Golf buddy keeps Obama on course
At age 4, Marvin Nicholson hit his first golf ball on the nine-hole course his father had mowed into the front of the family’s Ontario farm. By age 7, he had won a Canada Dry Ginger Ale trophy for sinking a hole-in-one at the local public course. He caddied through college, carried Sen. John Kerry’s clubs in Nantucket and then lugged so many of Kerry’s bags during the 2004 presidential campaign that he distributed business cards stamped with “Chief of Stuff.”
A decade later, Nicholson has reached back to his golfing roots to become the Obama administration’s Secretary of Swing. Nicholson, 42, has golfed with the president about 140 times, far more than anyone else in or out of government.
At a time in Barack Obama’s presidency when political, national security and sartorial critics are chanting, “You’re doing it wrong,” Nicholson, whose official title is White House travel director, can be trusted never to darken the president’s day. A nonjudgmental figure who will never question Obama’s double-bogeys or his shifting red line in Syria, Nicholson, a geography major from the University of Western Ontario, rounds out the president’s foursomes and soothes his frayed feelings.
“Every president needs a space where he can be quiet and let loose and feel normal,” Obama said in a telephone interview Saturday. “And when I’m with Marvin, we can talk the same way we would if we were just a couple of guys having a beer and whacking a ball around.”
Nicholson’s soothing effect is not limited to the president.
“When you just need someone who is going to be nice to you, that’s Marv,” said Alyssa Mastromonaco, Nicholson’s ex-girlfriend and Obama’s former deputy chief of staff. While Nicholson is effective in overseeing the president’s travel, he stands out in an ambition-laden work environment because, she said, “Marv has no agenda.”
The recreational approach that he and the president take to the golf course - “It is the only time I can get four or five hours outside, and I don’t have the option to take long walks through a city,” Obama said - infuriates advocates of the Bill Clinton and Lyndon B. Johnson school of golfing, in which the green is a lush cell for politicking.
In a town where government officials, operatives, donors and lobbyists fantasize about presidential face time, Obama has bypassed them for a less political group of golf partners. They include Alonzo Mourning, the retired basketball star; Ahmad Rashad, the former Minnesota Vikings wide receiver, who has dated Valerie Jarrett, the White House adviser; pre-White House pals Marty Nesbitt, Eric Whitaker, Mike Ramos and Bobby Titcomb; and the ESPN personalities Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. Nicholson’s older brother, Walter, has joined more than a dozen times.
When Obama does golf with members of the administration, he often passes over Cabinet members for relatively low-level - and low-handicap – company, including Sam Kass, the president’s senior policy adviser on nutrition and the Obama family’s chef.
But Nicholson is the constant. On one of the rare occasions that Obama played politics on the golf course - when he and Speaker John Boehner of Ohio took on Vice President Joe Biden and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio - Nicholson was there, too, riding behind in a cart. During an outing with Vernon Jordan, the Washington power broker, and Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, Obama hardly talked to them and directed most of his comments to Nicholson, according to a person told of the outing.
Obama, whose 18 handicap is 10 strokes higher than Nicholson’s, said “I don’t know that he improves my game.” But there is something else that politicians find appealing about Nicholson, who was working in a Massachusetts windsurfing shop when he met Kerry. “He has lived a quirky, adventurous life,” Obama said. “But that means that he knows a lot about a lot of stuff.”
Nicholson declined to comment for this article, but his American-born mother, Elizabeth Beatty, described him as “always determined to go along and make sure everyone is happy and congenial.”
In the weeks after Nicholson’s father, himself a talented golfer, died, the young boy began taking a cup of Taster’s Choice coffee to his mother’s bed every morning. When she remarried and relocated the family to a suburb of Victoria, British Columbia, Marvin, the middle of her three sons, earned a reputation as a self-assured and selfless friend at St. Michaels University School, where he quoted the film character Ferris Bueller - “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.” - in his senior yearbook.
“He was always the life of the party, 100 percent,” said Jeremy Petzing, who owns a bar and grill in Victoria and played with Nicholson on the school golf team. “He wasn’t a position-taker. He would never really take sides. He was so easygoing, and the chicks just loved him.”
Mastromonaco, who was Nicholson’s girlfriend from 2001 to 2005, when they both worked for Kerry, said she looked forward to Nicholson’s phone calls (“Marv sounds like a man,” she said) and their walks on Capitol Hill, where he knew the names of so many people that she called him “the mayor.”
She also discovered the hidden artisan within.
“He paints,” Mastromonaco said. “He builds things.” A 13-star American flag that Nicholson made from painted fence pickets hangs in the home she shares with her husband, David Krone, the chief of staff to Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. (On Thursday, the husband and the ex went golfing together.)
David Wade, Kerry’s chief of staff and Nicholson’s traveling roommate for two years during the 2004 presidential campaign, also owns a flag made by Nicholson, which hangs in the executive suites of the State Department. Wade and others describe Nicholson as an easy conversationalist and conscientious friend who slips out to the drugstore to pick up cough medicine while you sleep or shows up to assemble a grill in the backyard while you work.
While Nicholson has a close friendship with Obama, Kerry is considered a father figure.
“Kerry always joked it was a brotherly relationship,” Wade said. “Other people always said it was more father-son. Probably Kerry called it brotherly because he didn’t want to acknowledge he was in his 60s. Just very, very close.”
Kerry was especially close when Nicholson’s younger brother, Peter, died in 2009 from a pulmonary embolism. He and Nicholson recently dined together at the Washington restaurant Cafe Milano before dropping by Mastromonaco’s place.
It was Mastromonaco who urged then-Sen. Obama to hire Nicholson. After getting Kerry’s blessing, Nicholson took the job. Early on he used his big frame and basketball skills to fend off Bill O'Reilly, the conservative television personality, at a 2008 campaign event. Soon he was a fixture at the president’s side.
Peter Souza, the White House photographer, has captured Obama surreptitiously placing his foot on a scale as Nicholson weighed himself and shooting his arms in the air as Nicholson kicked a field goal at Soldier Field in Chicago after a dinner in 2012 with NATO dignitaries.
Reggie Love, Obama’s all-purpose personal aide before Nicholson, said in a 2013 talk at the University of California, Los Angeles, that on the day that Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, while most top officials were in the Situation Room, the president “was like, ‘I’m not, I’m not going to be down there, I can’t watch this entire thing.’” Love said the president retreated to a private dining room where he, Souza and Nicholson “must have played 15 hands, 15 games of Spades.”
But Nicholson’s mother worries a little about where her son will be after Obama hits his final drive as president. “That’s the 64-dollar question,” she said. “I would like him maybe to have some time for himself.”
Mastromonaco, whose old beau is said to be in a new relationship, had similar concerns. “I don’t know if there is too much else, generally,” besides working all week and playing golf with the president on the weekends and occasionally going to Home Depot for art supplies.
“I don’t know what he does next,” she said, adding that she sometimes wonders, “What’s going to fulfill the Marv dream?”
If the stuff of the Marv dream is a wife and kids, Obama is reluctant to weigh in.
“I’m definitely not going to touch that one,” he said. But as far as a future on the fairways, Obama extended a coveted invitation. “As long as I’m playing golf,” the president said, “Marvin’s going to be in the rotation.”