“I had friends who would tell me they’re into gardening,” Donald Trump told me.
It was years before his first term as president. This was one of his regular themes in our lengthy conversations/interviews. “I never got it. It seemed so boring. But when I started building golf courses I did. Building a golf course is like gardening but on a much bigger scale.”
As a golf-course owner, Trump would often spar with different architects and contractors — some Fazio family members; Jack Nicklaus; various others — insisting he had superior ideas for the locations of cart paths, halfway houses, practice areas, elevated tees on man-made hills, excavated greenside ponds and waterfalls. He loved waterfalls.
Trump was hot and cold on trees. He planted thousands of them when he built his first course, the very private Trump International Golf Club, on a formerly flat, desolate tract next to the Palm Beach International Airport. But when he built the public Ferry Point course in the Bronx, on a former landfill hard by the East River, he wanted a windswept course with a Scottish look and no trees.
The Trump Administration’s proposed East Potomac course renovation is closer to the Ferry Point project than anything else Trump did as a private-citizen golf entrepreneur. President Trump has spent hours talking to the legendary course architect Tom Fazio about what the historic public course, rundown but popular, could look like with a total makeover. Trump imagines it as a course suitable for tournament play.
Championship golf on his courses is a preoccupation for Trump. Once, in an interview, I suggested he could be the first course owner to host Ryder Cups on both sides of the Atlantic. He ran with that theme, settling on his course in Manassas, Va., for a U.S. Ryder Cup, and his seaside course in Aberdeen, Scotland, for a European one, though he named plenty of other Trump-branded courses. He talked about hosting U.S. Opens and British Opens as well. He can talk golf all day. The East Potomac course is on federal land, with a view of the Washington Monument. Can you imagine a Ryder Cup in such a setting? The president can.
Last weekend, and in open defiance of a federal court order that severely curtailed what tree removal could be done for now at East Potomac, the National Park Service felled at least 400 trees (a conservative estimate) in a short, intense and hastily-announced tree-cutting program. The president was not out there with a chainsaw, but Jessica Bowron, the acting director of the National Park Service, reports to the Doug Burgum, the Interior Department secretary, and Burgum reports to President Trump, and President Trump flies over the East Potomac course on a regular basis. He has an abiding interest in this whole thing. In the name of preserving democratic (lower-case d) norms, you hope this doesn’t turn into a case of what did the president know and when did he know it.
All the while, golfers at East Potomac have continued to play. It is East Potomac’s views, accessibility, casualness and rate sheet that makes the place so popular, plus a nice snack bar, though the service can be surly. The weekend green fee on its Blue course tops out at $48, and kids and military members play for about half that. East Potomac is a prime example of public, urban no-fuss golf. Ferry Point, now called Bally’s Golf Links at Ferry Point and a New York City course, is not. The Trump Golf empire is all about gilded golf. Trump told me—again, years ago—that one of the things he likes about investing in high-end courses is that if interest in golf craters he can always turn his properties into high-end housing developments. Presumably, that could never happen at East Potomac, it being a federal park and all.
When Trump got deep into presidential politics, he made an amusing politics-meets-golf observation. He compared the electoral college to match play and the popular vote to stroke play.
Along similar lines, you can compare the U.S. court system and the role of the USGA in American (and Mexican) tournament golf. Let’s say a player in a U.S. Open finds himself in an intra-hole rules dispute. When the player calls in a rules official it’s like a plaintiff taking a dispute to court. Players who don’t like their real-time rulings can appeal decisions to the tournament’s rules committee at the conclusion of play, and that’s the end of the line, golf’s Supreme Court. The USGA’s rules committee gave Dustin Johnson a one-shot penalty after he finished the last round of the 2016 U.S. Open. There was really nothing Johnson could do about it, short of not signing his scorecard. He wasn’t about to do that. He had won the tournament.
Not to get too wonky, here in your morning sports section, but Article III of the U.S. Constitution gives federal courts the power to settle public and private disputes. That’s why the judge overseeing this land-use dispute, Ana Reyes of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., was so incensed by the hasty, large-scale tree removal. It violated the judicial and constitutional authority that comes with her job. It doesn’t matter that many East Potomac golfers would say the course was overwhelmed by its trees, many of which are scraggly.
Golf-course renovation work on public lands is not a place for the impulsive. A group called the National Links Trust has spent close to a decade coming up with plans, and raising money, to restore and improve public golf in the nation’s capital. The NLT folks have been talking for years about restoring the East Potomac course to the inventive, reversible one Walter Travis designed well over a century ago. Tom Fazio’s vision for the course is distinctly more modern and different.
Such debates are common throughout golf. The Augusta Municipal Golf Course, aka The Patch, a beloved but run-down public course a couple miles from Augusta National, underwent a major renovation in the last couple years, overseen by Tom Fazio and another architect, Beau Welling. By various local accounts, it’s a different course today, certainly a more conventional course, and a better one, at least to some reviewers of it. The word “better” in golf is always elusive. One golfer’s “better” is another’s “they ruined it.”
President Trump’s roots in public golf might run deeper than you would guess, given how wealthy his family was as he was growing up in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens, in New York City. He told me, on more than one occasion, that he took up golf in his years at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which he attended from the fall of 1966 to the spring 1968. He described driving his own car west from Penn’s West Philadelphia campus to the city-owned Cobbs Creek course, a celebrated home for Black golfers in Philadelphia. Cobbs was a place with a lot of action and a city vibe. Trump once told Golf Digest that the course had “no grass on the tees, no nothing.” He recalled the hustlers there. “I mean, more hustlers than any place I’ve seen to this day.” He took what he learned there to Winged Foot, which he joined in 1969; to his West Palm course, which opened in 1999; to Turnberry, the celebrated Scottish course he bought in 2014. “I learned about golf [at Cobbs Creek],” Trump said. “I learned about gambling. I learned about everything.”
Cobbs Creek is now getting a major renovation of its own. It is no longer the epicenter for Black golf in Philadelphia and hasn’t been for years. The games with serious action have migrated elsewhere in the city, its suburbs and down on the Jersey Shore. There is a Tiger Woods Learning Center at Cobbs Creek now. Cobbs Creek, like the Augusta muni and The Park in West Palm Beach, is about do-gooder golf. There’s a cultural divide at East Potomac that is at the heart of the fight over its future. The National Links Trust plans were rooted in do-gooder golf, bringing kids to the game, keeping seniors at it, celebrating traditional golfing values, keeping golf affordable. Trump Golf is not built for that, and neither is Trump. He likes golf courses that are show pieces. He likes spiffy.
On Monday, at 10 a.m at the U.S. District Court in Washington, there will be a hearing about the state of tree removal at East Potomac. Could be interesting, if you’re into golfing jurisprudence and the wheels of justice and the rest. If not, we point you to Golf Channel, scheduled to be airing LPGA action from the Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai, China.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.
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