More recently, in 2009, Obama had the tennis courts adapted so they could also be used for full-court basketball, a favorite sport of his.
There had been a basketball court at the White House before Obama.
The elder Bush had a concrete half-court installed in 1991. He dedicated the court that year in honor of the Duke Blue Devils and the Tennessee Lady Volunteers, the men’s and women’s NCAA champions, UPI reported at the time.
A medicine ball, a net and a new sport
President Herbert Hoover’s sport of choice, or rather prescription from a doctor who urged more exercise, was a morning endeavor dubbed “Hoover-ball.”
It involved a medicine ball and a net similar to a volleyball net, and it was invented by the White House physician, Adm. Joel T. Boone, according to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.
“Getting daily exercise to keep physically fit is always a problem for Presidents,” Hoover wrote in his memoirs.
“The game was played by passing an eight-pound medicine ball over a ten-foot net on a court laid out as for tennis and scored the same way,” he wrote. “It required less skill than tennis, was faster and more vigorous, and therefore gave more exercise in a short time.”
New York Times Magazine reporter William Atherton DuPuy gave the sport its name in a 1931 article, according to the presidential foundation.
Hoover helped come up with the idea, it said, after he watched the sport “bull-in-the-ring,” which also used a medicine ball, aboard the battleship Utah in 1928.
The press had fun with the morning ritual and called the meetings the “Medicine Ball Cabinet,” according to the government website Navy Medicine.
Those who frequently attended included Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone, Attorney General William D. Mitchell, Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur and Agriculture Secretary Arthur Mastick Hyde, Hoover wrote in his memoirs.
After the game, they would have fruit juice and coffee, Hoover wrote.
From horseshoes to putting green to horseshoes again
Bush, the 41st president, jogged, played tennis and swam, but he made his sporting mark on the White House with a favorite pastime: horseshoes.
In 1989, Bush requested that a 40-foot horseshoe pit be installed near the existing tennis courts, according to news reports at the time.
It was not the first: President Harry S. Truman in 1946 had a horseshoe court on the lawn outside of the Oval Office that was removed when Eisenhower installed a putting green.
Bush had another horseshoe pit constructed near the swimming pool. When Queen Elizabeth visited in 1991, she gave Bush four silver horseshoes, and he demonstrated his pitching technique.
(Bush also had a horseshoe pit installed at Camp David in Maryland, where Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 famously scored a ringer in his first-ever try at the pastime. Bush presented Gorbachev with the horseshoe mounted on a plaque.)
Bowling at the White House
Donors in Truman’s home state, Missouri, gave the 33rd president two bowling lanes to celebrate his 63rd birthday.
The lanes were installed in the basement of the West Wing but were later moved to the nearby Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The New York Times reported when they were installed that Truman hadn’t been an avid bowler in recent years.
“Charles G. Ross, White House press secretary, was a little puzzled in explaining the gift, since Mr. Truman has not bowled since he was 19 years old, and there appeared little likelihood that he would take it up again,” the Times reported.
But Truman did have events there, including with the winners of a bowling championship at the Veterans Administration Paraplegic Centers, in 1947. Truman’s staff also started a bowling league.
President Richard Nixon was a more enthusiastic bowler, and he had a second, one-lane bowling alley installed in 1973. The bowling alley was built under the White House driveway.
Both the Truman and Nixon bowling alleys are still in their locations today.
Swimming over the years
The first pool was installed at the White House in 1933 to help President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had polio and used swimming for exercise.
The pool was indoors, and it was funded with the help of a campaign by the New York Daily News that sought donations, the White House Historical Association says on its website.
“Swimming is the only sport in which he can indulge. It is the one sport which he enjoys to the utmost, which will keep him in perfect physical condition,” the fund wrote, according to the historical association.
FDR used water to exercise after the diagnosis was made in 1921, including in Warm Springs, Georgia, which he bought and transformed into a rehabilitation center for polio patients, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum detailed about his therapy for the disease.
That indoor pool remained until 1970, when it was covered over and became the White House Press Room — although Nixon, the president at the time, gave orders that it not be harmed in the event a restoration was sought later, according to the historical association.
President Gerald Ford built the current outdoor pool, which opened in 1975. It remains on the South Lawn near the West Wing.
Calvin Coolidge’s mechanical horse
Coolidge enjoyed riding horses as a younger man, but when he became president, the Secret Service reportedly disapproved of the danger.
A friend, Dwight Morrow, gave Coolidge a mechanical horse, which looks something like a mechanical bull of more recent times. It was nicknamed “Thunderbolt.”
The device was invented by George Kellogg, according to the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library & Museum at Forbes Library in Massachusetts, where it remains on display.
Golf from Eisenhower to Trump
Golf has been a pastime of several presidents, and Eisenhower first established a putting green on the South Lawn, a version of which remains today.
Eisenhower’s 3,000-square-foot green was built in 1954, which took only a few weeks, according to the U.S. Golf Association, which assisted in the project.
“As you may know, I enjoy and need the exercise I get from occasional golf practice and this makes it easy for me to slip out for a half hour or so whenever I find the time,” Eisenhower wrote in a letter to USGA President Ike Grainger, according to the association.
Nixon had the putting green removed, but golf returned to the White House in 1991.
That year, Bush had an approximately 2,000-square-foot green installed “in a secluded area of the White House grounds near the tennis court, hidden from public view by large trees and shrubs,” The Associated Press reported at the time.
President Bill Clinton moved the green in 1995 to its current location.
In July 2025, pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau visited President Donald Trump at the White House for the signing of a Presidential Fitness Test order, and while he was there he chipped and putted around the White House green.
Trump is also an avid golfer and owns golf courses in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Lowes Island, Virginia, just outside Washington, among others, where he sometimes plays.
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