White House Adviser: Tiger Woods Is Part of D.C. Public Golf Project

Tiger Woods has agreed to help with the renovation of Langston Golf Course—a historic public track in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1939 as the city’s first golf course specifically built for African Americans—a White House adviser told Front Office Sports.

Langston is one of three public golf courses (alongside Rock Creek Park Golf and East Potomac Golf Links) in D.C. owned by the National Park Service, which in 2020 handed over operations of the courses to the National Links Trust, a nonprofit created in 2019, as part of a 50-year lease. 

In 2024, the NLT launched the Nation’s Capital Project, which seeks to revitalize and rehabilitate those three historic municipal golf courses. Famed golf architects Gil Hanse (Rock Creek), Beau Welling (Langston), and Tom Doak (East Potomac) have all signed on to provide pro-bono architectural services.

Work at Rock Creek is underway and likely won’t be finished until 2027. That project’s estimated cost, paid for by funds raised by the NLT, is between $25 million and $35 million. Once the Rock Creek renovation finishes, Langston will be up next. 

One man particularly excited about the Langston project is Ed Russo, a longtime consultant of President Donald Trump and now chairman of the White House Environmental Advisory Task Force, which was created in January. 

“I’m responsible for redesigning it and making it better than it ever was,” Russo told FOS last week in Miami. “And I’m proud to say that Tiger Woods has agreed to help me do that.”

Langston is an 18-hole course along the west bank of the Anacostia River. While Russo’s work will be largely focused on the environmental side—he said one priority will be to improve the habitat for the menhaden fish, which are found along the East Coast but are in decline—he’s excited to work with Woods. “I can’t wait to work with Tiger,” Russo said. “He’s a great guy.”

Langston Golf Course is named after John Mercer Langston, who was the first African American congressional representative from Virginia in 1890–91. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the course was managed by Lee Elder, who was the first Black player to compete in The Masters in 1975. Woods has publicly credited Elder for paving the way for people of color in the sport.

The NLT declined to comment when asked about Woods’s involvement in the forthcoming Langston project. Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, did not respond to a request for comment.

Welling, the golf architect who will head up the Langston renovation—in addition to leading his own firm—is a senior design consultant for TGR Design, Woods’s golf course design firm. TGR Design president Bryon Bell told FOS that the firm itself “does not have any involvement in the project at this time.” TGR Design is in the midst of its 12th major golf course project, leading efforts around a new nine-hole short course at Augusta Municipal Golf Course, which is undergoing a yearlong renovation spearheaded by Augusta National Golf Club. 

In recent weeks, debris from the White House’s $300 million East Wing renovation project has been transported to East Potomac Golf Links. A source told The Washington Post that some dirt from the White House site will be used to create mounds at the course.

Trump Golf owns and operates 16 golf courses across the world. In 2014, TGR Design was hired to design a Trump-owned course in Dubai, but that project was never completed. The Gil Hanse–designed Trump International Golf Club in Dubai opened in 2017.