They hit home runs, made par and swam laps, but only one had a game named after him.
From the beginning, U.S. presidents have participated in a wide variety of sports as fans and athletes.
George Washington set the standard as the sportsman president. He had a passion for horseback riding, fox-hunting and horse racing. During the Revolutionary War at Valley Forge he played an English game using a bat and ball; it was similar to the future national pastime. In retirement, he engaged in cards and billiards.
Thomas Jefferson favored walking, running and swimming for exercise. While at William & Mary, according to a 1955 Sports Illustrated article, “he swam 13 times across a millpond that was a quarter of a mile wide.” He also chose games that required mental acuity such as chess and backgammon.
In his youth, Abraham Lincoln was known to have been an imposing amateur wrestler. In years of competing, “Honest Abe” supposedly had only one recorded loss. Later, future president William Taft wrestled at Yale where he became the school’s first heavyweight intramural wrestling champion.
Likely one of the most athletic commanders in chief was Theodore Roosevelt. There were few competitive challenges that he could not master. He was also instrumental in helping save football by promoting rule changes that included the forward pass.
TR said, “I believe in rough games and in rough manly sports.”
After childhood illnesses, he conditioned himself with strenuous physical activities. He had a lifelong devotion of boxing, rowing, hiking and horseback riding. While at the White House, a tennis court was built that he used frequently. Roosevelt also engaged in sparring sessions while president. On one occasion his opponent, a young Army captain, inflicted a permanent eye injury forcing Roosevelt to take off his boxing gloves forever. He then learned jiu-jitsu.
Nearly every chief executive has had some connection with baseball.
Fledgling forms of the game were pursued by George Washington, John Adams, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Andrew Johnson was the first president to publicly identify himself with baseball’s growing popularity — two early teams visited him at the White House.
Benjamin Harrison in 1892 was the first sitting commander in chief to attend a major league game where Cincinnati defeated the Washington Senators. Eighteen years later, William Howard Taft began the ceremonial first pitch tradition. Since then, every chief executive has tossed out the initial ball for at least one game.
Richard Nixon may have been the sport’s most ardent presidential aficionado. After resigning, he was offered the job of Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Many were more than just fans — they were competitors.
Rutherford Hayes, William Taft, Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower learned to swing the bat as youths. Wilson was a center fielder in college. George H.W. Bush was the captain of Yale’s baseball team; he played in the inaugural College World Series in 1947. His son, George W. Bush, was the first former owner of a Major League team to be elected to the nation’s highest office.
Beginning in the early 1900s, golf became the most recognized presidential participatory sport.
William Taft popularized the game. All of his successors have chased the little white ball around the links except for Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter.
According to a 2019 Washington Post article by Ronald Shafer, Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1919 “played nearly 1200 rounds of golf — more than any president in history.” Wilson was such a fanatic that he even had black golf balls ready to use when it snowed.
Other commentaries note that Warren Harding trained his dog to retrieve his golf balls on the Executive Mansion’s lawn. Eisenhower installed a putting green at the White House and was second to Wilson for the most rounds completed while president. John Kennedy was an excellent player as well as Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Four Oval Office occupants have made holes in one: Ike, Clinton and Bush 41 and 43.
Gerald Ford occasionally hit spectators with an errant tee shot. Bob Hope quipped, “It’s not hard to find Jerry Ford on a golf course — you just follow the wounded.”
Long before tackling the nation’s problems, the gridiron was part of some future presidents’ college experience.
At Harvard, freshman Kennedy was on the junior varsity squad; he did not advance because of physical ailments. Richard Nixon was a bench warmer reserve tackle on the varsity team at Whittier College in California.
Ronald Reagan’s football legacy was not made on the field at Eureka College. It was his acting role portraying George Gipp in the 1940 film “Knute Rockne All American” that cemented his pigskin sport connection. In his presidential campaign he used the famous line “just win one for the Gipper.”
While Dwight Eisenhower started on the West Point team, his tackle of the future Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe is the most remembered event of his college football days.
Unlike his golf game, Gerald Ford was an accomplished football player at the University of Michigan. He had offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers to go pro but ended up at Yale law school where he did some coaching.
Outside of the mainstream, Herbert Hoover is the only president with a sport named after him — “Hooverball.” It is a combination of volleyball and tennis. Using a 6-pound medicine ball, players toss it over an 8-foot-tall net. Championship games are still held at the 31st chief executive’s hometown of West Branch, Iowa.
It is not entirely surprising that nearly all presidents have naturally engaged in some form of athletic diversion. As one author remarked, “a sporting event and a political campaign tend to have comparable ups and downs.”
