HOW DONALD TRUMP BECAME THE GOLFER-IN-CHIEF

  Golf has been called many things – “an expensive way of playing marbles” (Chesterton), “an insult to lawns” (National Lampoon), “a plague invented by Calvinist Scots as a punishment for man’s sins” (James Barrett Reston) and Twain’s famous “good walk spoiled”. The late and very great Arnold Palmer, unexpectedly, thought it a possible vehicle for world peace. Golffor him was a universal language brimming with the forging of new friendships and with deep and ancient traditions of honour, respect and personal accountability. Eric Trump, the president’s son, thinks so, too. In a New York Times interview, he praised his father’s unusual capacity to make connections on a golf course, with Mar-a-Lago being the perfect venue for world diplomacy. “If he could do that with Putin,” he said, “if he could do that with some of these horrible actors around the world who only want to compromise us as a country, and if he can make friends and they can trust one another, he just did something that not many presidents have been able to do.” President Trump has already played a round with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe. (Abe presented Trump with a $3,755 gold driver when he became president.) Golf is long established in Japan and Abe’s grandfather played with Eisenhower. But China’s Xi-Jinping came and went without lifting a club. Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu pointedly counted himself out from golf during a press conference with Obama. Could you entice karate black belt and bare-chested horse rider Vladimir Putin into plaid pants and tassled shoes? Politicians can be wary of golf. “Photograph me on horseback? Yes,” wrote Teddy Roosevelt in 1908. “Tennis, no. And golf is fatal.” It’s the frivolousness of it, the look of a childish pastime played by posh boys who know nothing of the world. Roosevelt’s contrast with being on horseback is revealing. He might have thought golf not only insufficiently serious but also insufficiently masculine. The clothes work against you. George W Bush could look manly in jeans and a Stetson clearing wood on his ranch, but the famous clip of him exhorting the world to stand up to terrorism, then declaring “now watch this drive” before striding to the tee, did him a lot of harm. Michael Moore put it in Fahrenheit 9/11. Bush soon stopped playing golf, or at least being seen to do so, as he didn’t think it fitted with his role as commander-in-chief after the invasion of Iraq. Even Trump, named “golfer-in-chief” by Golf Digest, repeatedly castigated his predecessor for “playing more golf than Tiger Woods”. “I’m going to be working for you,” he told Virginians during the campaign. “I’m not going to have time to play golf.” (According to the New York Times, he has visited a golf course 19 times in the past 13 weeks, compared with Bush Jr’s and Obama’s zero and Clinton’s three over the same period of their presidencies; this is around double the rate of Obama’s tally of just over 300 rounds over two terms. Only one of Trump’s golf outings appears to have involved “international diplomacy”. It’s an ensnaring game. In China it’s been called “green opium”. Trump as president has a rhythm of life continuity with Trump as businessman: weekdays at the city office, weekends at Mar-a-Lago and his nearby Jim Fazio-designed course at West Palm Beach, one of the state’s best.) There is a term in golf known as “the clerical 12”. It refers to a handicap of above-average proficiency, not so high as to be risible, but not so low as to indicate too much time spent away from the flock. It is a handicap meant for public consumption. Most declared US presidential handicaps have been of the clerical kind – Reagan, Nixon and Ford, 12; George W, Clinton and Kennedy, 10. All but four US presidents since the beginning of the 20th century golfed. Woodrow Wilson played more than 1,000 rounds, playing almost every day, and even, like Kipling, in the snow, using balls painted black. The usual public explanation given for presidents taking to a golf course for numerous hours is their need for “relief from stress”. (This seems to me to be like betting on junk bonds, hang gliding or writing novels to relieve stress, though it is true there are those who take their golf easy.) Trump or his son, or White House press secretary Sean Spicer, are innovators in their focus on golf as an arena for international diplomacy. Golf has certainly been associated with deal-making. It originally spread globally through Scots soldiers wishing to play their favourite game but, once established, the golf club tended to comprise the aspiring or established local elites. You could get on in business by joining. They are like Masonic lodges in their concentration of economic and political power. There are several in England that are simply extensions of public school, where men can gather without women, eat the same food and call each other by the same nicknames as they did at school, while at the same time settling the interest rate or the privatisation of the rail service. In Japan, golf became a ritualistic expression of corporate loyalty. ***prbxselfnetwork***..