SPECTATOR SPORT
Presidential drive
WITH his armada now gathered at the Gulf, President Bush mercifully seems to have been talked out of any more aping of Francis Drake on the golf course. The Independent last week gaily reprinted a piece by one of his playing partners, Dan Jenkins, of Golf World, who reported unkindly (as if we didn't know) that the opening presidential drive in front of the cameras off the first tee had in fact been a daisy-scuffing grounder. But his next, which circled the world on celluloid, had been a beauty. Says Jenkins: 'He has a good swing. He's a natural left-hander who plays right-handed — like Ben Hogan, I told him. He doesn't take it all the way back to the horizontal but he follows through nicely.'
But does it induce confidence for the peace of the world to know it is being held in the right hand of a man who is a natural leftie? A sinister thought, you might say. Well, when Ben Hogan won the Open in 1953, the only time he entered, he left Carnoustie bragging he'd have 'won it ten times better as a southpaw'. He had been a caddie at Fort Worth well into his twenties, and had to teach himself to play with right-handed clubs.
Golf down the years has been considered the okay game for US politicians — rather as a grouse moor image used to serve (they thought) the British Tory party. Both activities had a habit of backfiring. After Harry Truman gave orders for the first atomic bomb to be dropped, his golfing caddy cheerfully explained his boss's phi- losophy — 'No one could accuse him of slow play; he doesn't consider his shots, just steps up and knocks hell out of the thing.' Quite so. For years, his successor, Dwight Eisenhower (my all-time perfect Guardian misprint, by the way, was in, I think, Alistair Cooke's obituary which suc- cinctly called him 'President Eisenhowev- er) ran the world from his golf-cart — till a young Senator Kennedy suggested he take up painting instead, 'because it would take fewer strokes'.
The polls dipped even further, apparent- ly, for the presidential aspirant, Barry Goldwater, in 1965 when his drive off the first tee in the Phoenix pro-am brained a spectator who had been innocently stand- ing at squarish cover-point, and instead of showing concern the Senator angrily com- plained to the cameras that 'the goon was standing far too close to my ball'. President Ford's incumbency became a laughing stock because of his golf when middle America began calling him Gerald Fore! He also had difficulty missing spectators, and every comedian in the land had a variation on the gag that 'the President waits for his first drive to land before deciding what course he's playing that day'.
Golf as a vote-catcher and confidence- raiser also boomeranged on that Vice- President with the Perelmanesque name, Spiro T. Agnew. After unwisely playing a round with Bob Hope, his partner set the nation in a roar by saying that, 'At least the Vice-President couldn't cheat on his score — all we had to do was look back down the fairway and count the wounded. Sure he hit one good birdie — but also an eagle, a moose, an elk, and a mason.'
In the present crisis, how should we read the rub of the global green, when Bush last week admitted to Dan Jenkins, 'My prob- lem with golf is I have to deal with the humiliation factor.' Still, less disconcerting than Tip O'Neill, the Speaker, who told the House a few years ago, 'If I swung this gavel the way I swing my golf club, then the nation would be in one helluva mess'.
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