Serial Golf Cheat at White House
P.G. Wood house has written that the best way to get a man’s character to play golf with him. In his short story "Ordeal by Golf," the narrator says, "There is no other way of life when the hooves split so fast." Donald Trump is a favorite golfer, too, and is an active owner of seventeen golf courses on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, all the evidence shows that he loved golf more than immersing himself in the work of the Presidency.
According to the TrumpGolfCount.com website, which closely follows Trump's game, has made 165 guests to golf clubs since becoming President, and has played golf at least seventy-seven times. In March alone, he played six rounds at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Although incarcerated in Washington, he maintains his golf practice. The Washington Post reported that Trump has installed a state-of-the-art golf simulation machine in the White House residence, allowing him to pretend he is playing world-famous courses.
By the standards of many weekend pitchers, Trump is a respectable player, as his teammates testify, with a rotating house swing that pushes the ball away. But he does not claim to be an honorable player; he claims to be a successful amateur who has won an amazing eighteen club competition. (At any golf club, club championship is the biggest tournament of the year.) Over the years, however, legends of Trump's relentless cheating on the media have spread widely. In his new book “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Donald Trump,” sports writer Rick Reilly put the news together and found some new ones. Relying on testimonials from teammates, cardinals, and former Trump employees, Reilly opens more holes in Trump’s wonders than there are sand traps in all of his covered studies. It's a funny and scary turn. "Trump doesn't just play golf," Reilly notes. “He is cheating as a seller of three cards in Monte. He throws it, tears his boots, and moves on. He lies about his lies. He twists and turns and swells and swells. ”
Reilly recounts the time when Trump was announced as the club's top champion at Trump National Bedminster, New Jersey, even though he was in Pennsylvania on the day of the event. “He had announced that the club should start having big team games for those aged 50 and over, but he forgot that one of the top players in the club had just turned 50,” Reilly wrote. “With little chance of beating the boy, he went up to his Trump Philadelphia course on the day of the tournament and played with his friend there. After that, according to a source inside the Bedminster club, he called the Bedminster pro shop and announced that he would shoot 73 and should be declared the winner. The expert, wanting to stay active, agreed. His name was raised on the board. ”
This has been a double whammy. When someone from a Bedminster group called Trump's caddy to a meeting in Philadelphia and asked what he was going to shoot there, caddy replied, "Maybe 82. And that would be generous."
Apparently, Trump is pulling this kind of stuff all the time. Last month, another well-known sports writer, Michael Bamberger, reported that Trump had won the 2018 team title at his West Palm Beach club without playing in that tournament. And Trump has admitted to Reilly that at least some of those eighteen club competitions were by no means competitive. "Whenever I open a new golf course, I play the official opening round and just call it the club's first tournament," Reilly told Trump. "Anyway! I'm the first club champion!"
Trump’s biggest golf boast is that he plays 2.8 cripples. Disability is designed to rank players and make it easier for weak players to compete with strong ones. A 2.8 crash shows that a player is able to play a cycle almost three times more than the average, which is very difficult to do. According to the United States Golf Association, Trump's mark will put him on the top 5 percent of players with a disability. But those figures apply to players of all ages, and Trump is now seventy-two years old.
Among golfing septuagenarians, a handicap of 2.8 is very rare. Jack Nicklaus, who is either the best or second best golfer ever, depending on how you rank Tiger Woods, has a handicap of 5.2. If Nicklaus played Trump in a proper match, Trump would have to give him two shots. The Golden Bear is seven years older than Trump, but, as Reilly asks, “If you needed a partner for a death match . . . would you take Trump or Jack Nicklaus?”
Actually, it might be smart to pick Trump, especially if there wasn’t a team of referees to monitor his every move. Some of his tactics are blatant: not counting foul shots, dropping balls closer to the hole, and improving his lies. At Winged Foot, a storied New York course where Trump is a member, Reilly tells us, “the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: ‘Pele.’ ” (For those who don’t know soccer, the Brazilian Pelé was one of the best kickers of a ball in history.)
And Trump doesn’t only give himself unfair advantages: he’s also been known to hobble his opponents. On another occasion recounted by Reilly, Trump was playing with Mike Tirico, the sportscaster, who hit a long, soaring second shot into a par five, high-fived his caddy, and headed for the green. When he got there, there was no sign of his ball; it had somehow ended up in a sand trap some fifty feet left of the pin. “Lousy break,” Trump said. Tirico was so befuddled that he took a seven. Afterward, Trump’s caddy told Tirico that his approach shot had actually finished up about ten feet from the hole. “Trump threw it into the bunker,” the caddy said. “I watched him do it.”
Of course, Trump isn’t the first golfer to give himself a mulligan, which is golfspeak for a do-over. He also isn’t the first President to do this. Bill Clinton, an enthusiastic hacker, took so many mulligans that they became known as “Billigans,” Reilly says. But Reilly also points out that “Clinton’s methods were less diabolical and more goofy” than Trump’s are. With this President, the finagling on the course is more serious, “a path to something more important: I win again.”
In tracing the roots of Trump’s cheating, Reilly points out that Trump learned some of his tricks from the hustlers at Cobb’s Creek, a gritty public course in West Philadelphia, which he played when he was studying at the University of Pennsylvania. In searching for deeper motivations, Reilly consults with Lance Dodes, a Harvard psychiatrist, who says, of Trump, “He can’t stand not winning, not being the best. It had to have started very early in his development. . . . He exaggerates his golf scores and his handicap for the same reason he exaggerates everything. He has to. He exhibits all the traits of a narcissistic personality disorder. . . . He’s a very ill man.”
Reilly doesn’t say if he agrees with this diagnosis. But at the end of his book, he raises the question of whether Trump’s cheating matters and answers it in the affirmative. “If you’ll cheat to win at golf, is it that much further to cheat to win an election? To turn a Congressional vote? To stop an investigation? If you’ll lie about every aspect of the game, is that much further to lie about your taxes, your relationship with Russians, your groping of women? . . . I’m glad my dad didn’t live to see a Commander in Cheat like Trump. It would’ve turned his stomach.”
For a sportswriter, that’s quite a bit of editorializing, and yet one senses that Wodehouse would have approved. In “Ordeal by Golf” his alter ego remarks, “I employed a lawyer for years until one day I saw him kick a ball out of his heel-mark. I removed my business from his charge next morning.” The rest of us don’t have that option. For now, at least, we are stuck with Pelé in the White House.
