Golf – a refuge for US presidents but a headache for the Secret Service

Security risks abound on golf courses, with their wide-open spaces offering easy access

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Then President Ronald Reagan had gone to Augusta National Golf Club in 1983 for a break: He would stay in a cottage formerly favoured by Dwight D. Eisenhower and play the course renowned as the home of the Masters Tournament.

Then, a man rammed a pickup truck through a gate and headed towards the pro shop, where he took hostages and demanded to talk to Mr Reagan.

The episode ended after about two hours, with the president and the hostages unhurt. But Mr Reagan decided his time as the US' golfer in chief was largely done.

"Playing golf is not worth the chance that someone could get killed," he said, according to Mr Joseph Petro, a long-time member of Mr Reagan's protective detail who recounted the incident in his 2005 book, Standing Next To History: An Agent's Life Inside The Secret Service.

Mr Reagan rarely played again. Most recent American presidents have embraced golf as a bipartisan tradition a head-clearing, backslapping escape where a president is just as likely as anyone else to be betrayed by a putter.

But just as the Reagan episode prompted the White House to rethink whether presidential golf rounds invited unnecessary risks, Sept 15's apparently thwarted assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump has sparked questions about the perils that come with navigating 18 holes across wide-open spaces.

Presidents and their Secret Service agents have been trying for decades to balance security risks with the need for sporting refuges.