PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — When it comes to golf and the United States presidency, no one really comes close to Dwight Eisenhower.
Eisenhower is credited with helping popularize the game in the 1950s, when he was a two-term president. While the exact number isn’t known, it is estimated that Eisenhower played 800 rounds of golf in his eight years in the Oval Office. He was a member at Augusta National, had a famous tree named for him in the middle of the 17th fairway there – a tree which no longer exists – and was great friends with two other wildly popular golfers, an amateur named Bob Hope and a professional named Arnold Palmer.
The combination of Eisenhower and golf found its way to the Coachella Valley, where Eisenhower visited and played golf twice during his presidency and eventually lived in a house on the 11th fairway at Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells.
These days, golf and the presidency means Donald Trump. Trump played plenty of golf before being elected to the highest office in the land in 2016, and has played plenty since leaving that office after the 2020 election. And he owns more than a dozen golf courses across the country and in Scotland. While many question its legitimacy, Trump’s handicap is said to be around 3, making him a very good golfer. Then again, golfers question other golfer’s handicaps all the time.
Eisenhower and Trump are two of the numerous presidents who have played golf in the Coachella Valley through the years. Trump’s visit to the desert Saturday for a campaign rally just outside of Coachella isn’t about golf but of the presidents who have played golf in the desert, Trump has the smallest number of rounds in the valley.
Consider that Eisenhower and later Gerald Ford chose to live at least part of each year in the desert, giving them plenty of post-presidency rounds at any course they wanted to play. Eisenhower made his only hole-in-one at Seven Lakes Country Club in Palm Springs, while Ford lived at Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage and became a fixture in the Bob Hope Classic, now The American Express.
Who can forget the day in 1995 when Ford, sitting President Bill Clinton and the man Clinton beat in the previous election, George H. Bush, played in the same fivesome in the first round of the 1995 Hope tournament with Hope and defending champion Scott Hoch. Clinton would later go on to serve as host of the Hope tournament when Humana was the title sponsor starting in 2012.
Presidential playground
Other presidents played golf in the desert, like Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, often at Walter Annenberg’s private course at his Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage. When he was president, Barack Obama played in the desert on several trips, and he continued that habit after his presidency. George H.W. Bush has been known to have played at private desert courses.
Trump never played in the desert as president, but perhaps that is understandable given that he owns courses on the East Coast and of course played at the Mar-a-Lago resort he owns in Florida.
Trump’s most famous golf venture in the desert, not surprisingly, happened in the Hope tournament, which had a pro-am full of celebrities from entertainment and sports as well as politics. The year was 1993 and Trump was far from running for office or even hosting his “The Apprentice” reality show. But he was a well-known financial figure who had co-written The Art of the Deal, a book that made him popular as a television guest.
Trump played Bermuda Dunes, Tamarisk and La Quinta country clubs and the Palmer Course at PGA West with, respectively, pros David Peoples, Andrew Magee, Tom Kite (who would go on to win that week in tournament-record fashion) and Peter Jacobsen, who had won the 1990 Hope. He was among a list that included Hope, Ford, singers Andy Williams, Glen Campbell and Vince Gill, football star Lawrence Taylor, actors William Devane and Jason Bateman and in a strange twist, baseball star Steve Garvey of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who is currently running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in California.
But as far as golf and the Coachella Valley, that was pretty much it for Trump. He may have slipped in for a round or two in the desert through the years, but very quietly.
Trump won’t be adding to his desert rounds this Saturday, concentrating on a political rally instead. But it’s interesting to remember that even before he was president, Trump added to the lore of the desert as a golfing playground for presidents.
