Commander in Cheat

1

THE BIG LIE

IN THE 30 YEARS I’ve known Donald Trump, I never believed anything he said, but the wink-wink of it was that I never thought he believed any of it either. He was like your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving who sits in the living room telling the kids whoppers about punching Sinatra while the parents all roll their eyes in the kitchen. He was a fun, full-of-it fabulist.

One time, for instance, I was in his office in Trump Tower. He pulled a yellow laminated card out of his wallet and slapped it down on his massive desk like a fourth ace.

“Look at that!” he said. “Only nine people in the world have that!”

The card read: Bearer Eats Free at Any McDonald’s Worldwide.

“It’s only me, Mother Teresa, and Michael Jordan!” he crowed.

I pictured Mother Teresa, at that very moment, pulling into the drive-thru at the Calcutta McDonald’s, rolling down the window, leaning her habit out, and saying, “I need 10,000 double cheeseburgers, please.”

I liked Trump the way I liked Batman. He was what eight-year-old me thought a gazillionaire should be like—his name in 10-foot-high letters on skyscrapers and on giant jets, hot and cold running blondes hanging on each arm, $1,000 bills sticking out of his socks.

So I knew the whole “running for president” thing had to have an angle. There’s always an angle. The trick was figuring out what it was.

The first time I met Donald Trump, way back when, I was the back-page columnist at Sports Illustrated. I was playing in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am when he came at me with a bible-salesman grin and a short-fingered hand to shake. His wife, Marla Maples, was smiling at me, too.

Uh-oh, I thought. What’s this?

“You’re my favorite writer!” Trump bellowed. “I love your stuff. Tell him, Marla!”

“He does!” she said. “Look!” And she pulled out of her purse a column I’d written. Okay, there was the set-up. What was the hook?

“So,” he said, “when are you going to write about ME?”

Ahh, there it was.

No problem. Trump was the most accessible, bombastic, and quotable businessman in the world. Why would I turn that down? So when I set out to write my golf book Who’s Your Caddy?—in which I would caddy for 12 golf legends, celebrities, and oddballs—I asked if he wanted to be a chapter. “Absolutely!” he said.

When the day came, he didn’t have anybody to play with, so he announced that I wouldn’t be caddying for him, I’d be playing with him. Okay, you take what you can get. We played his Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York, and it was like spending the day in a hyperbole hurricane.

Trump didn’t just lie nonstop about himself that day. He lied nonstop about ME. He’d go up to some member and say, “This is Rick. He’s the president of Sports Illustrated.” The guy would reach out to shake my hesitant hand, but by then Trump had dragged me forward to the next member. Or secretary. Or chef. “This is Rick. He publishes Sports Illustrated.” Before I could object, he’d go, “And this is Chef. He was voted Best Hamburger Chef in the world!” And the poor chef would look at me and shake his head with a helpless “no,” same as me.

When we were alone, I finally said, “Donald, why are you lying about me?”

“Sounds better,” he said.

Sounding better is Trump’s m.o. It colors everything he says and does. The truth doesn’t break an egg with Trump. It’s all about how it sounds, how it looks, and the fact checkers can go run a 100-yard dash in a 50-yard gym.

A friend of mine had dinner with Trump and his wife, Melania, in 2015, when this whole presidential thing was starting to simmer. The husbands and wives had veered off into separate conversations. The wife said, “You have a lovely accent, Melania. Where are you from?”

“Slovenia,” she said.

Trump, in mid-sentence, turned to her and interjected: “Say Austria. Sounds better.”

But when I read The Big Lie, it nearly made me spit out my Cheerios. It was a tweet he’d originally posted in 2013, but I hadn’t read it until his campaign began. Trump was embroiled in one of his hundreds of celebrity feuds, this one with somebody in his weight class—Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire sports fan Mark Cuban. Cuban had dissed him on some forgettable TV show years before. “I think I said, ‘I can write a bigger check than Trump right now and not even know it was missing,’” Cuban remembers.

Trump seethed about it. Trump can dish out the insults by the steam shovel but he can’t take a teaspoonful back. His rule is: “When I’m attacked, I fight back 10 times harder.” He vowed lifetime revenge on Cuban that day.

That’s when he challenged Cuban.

Eighteen championships? That’s like an NFL quarterback telling you he’s won 18 Super Bowls. It’s preposterous. It’s a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float of a lie. Besides, Trump had already given away his little secret of how he does it that day at Westchester. “Whenever I open a new golf course,” he told me, “I play the official opening round and then I just call that the first club championship. There you go! I’m the first club champion!… That’s off the record, of course.”

You gotta admit: It’s sleazy, it’s morally bankrupt, but it’s pretty clever.

I did keep it off the record, for years. But then he kept bludgeoning people over the head with it.

“You know, I’ve won 18 club championships,” he said half a dozen times during campaign stops. “I’m a winner.” As though the trunk of his Rolls-Royce is so full of golf trophies that he can’t even get it shut.

In an interview with the Washington Post, he said, humbly, “My life has been about victories. I’ve won a lot. I win a lot. I win—when I do something, I win. And even in sports, I always won. I was always a good athlete. And I always won. In golf, I’ve won many club championships. Many, many club championships. And I have people that can play golf great, but they can’t win under pressure. So, I’ve always won.”

After a big primary win, he bragged at the podium, “I know how to win. I’ve won… these people will tell you. Have I won many club championships? Does Trump know how to close?”

At another campaign stump: “Winning is winning. It’s not easy to win club championships, believe me. And I’m not talking about with strokes. I’m talking with no strokes.”

Winning 18 club championships is a lie that’s so over-the-top Crazytown it loses all credibility among golfers the second it’s out of his mouth. To double-check, I called the only guy who could come close: George “Buddy” Marucci, of Philadelphia. Like Trump, Marucci belongs to more clubs than you can fit in your bag. Like Trump, he’s in the right age bracket, at six years younger than Trump. Like Trump, he’s got all the money he needs to play as many club championships as he can fly to. Unlike Trump, he’s as fine a golfing businessman as you can find. Marucci took 19-year-old Tiger Woods—24 years his junior—to the last hole of the 1995 U.S. Amateur final before finally losing.

So, Buddy Marucci, do YOU have 18 club championships?

“Ha!” he laughed. “No way. I have a few, but nowhere near that many. It’s hard to win a club championship. I might have eight. Tops.”

This is a guy who’s been breaking par for the past 45 years. He belongs to nearly every creamy course in the world—Winged Foot, Seminole, Pine Valley, Cypress Point. If it’s on a top 10 in the world list, Marucci probably has a locker there.

“Eighteen?” he said. “I don’t see how anybody could do that.” When I explained to him how Trump did it, he said, “You know, I’m not sure even doing THAT I could get to 18.”

When Trump told Gary Player he’d won 18 championships, Player scoffed. “I told him that if anyone beats him, he kicks them out. So, he had to win.”

Was Trump’s name on the wall of any clubs he didn’t own? Nope. Was it on the walls at Trump Washington, D.C., in Virginia, a course that was already up and running when he bought it? Nope. Or Trump Jupiter, which was a Ritz Carlton course when he bought it? Nope. Was it on the wall at any of his own courses he’d opened? Oh, yes.

Trump International in West Palm Beach, Florida, has a plaque on the wall that lists all the men who’ve won the men’s club championship. Trump appears three times: 1999, 2001, and 2009. But hold on. The course wasn’t even open in 1999. Turns out, then White House spokesperson Hope Hicks admitted to the Washington Post, Trump played in a “soft opening” round on November 1 of that year with “a group of the early members” and declared it the club championship.

Congratulations?

On March 17, 2013, Trump tweeted he’d won the club championship again at Trump International. This is the one he was gloating to Cuban about.

But the plaque for that year lists the winner as “Tom Roush.” The catch? It wasn’t really the club championship at all. Trump won the “Super Seniors Club Championship,” which at most clubs is reserved for players 60 and older. Something to be proud of, sure, but not within a Super Walmart of beating the best young players in the club. The difference between “Club Champion” and “Super Senior Club Champion” is the difference between Vanna White and Betty White.

“I remember Melania used to ask us, ‘What is this ‘Super Seniors’?’” recalls former Trump Westchester exec Ian Gillule. “And Mr. Trump would say, ‘Oh, Super Seniors is better than just a regular club championship, honey.’ He was saying it tongue in cheek but she didn’t know the difference.”

I called golf writer Michael Bamberger of Golf.com. He once did a story for Sports Illustrated on playing every Trump course with Trump. Had he heard about these 18 club championships? He had.

Bamberger: “We were at Trump Westchester and Trump says, ‘Michael, I just won the club championship here.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a little hard to believe, since he’s about a 9 or 10 [handicap] and you don’t get any strokes in the club championship.’ So I said, ‘Who’d you beat?’ And he said, ‘This guy!’” Trump was pointing to his longtime cement contractor, Lou Rinaldi, who’s a zero handicap and a terrific player. Bamberger looked at Rinaldi, who shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “I’m gonna argue with my boss?”

Later, Bamberger found out that, too, was the senior club championship. “Then I found out even later,” Bamberger says, “that it wasn’t that year at all. It was a different year.”

At Trump Bedminster in New Jersey, Trump once won a senior club championship from 87 miles away. He’d declared that the club should start having senior club championships for those 50 and up, but he forgot that one of the best players at the club had just turned 50. Having zero chance at beating the guy, he went up to his Trump Philadelphia course on the day of the tournament and played with a friend there. Afterward, according to a source inside the Bedminster club, he called the Bedminster pro shop and announced he’d shot 73 and should be declared the winner. The pro, wanting to stay employed, agreed. His name went up on the plaque. “But then,” says the source, “somebody talked to the caddy up in Philly and asked him what Trump shot that day. The caddy goes, ‘Maybe 82. And that might be generous.’ He pulls that kind of sh*t all the time around here.”

More than one source described another time when Trump happened to walk into the Bedminster clubhouse just as a worker was putting up the name of the newly crowned senior club championship winner on a wooden plaque. Trump had been out of town and hadn’t played in the tournament, but when he saw the player’s name, he stopped the employee. “Hey, I beat that guy all the time. Put my name up there instead.” The worker was flummoxed.

“Really, sir?”

“Yeah, yeah. I beat that guy constantly. I would’ve beaten him. Put my name up.”

Of the 18 club championship “wins” that Trump listed for Golf Digest, 12 are actually senior or super senior club championships. To repeat: senior and super senior club championships are not men’s club championships. They’re like bowling with bumpers. Besides, as I say, most of those smell like three-day-old halibut. So that leaves six real club championships. One of the six he lists was Trump Westchester 2001, when the club wasn’t officially open yet. That leaves five. The next was Westchester 2002, when the club was only nine holes. If it really happened, you can’t count that. That leaves four, one of them being Westchester in 2004. Could he have actually won that?

“Well, no, I know for a fact that’s not true,” Gillule says. “He never won any in the eight years I worked there. I mean, I loved working for Mr. Trump, but you know, some people take a certain license with the truth.”

We do know that Trump played in the 2007 Westchester Men’s Club Championship and was knocked out in the first round by a 15-year-old named Adam Levin. Trump was four-up with five holes to play, helped greatly by the 60-year-old calling two ticky-tack rule violations on the kid, one for accidentally touching the grass inside a hazard and one for fixing a small ball mark off the green, both loss-of-hole penalties.

That’s when, according to Levin, Trump said to the small gallery, “The kid put up a good fight, didn’t he?” A small bonfire lit under Levin, who wound up winning hole after hole, tying Trump up through 18 and then winning on the second playoff hole.

“He didn’t even say ‘Congratulations’ or ‘Good match,’” remembers Levin, now a data analyst. “He didn’t look me in the eye. He just shook my hand and walked off. He’d kind of been a dick the whole day. We were together for five or six hours, so there was plenty of time for conversation with me or my parents, but all he ever said was, ‘Isn’t this course fantastic?’ and ‘Aren’t these facilities the best?’ He’s a total asshole with no character.”

That leaves three possible club championship wins, all at one course—Trump International in West Palm Beach. But we already know the 1999 win there is a lie, since the course wasn’t open. That leaves two. Of those two—2001 and 2009—I have never seen a signed scorecard or spoken to any objective person who remembers him winning or not winning.

Final score on the “18 club championships”: Lies 16, Incompletes 2, Confirms 0. By this time, Trump’s nose has grown so long he could putt with it.

The whole thing bugged me so much I started to itch. I wasn’t offended as a voter. I was offended as a golfer. You can’t get away with that. You want to make political promises you can’t keep? Great, knock yourself out. You want to invent tales of your cutthroat savvy in business deals? Live it up. But golf means something to me. I’ve played it my whole life. It’s kept me sane and happy and found me more friends than I can count.

One of the things I love the most about golf is that you’re your own referee. You call fouls on yourself. Integrity is built into the fabric of the game. Honesty is more precious in golf than the little white dimples. As Ben Crenshaw likes to say, “Golf is a game with a conscience.”

For golfers, the stain of cheating is so much graver than winning or losing that we live in mortal fear of being called a cheater. Tom Watson accused Gary Player of illegally moving a leaf away from his ball at the Skins Game in 1983 and they’ve hardly spoken since. One leaf. Vijay Singh could win 10 majors and never lose his label as a cheater, based on a tiny incident that may or may not have happened once years ago in Indonesia.

So here was Trump caterwauling about 18 golf championships that were faker than Cheez Whiz, and it started to make me think. How much of what Trump says about his golf brilliance does the country believe? During the campaign, when Trump stood up in front of 30,000 red hats and bloviated, “When it comes to golf, very few people can beat me,” did people buy that? Because 50 guys at every course in America can beat him.

When Trump turned his back on Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, did anybody know that he’d abandoned his “fabulous” golf project there the year before, a bankruptcy that left the tiny territory with a $32 million debt?

When Trump held endless 18-hole meetings at his Florida courses with this prime minister and that emperor, were these leaders returning home to laugh at OUR president the way they laughed at him at the United Nations? Would they think all Americans cheat at golf?

It got me thinking…

Somebody should point out that the way Trump does golf is sort of the way he does a presidency, which is to operate as though the rules are for other people.

Somebody should explain that facts and truth are to Trump what golf scores and crowd sizes are—“feelings”—malleable and negotiable, flitting this way and that like an arm-waving inflatable car-lot balloon man.

Somebody should write that the way Trump cheats at golf, lies about his courses, and stiffs his golf contractors isn’t that far from how he cheats on his wives, lies about his misdeeds, and stiffs the world on agreements America has already made on everything from Iran to climate change.

“Golf is like bicycle shorts,” I once wrote. “It reveals a lot about a man.”

You could write a book about what Trump’s golf reveals about him.

Here it is.