Tiger Woods has agreed to help with the renovation of Langston Golf Course—a historic public track in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1939 as the city’s first golf course specifically built for African Americans—a White House adviser told Front Office Sports.

Langston is one of three public golf courses (alongside Rock Creek Park Golf and East Potomac Golf Links) in D.C. owned by the National Park Service, which in 2020 handed over operations of the courses to the National Links Trust, a nonprofit created in 2019, as part of a 50-year lease. 

In 2024, the NLT launched the Nation’s Capital Project, which seeks to revitalize and rehabilitate those three historic municipal golf courses. Famed golf architects Gil Hanse (Rock Creek), Beau Welling (Langston), and Tom Doak (East Potomac) have all signed on to provide pro-bono architectural services.

Work at Rock Creek is underway and likely won’t be finished until 2027. That project’s estimated cost, paid for by funds raised by the NLT, is between $25 million and $35 million. Once the Rock Creek renovation finishes, Langston will be up next. 

One man particularly excited about the Langston project is Ed Russo, a longtime consultant of President Donald Trump and now chairman of the White House Environmental Advisory Task Force, which was created in January. 

“I’m responsible for redesigning it and making it better than it ever was,” Russo told FOS last week in Miami. “And I’m proud to say that Tiger Woods has agreed to help me do that.”

Langston is an 18-hole course along the west bank of the Anacostia River. While Russo’s work will be largely focused on the environmental side—he said one priority will be to improve the habitat for the menhaden fish, which are found along the East Coast but are in decline—he’s excited to work with Woods. “I can’t wait to work with Tiger,” Russo said. “He’s a great guy.”

Langston Golf Course is named after John Mercer Langston, who was the first African American congressional representative from Virginia in 1890–91. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the course was managed by Lee Elder, who was the first Black player to compete in The Masters in 1975. Woods has publicly credited Elder for paving the way for people of color in the sport.

The NLT declined to comment when asked about Woods’s involvement in the forthcoming Langston project. Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, did not respond to a request for comment.

Welling, the golf architect who will head up the Langston renovation—in addition to leading his own firm—is a senior design consultant for TGR Design, Woods’s golf course design firm. TGR Design president Bryon Bell told FOS that the firm itself “does not have any involvement in the project at this time.” TGR Design is in the midst of its 12th major golf course project, leading efforts around a new nine-hole short course at Augusta Municipal Golf Course, which is undergoing a yearlong renovation spearheaded by Augusta National Golf Club. 

In recent weeks, debris from the White House’s $300 million East Wing renovation project has been transported to East Potomac Golf Links. A source told The Washington Post that some dirt from the White House site will be used to create mounds at the course.

Trump Golf owns and operates 16 golf courses across the world. In 2014, TGR Design was hired to design a Trump-owned course in Dubai, but that project was never completed. The Gil Hanse–designed Trump International Golf Club in Dubai opened in 2017.

Not having solved his last challenge, newly hired Rockies president of baseball operations Paul DePodesta said he is a “sucker” for the task of rebuilding Major League Baseball’s worst team.

Meeting with Rockies beat writers in Las Vegas during MLB GM meetings there, DePodesta said he was drawn in by the task of reshaping a club that barely avoided a modern-era league record for losses in a season, has dropped at least 100 games each of the last three seasons, and hasn’t had a winning campaign since 2018.

“I’ve used this phrase before, but I’m a bit of a sucker for a challenge,” said DePodesta, who was hired last week by the club. “The reality is that’s usually the situation. That’s why these jobs become available. They’re rarely rolling [with wins] and then are looking for someone new to take over. I’ve lived through this a number of times. It’s not going as well as you would have liked and you look for something different.

“I’ve been a part of that a number of different times, and I actually really enjoyed it,” he said. 

DePodesta comes to the Rockies after a lengthy stint with the Browns as the team’s chief strategy officer, a period during which the team barely won a third of its games and now arguably is just as adrift on the field as when he arrived there in 2016. 

Before the Cleveland stint, he spent 20 years in baseball across five clubs, and while he said he wasn’t actively looking to return to baseball, he remains drawn to it.

“You know, your first love, you kind of always have that in the back of your mind,” he said. “There were situations in baseball that I’ve just always been really intrigued by. I thought, ‘Boy, if that were available, that would be pretty intriguing.’ And so this was one of those.”

Addressing the Past and the Future

DePodesta was part of a Browns leadership team that executed the Deshaun Watson trade, one that ranks as one of the worst in NFL history, and was described earlier this year by team owner Jimmy Haslam as “a big swing and miss.” 

“Most of the decisions, especially the big ones like that, are organizational decisions,” DePodesta said. “I’m not a believer in the ‘King Scout’ situation where there is one guy who makes every call. … The jobs are too complex, the decisions are too hard.”

With Colorado, part of DePodesta’s task will be to push the Monfort family who owns the club to modernize and elevate what has been described as one of the least-progressive organizations in the game, and one that had MLB’s No. 21 luxury-tax payroll in 2025 at $145.3 million. DePodesta is the first executive in more than a quarter-century to come from outside the Rockies organization to lead the team’s baseball operations. 

“I think we’re going to have quite a bit of autonomy to do what we feel is right,” DePodesta said. “[Ownership] has been very open to suggestions and to a lot of ideas. They’re not only open, but I think they’re excited about doing some things differently and having some outside perspective to bring the organization to try some different things.”

As UCLA looks to rebuild its football program with a new head coach, the university has found itself engulfed in a lawsuit about a potential move away from its longtime home, the Rose Bowl.

The city of Pasadena, which owns the Rose Bowl, on Monday applied for a temporary restraining order to prevent UCLA from playing home games at SoFi Stadium (or any other Los Angeles–area facility) after multiple reports that a 2026 move to the $5 billion NFL venue was imminent. 

UCLA’s lease at the Rose Bowl, where the football team has played home games since 1982, runs through 2044. But on Sunday, Bruin Report Online first reported the program was finalizing plans to play at SoFi Stadium as soon as next year.

Monday’s request for a temporary restraining order, made in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, came after an initial lawsuit was filed Oct. 29. A Pasadena spokesperson was not able to comment on Monday’s filing when reached by Front Office Sports, but did point to a previous statement on the matter, which read in part:

“The City of Pasadena took the unfortunate but necessary step of filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court to enforce a lease agreement between the Rose Bowl Stadium and UCLA. That lease agreement is unambiguous, explicitly stating there is no option for UCLA to terminate the lease prior to its expiration in 2044. Notwithstanding the clear language of the lease, a representative from UCLA has notified the City and the Rose Bowl of UCLA’s intent to take steps that will breach the agreement.”

UCLA does not pay rent at the Rose Bowl, but also doesn’t receive revenue from luxury suite ticket sales or stadium sponsorships, which it would look to do if it played at SoFi Stadium. The school did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Searching for Answers

The Bruins are 3–6 this season, having gone 3–3 since firing coach DeShaun Foster following an 0–3 start. Foster is owed a buyout of more than $6 million.

UCLA’s five home games this season have averaged 37,098 fans at the 90,000-seat Rose Bowl, which is 25 miles away from campus. SoFi Stadium, which has a capacity of 70,000, is about 13 miles away from UCLA.