Trump’s UFC matches are unprecedented, but sports at the White House aren’t

The UFC matches to be held on the lawn of the White House on President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday are sure to be a spectacle unseen in the history of the storied complex.

The stage, which began being set up on the South Lawn in late May, features a 92-foot, 600-ton structure that has been dubbed “The Claw.”

An event like UFC Freedom 250 is a first for the South Lawn, but sports, even exhibition matches, are not a totally foreign concept at the White House, although it was more modest.

President Warren G. Harding and his wife invited tennis champions from the U.S. and abroad for a tournament, and Jimmy Carter was known for vigorous jogs. George H.W. Bush played horseshoes, including showing off for Queen Elizabeth II, and Dwight D. Eisenhower built a putting green on the South Lawn. Barack Obama expanded the White House tennis courts to allow an alternate use of full-court basketball.

Perhaps the most similar to Sunday’s event and the presidency — in sport, not spectacle — is President Theodore Roosevelt, who famously enjoyed boxing in the White House gymnasium until he was injured.

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“After a few years I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood-vessels,” Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography.

“Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot,” Roosevelt wrote. “Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.”

Here’s a look at how some of the presidents have shaped and enjoyed sports on the White House grounds:

Tennis exhibitions at the White House courts

Harding and first lady Florence King Harding held tennis matches at the courts on the White House grounds.

In 1922, six tennis champions attended a tournament at the invitation of the Hardings, according to the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit organization founded by Jacqueline Kennedy.

Tennis courts were first installed at the White House under Roosevelt in 1903. Roosevelt recalled in his autobiography that those who joined him in the sport came to be called the “tennis cabinet.”

Building expansions moved the courts to the South Lawn, and they were later moved again.

President Gerald Ford, right, chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld, center, and David Hume Kennerly, personal photographer to the president, after a match on the White House tennis courts in 1975.National Archives

President Calvin Coolidge’s teenage son Calvin Jr. played on the courts and developed a blister — which would later become infected and lead to his death.

The New York Times in reporting on the July 7, 1924, death of “the bright and lovable sixteen-year-old” said a blister formed on the boy’s big toe of his right foot while he was playing a match with his brother.

“It was from this insignificant injury that septic poisoning resulted and caused his death,” the Times reported.

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.

President George H.W. Bush and John Denver pitch horseshoes in 1989.National Archives

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.

President Harry S. Truman bowling with three paralyzed bowling champions from Veterans Administration hospitals at the White House in 1947.Bettmann / Bettmann Archive

“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 bowls at the Executive Office Building in 1971. There have been two White House alleys at different times: the Truman alley, now at the office building, and one during Nixon's administration.Oliver F. Atkins / National Archives

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.

Calvin Coolidge's mechanical horse.Calvin Coolidge Library and Museum

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.