Obama's golf game: 'Not high, not low'

by Mark Silva

Join us at the par-five, 12th hole of the Woodlawn golf course at Fort Belvoir, Va., on Father's Day, the picture that Time magazine paints in its portrait of the president and vice president as golfers.

Vice President Joe Biden, with an eight-handicap, "has leaked a 3-wood into the trees near the green. He stands amid the underbrush, talking with his match-play teammate, the President of the United States. Take a drop or risk the trees?

"A few inches off either way, and the ball will ricochet into the forest,'' Time's Michael Scherer writes in his article about The First Duffer.

"The stakes aren't high: Barack Obama, who has golfed almost every weekend since it got hot in Washington, plays a dollar a hole. But these leaders have more than money on the line. They are facing down their aides, men a fraction of their age. And no one wants to lose.

"Biden reaches for his wedge. The ball miraculously splits the trunks and bounds onto the green, less than 20 feet from the pin. Amid the caravan of golf carts, including those of the Secret Service detail, a doctor and the ever present nuclear-code-toting military aide, there is an eruption of applause.

"Calm under pressure," Obama calls out, bequeathing to Biden his own most valued attribute. "That's why he's my vice president."

Since Dwight Eisenhower battled South Lawn squirrels tearing up his putting green, every President but Jimmy Carter has been a golfer, Time notes.

"John Kennedy was known for low scores and a graceful swing. Ronald Reagan, whose scores were a state secret, putted down the aisle of Air Force One. Bill Clinton established a reputation for fudging his score -- cheating, some said -- in rounds with campaign donors while chewing an unlit cigar on the tee.

" George W. Bush played the way his father H.W. did, like a race against time, until the last years in office, when the son banned himself from the game because he didn't want to send the "wrong signal" to the mothers of the Iraq-war dead.

"Obama, who took up golf in his mid-30s as a relaxing alternative to basketball, did not find much time to play during the campaign. But now that his game is out of the closet, it is clear that he duffs in much the same way that he tries to govern,'' Time notes.

"You can really tell a person's personality by the way he plays golf," says Wellington Wilson, a longtime golf buddy. "He just goes with the flow. Not too high. Not too low.''