Washington counts.
Counts yeas and nays. Counts earmarked dollars and donated dollars. Counts favors and disses. Counts everything.
So golf, one of the most number-preoccupied of amateur sports, fits the town’s mind-set. It’s eminently quantifiable.
But Washington fiddles with numbers better than most towns, too, contorting budget lines into miasmas of spin and misdirection, calculating what’s up as if it were down and what’s down as if it were up. And so it goes on the golf course in Washington, a city consumed with the game this week because of the U.S. Open being played at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda and Saturday’s “golf summit” between House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and President Obama.
Members of Congress (and presidents, for that matter) get their own golfing math. The etiquette dictates that you look away when the distinguished gentleman or gentlewoman takes that do-over tee shot. “No need to mark that first one down!” That challenging three-foot putt? “Don’t worry about it! Pick it up. It’s a gimme.”
Deference prevails. After all, the consultants and the lobbyists and the influence-seekers are the pursuers in this town. The members are the pursued.
Except, that is, when your name is Tony Russo. The laws of nature dictate that Russo, the 42-year-old head lobbyist for T-Mobile, would be ever in pursuit. But it turns out he’s just as often the pursued, the man the powerful want to tee up with, and there’s a reason for that. It’s in the numbers. Add up the pars and the birdies, as Golf Digest did, and Russo comes out as the finest golfer in Washington’s political realm, a 300-yard-driving, chip-shot-precision-bombing, 15-foot-putt-sinking marvel.
When you’re so good that you can be counted on to reliably shoot between two-over and two-under par, you don’t have to defer. People want to play with you. They might learn something, or they hope that some of your magic will rub off, particularly when you’ve turned in scores as low as Russo’s 10-under-par 62 in Sun Valley, Idaho, or his 5-under 67 at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Northern Virginia. “They like getting tips,” Russo says of his congressional playmates. “They love that.”
On any given day, Russo might get a call from Vice President Biden to play a quick round at Andrews Air Force Base. “I’ll hit one, and he’ll say, ‘I can do that, too,’ ” Russo says of the vice president. “He loves it when he out-drives me.”
Biden has been known to describe Russo, who worked for him as a lawyer in the Senate in the late 1990s, as his “third son.” Biden inscribed a photo of them that hangs on Russo’s office wall: “I enjoy being with you anywhere, particularly on the golf course. You are not only my coach, but my son.”
Or Russo might hear from Steve Largent, the NFL Hall of Famer and former Republican congressman from Oklahoma who runs CTIA-the Wireless Association. “Just watching his game improves my swing,” Largent says. “I always play better when I play with Tony.”
Or it might be Joe Baca, the Democratic congressman from California who is one of the top golfers in Congress, lining up golfers for a fundraiser. “You play to a higher level,” Baca says of his outings with Russo. “Playing with Tony makes you concentrate.”
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