Obama drops basketball and shows his drive on the golf course

[Richard Pascoe]

The President cannot keep off the greens – is this a political move or has the game got him in its grip?

Barack Obama has just completed the 24th round of golf he has played since he became President of the United States. In just nine months in office, he has undertaken as many rounds of thrashing and cursing as his predecessor managed in two years and nine months. And George W Bush fancied himself on the fairway.
Golf Digest magazine has already placed Obama eighth in the list of all-time First Golfers, overtaking Ronald Reagan, who was known for practising putting in the aisle of Airforce One. Which isn’t bad, given that Obama had rarely applied nine iron to ball before swearing his oath of office. Now, seemingly, he cannot keep off the course, where he generally plays his vice-president for a dollar a hole. Joe Biden, though, is a formidable opponent, playing off a handicap of 12. The President says he pops his winnings into a White House envelope, a little savings scheme for his daughters’ education fund. So far he has put $2 in the envelope.
To be American President, it helps to believe in God and golf. Of the last 18 incumbents of the Oval Office, only Jimmy Carter abstained from the game. John F Kennedy, Obama’s hero, is said by Golf Digest to be the best of the lot, a man with a perfect swing. President Eisenhower, who railed throughout his life against the unfairness of JFK’s natural gifts, played as many as 100 rounds a year, without ever coming close to matching his successor’s abilities. George Bush senior was a very handy player, although he admitted his game suffered horribly when he ceased to be president. As soon as he retired, he says, people he always used to thrash miraculously started to beat him. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was a perfectionist on the course, renowned for hitting several balls from the same position and only counting the one he hit best on his scorecard.
Much was made during the election campaign of Obama’s prowess at basketball, the game favoured by African Americans. He was frequently photographed emerging from a hoop session, looking trim and ready, a visual metaphor of his ability to mix it in the toughest places. Golf was hardly mentioned. Now ensconced in the White House, he appears keen to reassure the rest of the country that there is nothing too edgy or urban about him, he is a regular guy, an aficionado of the game of middle-class middle America.
But golf is a dangerous pastime. With its endless insistence on self-improvement, it can quickly turn to obsession. Plus, a President has to be careful: too much golf and he might face accusations of loafing. JFK took great pains to ensure he was never photographed on the course for that reason, while George W Bush gave up in 2003 when the apparently endless imbroglio in Iraq made it seem not wholly appropriate for the President to spend three hours a day fretting about his handicap. He was said to be forever haunted by that sequence in Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 when he was seen turning away from a discussion about the war and telling reporters to “just watch this drive”.

Maybe that is why our prime ministers have never taken to the game. There were many handicaps to the regimes of Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, but none of them came on the golf course. The nearest we saw Tony Blair to the putting green was as a passenger in George Bush’s golf cart. And despite hailing from the land of the game’s origins, as far as we know Gordon Brown has never knowingly picked up a club. Though obviously during his time at Number Ten he has announced several initiatives suggesting he is about to.
In fact, the closest we got to a golfing premier was Denis Thatcher, who firmly believed the best place to judge a man’s character was out on the course. Which may be the real reason our leaders have so assiduously avoided the game.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/6447678/Obama-drops-basketball...