Woke PGA Tour staff refuse photo with garish new | Golf News

The PGA Tour has returned to Trump National Doral for the first time in a decade, and the course has welcomed it back with one thing that has stopped gamers, staff and caddies in their tracks.

A 15-foot gold statue of Donald Trump, put in just off the walkway between the first tee and driving vary, depicts the president with his fist raised following the July 2024 assassination attempt at a marketing campaign rally in Pennsylvania, though not everyone on web site appeared thrilled with its presence.

The statue, formally dubbed the “Don Colossus,” sits on a two-tiered concrete pedestal that brings the whole peak to 22 ft. The 3.1-ton bronze construction is roofed in gold leaf, and the pedestal alone weighs 7,000 kilos. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s golf pastime has come at a staggering price to taxpayers.

It was commissioned by $PATRIOT, a cryptocurrency group, and created by Zanesville, Ohio sculptor Alan Cottrill, though its journey to Doral was significantly more sophisticated than merely carving and putting in a likeness of the president.

Cottrill had been paid $300,000 for the bronze work and another $60,000 for the gold leafing, but a dispute emerged after the crypto group used the paintings’s likeness to promote crypto tokens, which Cottrill alleged constituted copyright infringement.

He held the statue in an undisclosed location in Muskingum County, east of Columbus, and refused to release it until all events reached an settlement. That decision got here last week.

Cottrill wrapped the statue, strapped it to a flatbed trailer and drove it from Ohio to Miami himself, before putting in it on the custom-designed pedestal overlooking the resort’s golf programs. “Now fully installed, the sculpture is prominently positioned overlooking the resort’s golf courses, where its gold-leaf surface interacts dynamically with the South Florida light,” Cottrill said in a press release.

On Tuesday, during pre-tournament festivities for the Cadillac Championship, the statue turned the dominant dialog on the driving vary. Players lined up to offer their reactions, most of them diplomatic.

Rickie Fowler, who lives close by in Jupiter, managed two sentences. “It’s big and gold. About all I got. It’s his place — he can do whatever he wants.”

Maverick McNealy confirmed what everybody might see: “It’s very tall and very gold.” Tommy Fleetwood discovered humor in it. “If I have my own resort one day maybe I’ll put a big gold statue of me on it,” the Englishman said with a giggle. “We’ll see.”

Not everybody was inclined to interact. When a event photographer gathered a group of PGA Tour staff members and requested if they wished a group photo beside the statue, he obtained a collective and rapid refusal. The photographer’s response was pointed. “Ok, I didn’t know you were all so woke,” he said.

The Cadillac Championship runs from April 30 to May 3 at the Blue Monster, which last hosted a PGA Tour event in 2016 before the connection between Trump and the Tour fractured during his first presidency. The course has since hosted 4 LIV Golf occasions.

Whether Trump himself will seem at Doral this week stays unclear, but his presence on the property is already unattainable to miss.