In Tahoe, a wild intersection of golf and celebrities
Serious golf is only for a few at the ACC; mostly it’s about partying/gambling off the links. Photo Copyright 2017 Carolyn E. Wright
By Malika Andrews, Joe Drape and Karen Crouse, New York Times
STATELINE — The 17th hole is the party spot. Nearby is a dock where fans motor up wearing swimsuits.
The football coach Herm Edwards remembers playing with the talk show host Maury Povich when his tee shot landed on a boat. Is that out of bounds? Povich asked. Edwards laughed. “No,” he said, “you can hit from there.” And so he did.
They were competing — or perhaps simply participating — in the annual American Century Championship, a celebrity golf tournament at Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course, a loose affair in its rules and its atmosphere. It’s not so much a sporting event as a gathering of famous and not-so-famous athletes and Hollywood talent on the shores of Lake Tahoe.
The tournament, entering its 29th year, sits in the not-taken-seriously corner of the sports landscape, with a reputation among golf-mad celebrities as a first-class frat party where short days give way to long nights at gambling tables and nightclubs.
This month the event got a new claim to fame, or infamy: According to the Wall Street Journal, a pornographic-film star was paid $130,000 before the 2016 election to conceal a past relationship with President Trump that began at the tournament.
