Obama Sucks at Golf, and That's a Good Thing

While watching the Shell Houston Open this weekend, an ad for the World Golf Hall of Fame caught my eye (I can’t find any video of it on the web unfortunately). It starts with Arnold Palmer talking about the fact that he’s had the pleasure of playing golf with quite a few Presidents. Then the ad shows clips of some past Presidents actually playing golf -- Ike, George H.W. Bush and Clinton. Then Arnie drops the punchline, that all Presidents have something in common when it comes to their golf games: mulligans. “How are you going to tell the leader of the free world that he can’t take a mulligan?” Arnie says, or something to that effect.

Seeing the shots of various POTUSes with clubs in hand got me to thinking about the fact that over the course of the 20th century, golf somehow became the quintessential Presidential sport, which led me to think about our new President and his relationship to the game.

Despite the appearance in the late ‘90s of a certain international phenomenon of African American, Native American and Chinese descent, golf retains its image in this country of a leisure pursuit for the wealthiest and most privileged. The fact that a person of color absolutely has ruled the sport for over a decade now certainly has challenged that prevalent image, but not nearly, say, in the way that the Williams’ sisters did the country club veneer of tennis.

The reason for that is simple. Though its cultural history may hearken to exclusive clubs and blue-blood pedigrees, tennis is at its most basic a truly populist game. All you need is rackets, balls and a court. Halfway decent rackets come pretty cheap these days, balls even cheaper, and courts are everywhere. When I lived in Fort Greene in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, I used to frequent the tennis courts at Fort Greene Park, just over the hill from the famed Marcy projects. All races, all classes, all walks of life battled it out on those courts. This was a daily urban melting pot of vast diversity.

Golf, of course, is a more complicated endeavor than tennis no matter how you ... ah, slice it. The start-up costs are high, and while there are lots of public courses, they’re not usually within walking distance of your average urban abode. Plus, as every duffer knows, for the most part the nicest courses remain the purview of the people who can afford to belong to the fancy clubs that own them and pay the extravagant greens fees to play on them regularly.

We can pretend that Tiger Woods has changed all of that if we want, but he hasn’t, and we all know it. More people of different circumstances are involved with the game today because of Tiger -- that is inarguable. But despite the best efforts of the PGA and the USGA to bring golf to people of all backgrounds and means, it’s doubtful that golf is destined to become a hobby of regular folks in the same way that skiing isn’t either. Both sports presume a certain amount of disposable income and travel time that make them largely inaccessible to the vast majority of us.

Which brings me back to Presidents and golf. The sports our Presidents play serve as powerful symbols of who they are as men in relation to ourselves. And as far as I can remember, the only President in my lifetime who wasn’t a prominent golfer was Jimmy Carter, and that certainly wasn’t a question of class alienation. Hell, Carter was a native Georgian and his great-grandfather was a general in the Confederacy. It wasn’t like he didn’t grow up around rich white men chasing the little white ball. No, if Carter didn’t golf, it wasn’t because he was beneath the game. Carter is quite a high-minded individual. The game, I’m sure, was beneath him.

Other than Carter, however, for decades now, images of Presidents golfing have served as a sort of visual shorthand to the public mind that here are very powerful men at play on the lush, pampered playgrounds of the rich and powerful. For some reason, I think of Clinton with Vernon Jordan in a golf cart, each with a fat stogie in his mouth. Golf itself always seems like an exclusive club in these images, and our Presidents senior members in very good standing.

And yet here we are at a historical moment at which we are more irate with that particular “club” than we have been in some time. The people who belong to that club have brought us to the brink of ruin, and we all seem maybe two or three more bailout payments from forming CEO lynch mobs. Members of the club are disavowing their membership, while non-members are ready to burn it to the ground.

Not surprisingly we’ve elected as our President a man whose relationship to “the club” seems infinitely more like that of your average rank-and-file American than it does Kennebunkport’s golfing cowboys of yore.

Obama does golf, it turns out, something that one might not have suspected of him. His golf game drew quite a bit of attention over his most recent Christmas vacation, his first golf outing as President-elect. He played a few rounds in Hawaii, and the press took note with the scrutiny it generally brings now to every move he makes. Butch Harmon dissected Obama’s swing. Golf.com posted five pictures of him on the course and analyzed each one, because, as they put it, “nothing ... reveals the soul as ruthlessly and efficiently as how one plays the old Scottish game.”

Their conclusion? Obama sucks at the old Scottish game. The overall take on Obama and golf is that he doesn’t play very often, and when he does, he manages to get by on his natural athletic abilities, which allow him to stop just shy of making a complete fool of himself.

He wore cargo shorts. He put a lot of body English on his mostly terrible putts and did a lot of laughing at his own incompetence. No cigars were in evidence. In short, he looked like the great mass of duffers you’d see on your average public course on a crowded Saturday, only less fat, and less drunk, and more surrounded by people with earpieces and guns.

I don’t know, but something tells me he’s never going to play that noblesse oblige round with Arnold Palmer. There’s just no getting around it -- golf is not this President’s game and it never will be. The sports associated with the White House today are basketball and, increasingly, bowling. At this juncture in history, the symbolism could not be more appropriate, and as much as I love golf, I have to say that right now Obama’s taste in sports, as with just about everything else to do with his public image, seems to me to be pitch-perfect.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.