One thing is clear about President Barack Obama's golf game: he clearly loves playing. In his first year as president, he's played 25 rounds, as much as his predecessor George W. Bush played in two terms. The state of his game is more murky. Golf Magazine's Top 100 Teacher Brady Riggs analyzed Obama's swing last summer and gave it a big thumbs-up for a beginner, while other reports say the commander in chief has become the hacker in chief.

Elizabeth Williamson of The Wall Street Journal checks in with the most detailed article to date on the president's golfing jones, interviewing teaching pros at the Vineyard Golf Club in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where Obama played his vacation golf. The verdict? The president has a long way to go if he wants his golf prowess to equal his ability on the basketball court.

Postings by golf observers on the Web site Baller-in-Chief, which is primarily devoted to the president's basketball game, posit a brutal answer: Mr. Obama has a golf handicap in the mid-20s, considered weak to average, and a cramped swing that's not so pretty.

A recent anonymous posting on Golf.com comes from a golfer who claims to have caught some of the action: "I had the misfortune of being stuck in a group on the same course as the Prez and his buddies and watching them play one hole in the time it took our foursome to play 3 was painful. The only thing stopping us from telling them to pick it up was the incredibly large security detail he had with him."

Williamson gets a couple good anecdotes from Vineyard Golf Club, including one teaching pro giving Obama an on-course bunker lesson ("Open the clubface more!") and the Secret Service tapping range balls to make sure they didn't contain hidden dangers.

A nice addition to the story is a gallery of presidential golfers, which includes some great pics I hadn't seen before: Richard Nixon with Jackie Gleason in Key Biscayne in 1968, Ronald Reagan teeing off in 1976 at the LA Country Club, and JFK, "the best golfer to ever inhabit the White House," at the Hyannis Port Country Club in July 1963.