The New First Golfer

"The great thing about him," Nicholson says, "if he duffs one dead into the woods, there's no cursing. The most excited we get on the golf course is a fist bump."

Obama's swing. Video stills courtesy of KGMB channel 9 news Hawaii

Now that he was a golfer, Obama refused to put away his basketball, much to the chagrin of Michelle, who does not play golf. "Like any smart, red-blooded American man, Barack decided to take up golf and still play basketball," says Dan Shomon, an Obama aide in the state Senate who had encouraged his boss to play golf. "Barack thought, This is great -- now I get to play golf, and I can continue to play basketball. He figured he had pulled the ultimate scam on Michelle."

WATCH OBAMA'S SWING IN VIDEO AND LISTEN TO TOP TEACHERS' CRITIQUES

• Butch Harmon advises more windup for the President Elect

• David Leadbetter wants Obama to strengthen his grip

• Jim Flick gives Obama a drill Jack Nicklaus used

MORE ON PRESIDENTIAL GOLFING

• Editor's Letter: Swing Tips for the new First Golfer

• Ranking the golfing Presidents

• Jenkins: The Bush golf dynasty

Later that year, Obama played four rounds in Chicago with Ian Manners, a Brit who was married at the time to Obama's half-sister, Auma. The rounds, Manners said, allowed him and Obama to get to know each other and, as Manners put it, "get away from the women."

Already, Obama's handicap was 24, quite a feat for a man who had been playing less than a year. "He played percentage golf, always keeping the ball under control, whereas I was always going for the big one," Manners recalls.

Whenever he needed it, Obama seemed to have a special constituency pulling for him: The golf gods.

"If I went into the trees, my ball would stay there," Manners says. "If he went into the trees, it seems like the ball would always bounce out, 50 yards farther up the fairway. I joked with him that if he was as lucky at politics as he was at golf, he'd be president some day."

GOLF AND THE PRESIDENTS

Sometime early in the last century, golf became the most beloved presidential pastime. Obama will be the 15th American president of the past 18 to have played the game, a century-long run of golf-obsessed chief executives that began ignobly with the 340-pound William Howard Taft. President Taft pursued his passion, comically, despite the warning of his mentor, Theodore Roosevelt, that playing golf could be "fatal" for a political man. The stigma was long hard-wired to the gilded game; John F. Kennedy had often forbidden photographers from going anywhere near his golf outings in Palm Beach and Hyannis Port.

Bill Clinton had a pollster figure out how Americans would react if he played golf on vacation (the game didn't poll as well as hiking in the mountains; Clinton played golf anyway). But today, the game's political peril has all but vanished despite George W. Bush's very public abstinence from golf during the Iraq war (most of the time). Golf is now seen as a boost to practically any long shot, even a national political career for an African-American man with a funny name from the South Side of Chicago.

"An awful lot can happen on the golf course," Barack Obama told a friend a decade ago. He decided to play golf later in life in pursuit of something other than just escapist pleasure, just as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had. For LBJ, the golf course was a convenient venue to lobby senators into voting for legislation that he was championing, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (LBJ said, "One lesson you'd better learn if you want to be in politics is that you never get out on a golf course and beat the president.") Vice President Richard Nixon was 40 when he took lessons because he knew the game was the surest path to winning over his boss, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

For Obama, golf was appealing because he believed the game would help him connect with his colleagues in the state Senate as well as his constituents in far-flung places like downstate Illinois. Much to his surprise, he soon fell hard for the game's charms. Friends say he became as devoted to golf as he is to his beloved basketball. "Basketball and golf are his one-two," Marvin Nicholson says. "Now, he wants to play all the best courses: St. Andrews, Pebble Beach, Bethpage Black.