Only in the political fishbowl of Washington DC could the cream of global chippers and putters pitch up for the US Open -- and find themselves the second most talked about golf story in town. With the world's top players set to tee off Thursday at swank Congressional Country Club in the Washington suburbs, the political elite are fixated on a different showdown, at a venue to be confirmed on Saturday.
Democratic President Barack Obama will take on Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner in a long-awaited grudge match. Obama and Boehner, at loggerheads over taxes, spending cuts, Libya and a host of other issues, have a courteous but cool public relationship. But they do have one thing in common, an obsession with spoiling good walks by thrashing around a little white ball.
The president plays almost every weekend, usually on the utilitarian fairways of Andrews Air Force base in Maryland, and takes his clubs on the road for annual holidays in Martha's Vineyard or Hawaii.
Boehner, from Ohio, is said to have a taste for the finer golf courses in life, and is the better player, coming in 43rd in a recent Golf Digest survey of the capital's best golfers while Obama limped in at 108th.
Asked to divulge the president's handicap on Wednesday, his spokesman Jay Carney, quipped "classified."
But Obama might have a few secrets up his sleeve after welcoming PGA Tour stars Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson, among the favorites for the Open, to the White House for a private chat on Wednesday.
Saturday's high powered presidential foursome will be rounded out by Vice President Joe Biden, off a snazzy 6.3 handicap, and Ohio Governor John Kasich.
Carney said that while politics, specifically a showdown between Obama and Boehner over raising the $14.25 trillion debt ceiling, would be a subtext to Saturday's round -- in depth, on-course negotiations were unlikely. "I think I can say with great confidence that they will not wrap up the 18th hole and come out and say that we have a deal," he said. But "spending a number of hours together in that kind of environment I think can only help improve the chances of bipartisan cooperation," he said. "It certainly can't hurt it, unless someone wins really big."
Kasich is not just trying to dispatch Obama on the links -- next year he will be trying to crush the president in his home state, which may hold the key to the president's 2012 hopes for a second term.
"I really don't plan to make this a political event, that is not what this is," Kasich told Fox 19 local TV this week. "One thing I've learned over time is when you develop personal relationships that's what leads to treating people like humans rather than a political adversary."US presidents are often drawn to golf.
In recent years, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, his father George Bush, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, reputedly the best White House golfer, have all played. President Dwight Eisenhower is said to have enjoyed around 800 rounds while he was in office between 1953 and 1961 and installed a putting green on the south lawn of the White House which is maintained to this day. He even had a tree named after him at exclusive Augusta National golf club in Georgia, the home of the Masters. The unfortunate pine on the 17th hole got its name after becoming a frequent victim of the infuriated president's errant shots.
Clinton was also a golf addict, and once conceived a free trade deal with Singapore during a floodlit, post-midnight round of golf in Brunei with the city-state's then prime minister Goh Chok Tong.
George W. Bush, like his father a brisk player, gave up the game however, saying he did not want to be photographed relaxing on the course while US soldiers were dying in Iraq. Carney said he believed that presidential golfers took to the game as the course was one of the few places where they could walk free in the open air. "The President plays golf because I think a lot of Presidents who occupy this house and this West Wing look for ways to literally get outdoors where you're not surrounded by people."