standard in 2007.

While not unusual in Alaska, Palin is sure to strike an intriguing figure when it comes to national politics. She hunts, ice fishes, rides snowmobiles, owns a float plane and says moose burgers are her favorite food.

The family was always hunting or fishing. Sarah shot her first rabbit at age 10 and in her teens hunted caribou with her father.

While after she graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Idaho in 1987 she worked as a TV reporter for Anchorage's NBC affiliate, KTUU-TV, she eventually left journalism to fish commercially with her husband, Todd, a native Yup'ik, and start a family.

In her high school yearbook, the future gubernatorial candidate quoted the Bible, signed the class page "Sarah Heath #22," and listed a demure ambition: to sit in a broadcast booth with Howard Cosell broadcasting basketball games played by her then-boyfriend, Todd Palin.

Bill McAllister, a political reporter for KTUU, told the University Of Idaho Alumni magazine that Alaskans generally love Palin.

"Alaskans perceive her as genuine, above board and truly interested in their welfare," McAllister said.

She's not afraid to be seen as an outsider, disagreeing with the state's Republican leadership before being elected. One of the first things she did upon being elected was to sell the former governor's personal jet on eBay.

"You get to start fresh, you get to start with ideals, and it's worth it," she told NPR in November 2006 of being an outsider going into the governor's office.

One of Palin's other traits is what her father described in Johnson's book as an unbending, unapologetic streak of stubbornness.

"The rest of the kids, I could force them to do something," Chuck Heath Sr. said. "But with Sarah, there was no way. From a young age she had a mind of her own. Once she made up her mind, she didn't change it."