George H.W. Bush and a legacy of golfing American Presidents

William Howard Taft: The bunkers of Myopia

Golf was introduced to the United States in the latter part of the 19th Century by emigrees, largely from Scotland, where the game had long been popular. There are reports that President William McKinley (1897-1901) dabbled with golf during the late 1890s. But the first future chief executive to fall in love with it was William Howard Taft (1909-1913), who was known to have been playing regularly by 1895 – the year of the inaugural U.S. Open – and possibly sooner.

During Taft’s ultimately successful 1908 presidential campaign, sitting President Theodore Roosevelt – who had urged Taft to succeed him – pushed the candidate to refrain from the course, warning that voters looked on golf as “a rich man’s game.” Taft ignored the advice and won handily.

Following the election, one of his first actions was to schedule a pre-inauguration vacation in Augusta, Ga., where he played golf every day.

As president, Taft assiduously balanced work and relaxation. In her book, “The Bully Pulpit,” Doris Kearns Goodwin recalls how the president fought long and hard to negotiate a new tariff bill, then dashed off to the Myopia Hunt Club, at the time one of the leading golf courses in the country. “If anybody says the word tariff to me within the space of several days, he will get hit with a golf stick,” he is reported to have cautioned friends.

Myopia was a favorite Taft haunt, but the relationship was not always mutual. The course, a four-time U.S. Open site, was famous for its highly penal bunkers. It was said that the designer, H.C. Leeds, delighted in noting where people hit shots, then digging bunkers in those spots. And once he dug them Leeds dug them deeper and deeper; so deep, in fact, that eventually Taft’s caddies had to equip themselves with ropes in the event those ropes were needed to extricate the 300-lb. chief executive from one of them.