by Rick Reilly
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.
2
YOU AIN’T NO BALLERINA
Golf is fatal.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
FOR PRESIDENTS, THE WHITE House is a kind of prison with butlers. You can’t go anywhere without a squadron of Secret Service people and a week of planning. You sleep above your office, where a desk full of the world’s biggest problems silently screams for you. That’s why golf is perfect for presidents. With no skyscraper windows, no streets for people to line up on, no intersections, no passing cars, presidents can stay relatively safe.
Where they play, how they play, how often and why they play can sometimes tell you more about a president than a room full of historians.
Golf didn’t become trendy in America until the turn of the 20th century, and one of the first to get bit was William Howard Taft, a man who topped 300 pounds. He loved the game so much that he once blew off the president of Chile, who was waiting for him back in the White House, to keep his tee time.
Woodrow Wilson was such a worrier that his doctor ordered him to play golf to relieve his indigestion, even though Wilson couldn’t play dead in a cowboy movie. He rarely broke 110. He’d putt hunched over 90 degrees, like a man talking to a pet mouse, with a putter that couldn’t have been much taller than a toilet plunger. Wilson played only with his wife and his doctor, fearing that anybody else would want to talk about the League of Nations or somesuch. He became hopelessly addicted to the game. He even painted his golf balls black so he could play in the snow. Wilson makes Trump look like a newbie. Presidential golf historian Don Van Natta estimates Wilson might have played as many as 1,600 times during his eight years, about every other day, always first thing in the morning. He played faster than the morning train and was usually back at his desk by 9 am.
The swashbuckling Warren Harding was just the opposite. Golf to him was a kind of party with spikes. Why hurry? He loved all celebrities, but especially golf stars. He hosted the legendary night owl Walter Hagen often. One day, Hagen presented Harding with one of his favorite drivers.
“What can I do for you in return?” Harding asked, tickled.
The habitually late Hagen said it sure would be convenient to have a Secret Service badge to get him out of speeding tickets. He got it.
Harding was the first in a long line of presidents who fudged the rules. He was great fun on the golf course, long on laughs, always in plus fours and a bow tie. He wasn’t above having a few belts between green and tee, which, coupled with his big off-balance lash, kept him from scoring well. Still, he was devoted to it. He was in San Francisco, on a vacation that included boat loads of golf, when he suddenly shuddered and died, probably of congestive heart failure. To commemorate him, San Francisco is now home to a terrific public golf course, Harding Park.
Calvin Coolidge wasn’t good or fun or loose with golf at all and, in fact, was a chop’s chop, which is to say he was so bad he couldn’t even shoot his weight. When he left the White House for good, he left his clubs there.
Our most talented golfing president, by far, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A big hitter with a fine iron game and a diamond cutter’s touch around the greens, he won many golf medals as a teen and, at 18, won the men’s club championship (no, really) at Canada’s Campobello Golf Club. But polio hit him at age 39, 12 years before he became president, and he never played again. Still, his work projects gave us dozens of terrific public tracks, including Bethpage in New York, site of the 2019 PGA Championship.
Harry Truman played piano, not golf, but his successor, Dwight Eisenhower loved it like dogs love bones. He could hardly stand to be away from his clubs. In fact, he’d stroll the halls of the White House with an iron, taking half-swings while he pondered what to do about the postwar world. He and his idol—a permanently tan heartthrob named Arnold Palmer—fueled the 1960s golf boom in this country that didn’t slow down until the Great Recession of 2007.
Ike loved golf but it didn’t love him. His Achilles’ heel was putting. He’d approach the ball as if it were a snake, freeze like a statue over it, then jab at it and jump back fast. He seemed to have 11 kinds of yips. To practice, he built a putting green outside the Oval Office. Sometimes, upon re-entering the office, he’d forget to take off his spikes. I once crouched down there and felt the holes he left in the wooden floor.
Were it not for his bad back, President Kennedy could’ve been terrific. He played on the Harvard freshman golf team but hurt his back playing football and didn’t go out the next year. His swing was elegant and upright, with a perfectly balanced finish, his slim right shoulder facing perfectly toward the target, his hatless hair tossed back with the wind, a kind of Gatsby in cashmere. Unlike Trump, JFK didn’t want to talk about his golf, didn’t want cameras around while he played it, and didn’t want to announce what he shot. After his election but before his inauguration, Kennedy rattled his tee shot in and out of the cup on the 16th at Cypress Point, the most famous par 3 in the world. Kennedy breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re yelling for the damn ball to go in,” he said to his playing partners, “and I’m seeing a promising political career coming to an end!”
LBJ played miserably and mostly as a way to cajole congressmen to vote for this bill or that. They say he wrangled the votes he needed for his landmark Civil Rights Act on the golf course. He was fond of swear words and mulligans, taking sometimes five, six, and seven of each in a single nine holes, always reminding his opponents, “It’s not nice to beat the president.” After he was out of the office, he found out how true that was.
Nixon played, but never looked natural at i
t, always smiling too big, wearing his pants too high. His friends said he did it just to suck up to Ike as his vice president. Nixon was about an 18 handicap, but after resigning over Watergate, golf became a refuge and he got down to 12. So, you know, Watergate wasn’t all bad.
Nixon’s resignation, coupled with the resignation of his veep Spiro Agnew, shoehorned into the Oval Office the only bonafide college sports star we’ve ever had, former Michigan lineman Gerald Ford. A natural athlete, President Ford loved golf, but it didn’t love him. Still, he’d play as much as he could. He’d even play in the PGA Tour’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a nightmare for the Secret Service, not to mention the galleries. Ford hit far more people with golf balls than ever voted for him for president (that number is zero), mostly because his driver was long and wrong. But he did make a hole in one once, at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, playing with Crenshaw in the Pro-Am. “The place went crazy,” Crenshaw remembers. “He was beside himself. He turned to me said, ‘I can’t believe I just did that!’”
Golf went dark for a while after Ford. Jimmy Carter fished. Reagan could take golf or leave it, preferring horses. He was about a 13. You can still see his locker at Los Angeles Country Club.
There can’t be a more golfy family than the Bushes. Bush 41’s grandfather, George Herbert Walker Bush, was the president of the U.S. Golf Association (USGA) and invented the Walker Cup, the amateur version of the Ryder Cup. Bush 41’s father, Prescott Bush, was scratch (a 0 handicap) and also president of the USGA for a year. Bush 41 was the fastest golfer I’ve ever seen. He was an 18 handicap with elbows flying every which way. He looked like a man trying to swat a horsefly. What he cared about more than score was finishing in less than two hours. The best-selling author James Patterson played with him once. “It was a blur,” Patterson says. “The whole thing seemed to be a rush to get to the end. It was a feeling like, ‘Wow, are we done now?’ But he was very nice, very kind, and very down to earth.”
Bush 41 loved the Texas pros like Crenshaw and Tom Kite as if they were his sons. In fact, any writer who dared criticize either of them would hear it from him personally, including yours truly. After Kite got out-captained by Seve Ballesteros in Spain at the 1997 Ryder Cup, despite having 8 of the top 14 players in the world (Europe had one), I poked a little fun at Kite. He was squiring Bush and Michael Jordan around in his plodding four-man cart while Seve was zipping hither and yon in some sort of turbo cart by Maserati, seemingly showing up at every hole, shouting instructions in Spanish, telling players which greens had been mowed during the round, and generally driving circles around Kite. Europe beat the United States, 14.5 to 13.5. The next week, Bush sent Sports Illustrated a hand-typed letter:
Was Rick Reilly even there? Didn’t he sense the comeback in the air on Sunday?… Tom Kite and the American players don’t deserve the cynical, subtle put down Reilly lays on them.
An America fan,
a Tom Kite fan,
G.B.
Yes, I was there. In fact, I perched next to Bush half a dozen times that day. Apparently, I didn’t make much of an impression.
Bob Hope once said, “I’ve always enjoyed playing golf with a president. The only problem is that there are so many Secret Service men around there’s not much chance to cheat.” Hope would’ve loved playing with Bill Clinton.
When I played with Clinton in 1995 at Congressional Country Club for a story, he cheated with the help of the Secret Service. He didn’t take mulligans, though, which are complete do-overs of a shot. No, he took what the press called “Billigans.” He’d hit his first ball and tell everybody he was going to play that one. But then he’d take three, four, even five practice shots from the same place—Billigans. (Wholly illegal.) Of course, with so many balls on the hole, it started to look like an Easter egg hunt. It was hard to figure out which was his first ball. Luckily, the Secret Service seemed to always know: the one near the pin. What agent doesn’t want to be ambassador to Sweden?
Clinton didn’t seem to give a fig about the four SWAT guys in the trees or the six agents walking with us, all of them Uzi’d up under their sport coats. We also had 13 golf carts following us, one of which held the red phone, one the assistant to the chief of staff, and one the chief of protocol. I don’t know how the chief of protocol would’ve liked what Clinton said to me as we walked past a balcony full of people waving to us. He was waving with his right hand and elbowing me in the ribs with the left.
“What?” I said out of the side of the mouth.
“You see the blond on the left?”
“Yeah?”
“I just got a wink from her.”
I wanted to say, “They did mention I was a reporter, right?”
Like Trump, Clinton was fabulous golf company. Unlike Trump, he wanted the round to last as long as humanly possible. A six-hour round was delirium for Clinton: more cigars, more laughing, less Bosnia. He zinged you, slapped you on the back, and praised you, sometimes all in one par 3. He was oddly conversant on anything golf. “You like that new bubble shaft?” he asked me. (I didn’t even realize I had one.) He had a complicated swing you’d never be able to find parts for—moving here and there, up and down, left and right. At impact, he’d jump up on the balls of his feet, like Andre Agassi hitting a forehand, and it produced a big cutting slice. This, plus the 24 clubs he had in his bag (the limit is 14), plus all the chasing down of the errant Billigans, was more than the caddy, a 70-year-old black gentlemen, could handle.
“Get off your toes!” he finally said. “You ain’t no damn ballerina!”
The chief of protocol’s mouth fell open like a drawbridge. The necks of the Secret Service agents snapped. There was an awkward pause. Then Clinton just said, “You’re right. My bad.” With all the Billigans and craziness, it was hard to tell what he shot, but the card said 82, which he told me later was the best of his life.
(Quick story about Trump and the Clintons: One time, Hillary gets her brother, Hugh Rodham, on at Winged Foot, even though neither are members. Rodham shows up wearing shorts. That’s a no-no at Winged Foot. Pants only. Hugh Rodham is a man of large girth, so there weren’t any pants in the pro shop that fit. The valet says to a caddy, “Go in and get Mr. Rodham a pair of rain pants to wear.” The caddy goes in, tries to think of a guy near to Rodham’s size, goes to Trump’s locker, gets his rain pants, and runs out. Rodham plays in the rain pants. When this story gets back to Trump, he flips out. He makes Winged Foot buy him an entirely new rain suit. Clinton cooties.)
The greatest day for presidential golf buffs was February 15, 1995, the only time three presidents have played in one group. It was at the Bob Hope Desert Classic—standing president Clinton, Bush 41, and Ford, with Hope thrown in as a foursome filler. It was a unique moment. I always fantasize that at one point Hope said, “You’re on the tee, Mr. President,” and three guys knocked heads trying to tee up their ball.
Bush shot 93, Clinton 95, and Ford 103. And we know those scores are real. It was on NBC. Bush, though, was a menace to the gallery. On the first hole, he ricocheted one off a tree and hit an elderly woman on her nose, breaking her glasses and splattering blood everywhere. On the 14th, he hit a man on the back of the leg. His wife Barbara shook her head and said, “As if we don’t have enough violence on television.”
Bush 43 was a fair golfer—about a 15—but he stopped playing golf in 2003 out of “solidarity” with soldiers in the war. No, he actually did. What would it take to get Trump to stop playing? Nuclear winter?
“The Bushes don’t cheat,” Crenshaw avers. “Forty-three will get to the first tee and say, ‘Now look, I’m not moving this ball today. I’m playing it honestly all the way through.’ And he would.”
Crenshaw became so close with Bush 43 that one year, when he was playing the PGA Tour’s Kemper Open near Washington, 43 insisted he stay at the White House. After the first round, though, Crenshaw, famously awful at directions, got lost coming back to the White House and ended up parked on the side of the highway, wres
tling a map. A patrolman pulled up and asked where he was trying to go.
“Well, uh, you’re not gonna believe this,” Crenshaw stammered, red-faced. “But I’m stayin’ at the White House.”
When the cop stopped laughing, he escorted him there personally.
Obama loved golf and liked to play it with—are you ready for this?—sportswriters. I kid you not. He played dozens of times with ESPN Pardon the Interruption hosts Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. Obama is a feverish sports nut, so it was a good fit. I know, because he was my fantasy football partner for an ESPN column once. He knew more than I imagined.
“We need a wide receiver,” I’d say. “Let’s pick (so and so).”
“No way,” he’d say. “They just lost their receivers coach.”
You could’ve put Obama’s golf on a USGA poster—no cheating, no mulligans, no do-overs. He also kept it very private. He rarely played with politicians or world leaders, mostly guys from his travel advance team, especially as he was trying to get better. After a year and a half out of office, he was down to an 11 handicap, according to Wilbon. “I’m not a hack, but I’m not quitting my day job,” he likes to say now. Off the tee he’s “very straight,” Tiger Woods says, but “not long.” His chipping is salty, but he’s a disaster in the bunkers. Like Saddam Hussein, he may someday get in a bunker and never get out.
Which brings us to Trump.
No president has been as up to his clavicles in golf as Donald Trump. None has been woven so deeply into the world of golf. Trump doesn’t just play courses; he builds them, buys them, owns them, operates them, sues over them, lies about them, bullies with them, and brags about them. From the people he knows, to the businesses he runs, to the favors he hands out, to the access he grants, to the trouble he gets into, to the places he goes, to the money he makes, to the money he loses, to the opinions it informs in his brain, Trump’s soul is practically dimpled.