When President Obama first took office, I wrote a Post, “When Travis Played the President,” about a golf match at the Chevy Chase Club course in Maryland between Walter J. Travis and President Taft. (See https://golfpoet.com/2009/02/09/when-travis-played-the-president/)

In his first term, President Obama has played his share of golf. During the re-election campaign he has been criticized for this practice. Here, for example, is a recent headline from CBSNews.com, “President Obama plays 100th round of golf, draws fire from critics.” But golfing Presidents are nothing new.  Nor is the criticism.

The exploits of golfing Presidents have been ably documented by ESPN Senior Writer Don Van Natta in his book  “First Off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers, and Cheaters from Taft to Bush.” But what about Presidents who may have tried golf before Taft? As Van Natta points out, in 1897 during his summer vacation President McKinley was persuaded  by his Vice President Garrett Hobart to play a few rounds. But McKinley  had no success.  Van Natta goes on with the story, writing,

“Two years later . . . McKinley surprised his aides when he announced that he would like to take up golf again.  . . . But his senior advisers were very concerned, telling McKinley that golf was “undignified for a President . . .”

In today’s world, if a reporter caught wind of such a story, s/he might have had some fun with it in a few paragraphs. But in McKinley’s time when poetry was popular, here is what I found in the July 7, 1899 issue of Golf Illustrated, an English weekly publication:

“President McKinley is only deterred from taking to Golf by fears that by so doing he might compromise the dignity of the Presidential Office. The Evening News’ poet soliloquises as follows:

‘What degradation may there be,
What loss of manly dignity,
In boldly driving off the tee?
Or is it that, perhaps, you know
Your limbs, I mean the ones below
In heather stocking clad, would show
But thinly,
McKinley?’”

Maybe President Obama is lucky that there seems to be no interest in poetry among his Republican detractors.