Rory McIlroy and Washington’s Golf Culture
By Colman McCarthy
Think and live green, we are being told. Getting the message, Washington heeded the counsel in mid-June. With ticket prices at $110 for the first two rounds and bloated to $125 for the final two, sell-out crowds trod the verdant roped-off fairways of the Congressional Country Club to see Rory McIlroy from Northern Ireland breezily win the U.S. Open in record low numbers. The same weekend, Barak Obama and John Boehner went out for 18 holes at the East Course of Andrews Air Force Base in what was hyped as the Golf Summit.
In Bethesda, Md., and about 12 miles from the U.S. Capitol, Congressional Country Club was founded 1922 by two Indiana Republicans members of the House of Representatives. Then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover was the first president. The purpose of the club was to secure a haven where politics and business could partner in private, the pleasures befitting the Roaring Twenties. Capitalism’s titans—names like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Firestone, Hearts, Chrysler—were early supporters.
Robber barons and union-busters are long gone from Congressional. Now it’s
money-men of other stripes: lobbyists, corporate grandees, K Street dealmakers. Freewheeling favor-seekers and freeloading congressman can use the regal clubhouse and kempt fairways to find common interest and subvert the public interest. The frolic of golf, food and booze can be written off as business expenses. The club’s initiation fee tops $100,000, plus $460 in monthly dues—often company-perked The list is long of golfing politicians who let their backs be slapped and elbows rubbed by corporate loophole seekers: Tom DeLay, Marty Russo, Tip O’Neil, Dan Quayle, Sam Nunn, Dan Rostenkowski.
Into this gated sanctuary, which ought be renamed Fixers Country Club, came Rory McIlroy, the only son in a working class family near Belfast. Besides his personal affability and carefree manner that contrasts with the grim pusses of so many touring pros, McIlroy, 22, was anything but another robotic breaker of par. Days before the Open, he traveled to Haiti as part of his work with UNICEF. For two days, he brought what comfort he could to families still awash in the misery following the January 2010 earth quake. Port-au-Prince once had a 9 hole golf course, its greens and fairways now teemed with 50,000 of the displaced who subsist in shacks and tents. Of his two days in Haiti, a chastened McIlroy said: “There’s stuff there I never thought I’d see in my life….A little bit of perspective now and again is a good thing.”
Especially in the cloistered world of big time golf. Touring pros travel the world from country club to country club, attended by swing coaches, sports psychologists, agents and caddies. In addition to tournaments in Europe, the sites include Abu Dhabi, China, Thailand and South Africa. For American players, merely showing up at these international sites guarantees hefty appearance fees. In 1960,the total prize money for an average PGA tournament was $20,000. Purses of $6 million and more are now routine in most of the 45 tournaments that have a combined total of $288 million. Extra cash flows in from endorsements, wearing logos on hats, shirts and golf bags, and playing in Monday and Tuesday outings that companies stage for employees and investors. Most tournaments are bankrolled by corporate America, including Wells Fargo, AT&T, Waste Management, Nissan, Shell and Deutsche Bank.
The same weekend Rory McIlroy was having his gloried moment at the Open, the Obama-Boehner match, along with Joe Biden and John Kasich to round out the foursome, was held at Andrews Air Force Base on the other side of Washington. It’s two courses are among the some 230 worldwide the Pentagon runs for its warriors. With the Secret Service patrolling the fairways, after clearing them of other golfers who might shout on Obama’s backswing or otherwise foment, the four rode the course in golf carts.
What’s that? No caddies? With both the president and the speaker of the house regularly calling for more jobs, this was a time to employ four caddies. Michelle Obama calls citizens to get more exercise, but there was hubby lazily joy-riding in Golf Cart One. Although motorized golf has all but eliminated caddies, a few clubs still use them. One of them is Burning Tree, two miles from Congressional and where caddies can make more than $200 a day.
John Boehner knows about this. He is a member of Burning Tree, the club where in the 1950s young Patrick Buchanan caddied for his boyhood idol, Richard Nixon. It’s doubtful that Boehner will reciprocate the president’s invitation to Andrews by bringing him to Burning Tree. Club policy bans women. Is it imaginable that Obama would risk the wrath of the sisterhood by golfing with the bunkered Old Boys? Boehner, apparently, knows he already irks the Emily’s List set. So let it be teed off that he’s a sexist. Burning Tree is not totally shut off from females. They are allowed on the property one day a year: buying Christmas presents in the pro shop for their husbands.
Obama hooks and slices mostly at Andrews, a private facility. A question: why not disport to the District of Columbia’s three public courses, all overseen by the National Park Service. He’d need to pay greens fees, of course, but lobbying for a waiver could be the next order of urgent business for the Congressional Golf Caucus. Yes, there is one. Seriously.
-----------------
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace, a Washington non-profit.