Embrace golf, banish the hypocrisy
I wish one of two things would happen — that the media would quit squawking about Donald Trump playing golf — that Donald Trump would quit playing golf.
Both pundits and Trump are giving golf a bad name. Golf is too valuable to be disrespected, which is exactly what’s happening now.
Take the latest episode, as reported by the New York Times. In February 2018, the president of the United States asked his ambassador to the United Kingdom to inquire into the possibility of bringing the British Open to Trump’s Scottish golf course at Turnberry.
The ambassador, the billionaire heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, was told to by a career State Department diplomat that the request would be ill-advised and unethical.
Robert Wood Johnson IV broached the subject but with some reluctance, apparently.
On Wednesday of last week, Johnson issued a statement that by skirting around Trump’s involvement more or less confirmed the Times story.
“I have followed the ethical rules and requirements of my office at all time,” said Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets football team.
Also on Wednesday, President Trump denied the report’s veracity. “No, I never spoke to Woody Johnson about that,” Trump told reporters.
The president then plugged Turnberry, which, at a cost of $60 million, has been part of the Trump business portfolio since 2014.
“Turnberry is a highly respected course, as you know, one of the best in the world,” the president said from a White House lectern.
The reaction was quick and sure. Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump referenced this “apparent corruption.” He tried to pin down an equivalent and came up with a scenario from the Obama years – a scenario that never happened, of course. To wit:
If President Obama had approached the Canadian government about buying his private residence in Chicago for use as a consulate. “Even that would have been relatively small by comparison.”
Paul Waldman of the same paper called the Trump Turnberry gambit an example of the “boundless corruption” of the Trump years. By trying to use his office to line his own pockets,” Waldman said, Trump had committed an impeachable offense.
A letter writer chimed in: “Plain and simple, America’s president is a crook.”
While golf itself was not implicated, a spillover effect was clearly possible. Since Trump became president, the press has regularly lambasted him for spending so much time on the golf course.
Social media has gotten in on the action. Did you know there’s a website dedicated to tracking Trump’s time golfing? It’s called Trump Golf Count, and it’s exhaustive, listing every Trump golf outing down to the minute. Example: July 19, 2020, 8:47 a.m-12:34 p.m., Trump National, Potomac Falls, Virginia.
Already smeared as a game of filthy-rich elites, this constant airing of Trump’s golf addiction does golf no good at all.
As a weekly 36-hole (sometimes more) man myself, I take umbrage – umbrage, I tell you – at this mindless labeling of the game as a waste of time.
Millions of lowly thousand-aires like myself embrace golf with ardor and conviction. A golf course is like an oasis in a parched landscape, the game a watering hole of delights. (I refuse to make the obvious reference to the proverbial “19th hole” – oops, I just did.) Playing with friends with nothing at stake is one of the great pleasures (for me) of life.
Golf should be a political-free zone, just as it was under Barack Obama. What? You say candidate Donald Trump criticized President Obama for golfing? So he did, at the same promising he’d be so busy working for the American people that he would have no time to play.
So maybe it’s not golf that is the issue. Maybe it’s Trump’s hypocrisy in saying one thing and doing another; maybe it’s his willingness to betray the public trust by using his high office for private gain. Laundering the British Open through the Oval Office? That’s not good.
In thinking of golf and the presidency let us recall President Eisenhower watching from a White House window as rain washed away an afternoon round of golf – an opportunity for Ike to shed the burdens of office for a couple of hours. “Poor me,” the president said to himself.
Poor golf. Give the game a break.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” can be found on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.