Trump Golf: Designer Insights & Stories

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The week was a dank one, here in the nation’s capital, Wednesday most particularly. Hump Day, so-called, was cold, windy and bleak, more December than Christmastime. Still, and amazingly, at the very public East Potomac Golf Links there was plenty of action, all things considered.

At lunchtime, the double-decker driving range had a dozen or more golfers batting away tired balls to a bumpy, unkempt field from first-floor stalls. East Potomac’s charming mini-golf course was empty but out on the playfields, where there are a total of 36 no-fuss golf holes, there were golfers in action, in twosomes and threesomes and as singletons. People love golf. People love golf!

There’s a century-old 18-hole Walter Travis course at East Potomac, the Blue course, along with two short nine-hole courses, the White and the Red. There are spectacular views of the Washington Monument from many of the dead-flat East Potomac holes on a manmade island. Still, nobody is confusing golf at East Potomac with, say, golf at the reinvigorated city-owned course in West Palm Beach, Fla., The Park. At least, not yet.

The East Potomac courses are under the purview of the Department of the Interior and they are run by a pro-bono group, the National Links Trust. This group has ambitious rehabilitation plans for golf at East Potomac and the two other public courses on federal property in Washington, the Langston and Rock Creek courses, all of them on federal parkland, just as Mount Rushmore is on federal parkland. The progress has not been swift. The term “red tape” has semi-ancient European origins but the federal bureaucracy, aided and abetted by America’s historic and dueling two-party system, has turned the phrase into a slow-play artform.

Municipal golf and public golf, you may know, is having a moment across the United States. The historic city-owned Cobbs Creek course in Philadelphia is getting a total makeover, Gil Hanse presiding. As is The Patch, in Augusta, Ga., under the watchful eye of Tom Fazio and his former colleague Beau Welling, now affiliated with Tiger Woods’s course-design company. The Houston Open, the venerable PGA Tour stop, is played on a beloved municipal course there, Memorial Park. Name a city — Austin; Chicago; San Francisco; Jacksonville, Fla.; Jacksonville, S.C. — and you’ll find a bevy of public-minded golf nuts devoted to improving the state of play for local public-course golfers.

It is not a state secret that Donald Trump, who got bit by the golf bug at Cobbs Creek when he was a student at Penn’s Wharton School in the mid-1960s, has his eye on East Potomac, literally and otherwise. He flies over it regularly as a passenger in the presidential helicopter, Marine One. The National Links Trust is in the early stages of a 50-year operating agreement with the Department of Interior. But anybody who saw how quickly the East Wing of the White House was torn down in the name of a new ballroom knows that slow-and-methodical is not how Trump operates.

Trump developed a public course in New York City, his hometown, that nobody would confuse for an ordinary public course, not in scale or scope of green fee. (That course was called Trump Ferry Point but is now called Bally’s Golf Links at Ferry Point.) The National Links Trust has a vision for the Blue course that is rooted in its quaint history, a course where a bogey golfer can make loads of bogeys and some pars. Trump’s golf tastes run, exclusively, to the spectacular.

Tom Fazio has designed four courses that bear the Trump name, including the original course at Trump Bedminster, in the New Jersey horse country. The second course there was built by Tom Fazio’s nephew, Tommy Fazio. Tommy’s father, Jim Fazio, designed the Trump courses in West Palm Beach and in Westchester County, New York. You can’t play golf with Trump and not hear him mention one of the Fazios. (Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods get mentioned regularly, too.) Tom Fazio was a guest for lunch at the White House last month. At the two-hour mark, President Trump was still deep into his midday golf conversation with Fazio. The two men have known each other for a half-century or so. Trump is 79 and Fazio is 80.

“He really does love golf and his memory for it is incredible,” Fazio said in a phone interview on Thursday afternoon, after a day of work on a Florida course. The legendary course designer is assiduously apolitical in his public life, wittily noting that he will work for anybody, regardless of the developer’s party affiliation. (“The only times I have not been busy came in 1974 and 2008,” he said, a nod to two periods of recession.)

During their lunch, Trump recalled a day of golf from 1989, opening day at Shadow Creeka Fazio course in Las Vegas. Trump recollected how he stopped in Las Vegas on his way to Los Angeles to look at the Ambassador Hotel, which he was interested in buying. (He bought the hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in 1968, in 1991.) The two men recalled the unlikely fivesome gathered at Shadow Creek that day: Steve Wynn, the course owner; Fazio, its designer; Clint Eastwood; and Trump. The fifth person on hand was Michael Jackson, not playing but taking in the scene.

“He asked me what I thought would happen with LIV Golf and the PGA Tour,” Fazio said. They talked about various courses, including Trump Doral, which again has a spot on the PGA Tour schedule, for the Miami Championship, two weeks after the Masters. There will also be a LIV Golf event at a Trump course, Trump Washington in Northern Virginia, in early May. Trump told Fazio how truckloads of dirtthe detritus of excavation work where the East Wing once stood, was being parked at East Potomac, with more dirt coming in every day.

And indeed, on this week’s cold and windblown Wednesday afternoon, there were workmen on this giant pile of dirt, surrounded by a chain-link fence, its gate open for the arrival of new truckloads of East Wing dirt. The pile is to the right of the 9th hole on the White course at East Potomac, and there were golf balls on the pile, some newly arrived. If a righty hits a wind-aided slice off the 9th tee it could wind up in this most unexpected ground under repair.

“He said he needed a place to put the dirt, and the course could use it anyhow,” Fazio said. “He’s a construction guy.”

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com