Commander in Cheat

by Rick Reilly

  So why isn’t being a 9 good enough for Trump?

  Because, as you’re about to find out, “good enough” is never good enough for Donald Trump.

  4

  PELE

  He cheats like hell.

  —SUZANN PETTERSEN, LPGA GOLFER

  I USED TO HAVE this coach who told us, “How you do one thing is how you do everything. You loaf in practice, you’re gonna loaf in the game. You cheat on your tests, you’re gonna cheat on your wife.”

  I’ve found that to be true with golf. The guy who plays slowly on the course is going to be molasses in meetings. The guy who’s generous with compliments on the course is going to do the same at dinner. And the guy who cheats on the course is going to cheat in business, or on his taxes or, say, in politics.

  Jack O’Donnell worked with Trump for four years as vice president of Trump Plaza Casino in Atlantic City. O’Donnell’s dad was one of the founders of Sawgrass, the iconic Pete Dye golf course near Jacksonville, Florida. “My dad always told us to respect the game,” O’Donnell says. “That’s the one part of the game that tells me what kind of person you are. You play the ball where it lies.” So when O’Donnell’s office colleague, the late Mark Eddis, came back after his first round with Trump, O’Donnell couldn’t resist asking.

  “So, does he improve his lie?”

  Eddis looked at him and threw his head back in laughter. “Every shot but the tee shot.”

  Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf. He cheats like a three-card Monte dealer. He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs. At Winged Foot where Trump is a member, the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: “Pele.”

  “I played with him once,” says Bryan Marsal, longtime Winged Foot member and chair of the coming 2020 Men’s U.S. Open. “It was a Saturday morning game. We go to the first tee and he couldn’t have been nicer. But then he said, ‘You see those two guys? They cheat. See me? I cheat. And I expect you to cheat because we’re going to beat those two guys today.’… So, yes, it’s true, he’s going to cheat you. But I think Donald, in his heart of hearts, believes that you’re gonna cheat him, too. So if it’s the same, if everybody’s cheating, he doesn’t see it as really cheating.”

  Okay, but…

  a) Everybody isn’t cheating. Except for an occasional mulligan on the first tee and accepting a gimme (a short conceded putt) from an opponent, 85% of casual golfers play by the rules, according to the National Golf Foundation.

  b) To say “Donald Trump cheats” is like saying “Michael Phelps swims.” He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching, and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf, that’s how he learned it, that’s how he needs it, and whether you’re his pharmacist or Tiger Woods, if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.

  In fact, he did cheat with Tiger Woods. Not long after becoming president, he invited Woods, Dustin Johnson (the No. 1 player in the world at the time), and longtime Tour pro and Fox golf analyst Brad Faxon to play.

  They set up a bet: Faxon and Trump against Woods and Johnson. But because Woods and Johnson are so preposterously long off the tee, they decided Faxon and Trump could tee off the middle tees. Trump would get a stroke subtracted on the eight hardest holes; everybody else would play scratch. Off they went.

  “On this one hole, Donald hits his second and fats it into the water,” Faxon remembers. “But he quickly says to me, ‘Hey, throw me another ball; they weren’t looking.’ So I do. But he fats that one into the water, too. So he drives up and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green.”

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the fairway, Woods, being Woods, has hit his approach to a foot from the hole for a kick-in birdie. Everybody’s on the green now, with Trump about 20 feet from the hole, and getting a stroke. Trump said, “So, where does everybody stand here?”

  FAXON: “Well, Tiger just made a three. What’s that [putt] for, Mr. President?”

  TRUMP: “Four for a three.”

  Faxon had to laugh because Trump was actually putting for a seven, but he was claiming it was for a four, which would’ve worked out to a three with his free stroke on the hole.

  “How great is that?” Faxon recalled. “Four for a three! But he missed it anyway. It was really fun to play with him. He rakes [picks up] every putt [as if it’s conceded], but you kind of want him to. You’ve heard so much about it, it’s almost like you want to witness it so you can tell the stories.”

  One time an old country singer/songwriter friend of mine played golf with Trump in L.A. for the first time. On the very first hole, Trump kicked his ball from the rough onto the fairway. This stopped the singer cold.

  “Wait a second,” he yelled. “So this is how it’s going to be today, Donald?”

  “Oh,” Trump explained. “All the guys I play with throw it out of the rough. You have to do it just to keep up with them.”

  Just for the record, I’ve played for 50 years and only know one guy who does that. His picture is on the cover.

  Once, Trump hosted three famous ESPN football announcers—Mike Tirico (now with NBC), Jon Gruden (now the Raiders coach), and Ron (Jaws) Jaworski, the old Eagles quarterback—at one of his courses. Trump loves to show off his courses to celebrities, and the more celebrated you are, the more he wants you to see them and the more he wants his members to see you. Trump arrived as the other three were warming up and he picked the teams immediately. “It’s gonna be me and Gruden, ’cause I like winners.”

  Off they went. At one point, they were playing a blind par 5, and Tirico, who’s a 12.3 handicap, had 230 yards into the green. He hit the 3-wood of his life. “Oh my god!” his caddy said, open-mouthed. The thing had the flag covered from the start. It crested the hill perfectly and was going to be tight to the pin. Shocked at his sudden skill, Tirico high-fived his caddie and strode toward the green, his shoes barely touching the grass.

  But, somehow, when they got there, the ball wasn’t near the pin. It wasn’t even on the green. It was 50 feet left of the pin, in the bunker. Unless it hit a drone and ricocheted sideways, there was no physical way it could’ve ended up there.

  “Lousy break,” Trump said to Tirico, who checked the marking on the ball to be sure it was his. It was. Befuddled, it took Tirico two swipes to escape the bunker on the way to a 7.

  “Afterwards,” Tirico remembers, “Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it into the bunker. I watched him do it.’”

  What did Tirico do? He laughed, shook his head, went inside, and paid Trump his money. When it comes to golf, Trump is the tornado and you are the trailer.

  But why? Why does Trump cheat so much when he’s already a decent player? And how can he be so shameless as to cheat right in front of people? They call him on it, but he just shrugs and cheats some more. It’s ruined his reputation in the golf world. Ninety percent of the people I interviewed—on and off the record—say he openly cheats. A lot of them said they stopped playing with him because of it. So why? Why cheat? Why lie? Why exaggerate his handicap, his scores, his club championships?

  “Because he has to,” says Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes, co-author of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. “He needs to be the best at everything. He can’t stand not winning, not being the best. It had to have started very early in his development. To him, not being the best is like fingernails on the blackboard to you. He can’t live with it.… 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. People with his disorder have no conscience about it. He has no sense of morality about things. He lacks empathy towards others. He’s a very ill man. He doesn’t get that other people have righ
ts and feelings. Other people just don’t matter to him.”

  Trump consistently says he doesn’t cheat. “I never touch the ball,” he says. That’s sort of true, maintains actor Anthony Anderson. “I’m not going to say Trump cheats. But if Trump’s caddy cheats for him, is that cheating?”

  “We clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster],” actor Samuel L. Jackson once recalled, “and his caddy told him he found it!”

  LPGA player Suzann Pettersen, a friend of Trump’s, thinks he must pay his caddy extremely well “since no matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”

  You can try to fight against it, but you’ll fail. The first time L.A. Clippers coach Doc Rivers played with him, Trump was on the other team and his buddy was going to be Trump’s partner. The buddy came over to console him. “He’s like, ‘Well, that’s it. You’ve got no chance of winning today.’ I figured he was trash talking. I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s see what you got!’ But then I saw the way Trump cheats. About the fifth or sixth hole, I went up to my buddy and said, ‘I finally see what you mean. I’ve got no chance.’”

  Boxer Oscar De La Hoya says he witnessed him cheat. Rocker Alice Cooper, too. New Jersey native Bill Rayburn wrote to me on Facebook about it. “I caddied for him once at a celebrity thing. Even with a gallery, marshals and me standing there, he openly cheated at least 10 times in the round. I finally stopped counting around the 15th hole.… He kicked his ball away from tree stumps, improved his lie, grounded his club in traps, and on the green repeatedly cheated on his ball marking, making sure to get his ball closer to the cup.… Trump walked off the 18th hole trumpeting his score, 74. Which easily was closer to 90 in the real world. Then he tipped me $10.”

  It’s so brazen you almost admire it. When Trump and I played together that day at Westchester for Who’s Your Caddy?, he took “floating mulligans” and re-dos, and simply subtracted shots when it came time for me to write his score down. “I have to take a newspaper 4 once in awhile,” he said.

  I also heard “I’m-taking-a-mulligan” excuses like:

  “You distracted me.”

  “That bird flew over just as I was about to hit.”

  “My foot slipped.”

  The man even took a gimme chip-in that day. A “gimme” is usually a putt that your opponent concedes you will make. He says, “That’s good,” meaning, “I concede that you’ll make that putt, so just pick it up.” Gimmes are illegal under the rules of golf but as common on the course as hot dogs. Still, a gimme should not be longer than two feet, three feet tops.

  Gimmes are supposed to be like gifts: they can only be given, never taken. Except for Trump. When you’re playing with Trump, he has the only gimme vote. He’ll declare any putt he has under five or six or eight feet a “gimme” and scoop it up. But as you go to pick your shorter putt up, too, he stops you and warns that “you better brush that in.” He’s the conductor of the Trump Train and you’re just hanging on to the caboose.

  The Olympic hockey star Mike Eruzione played with Trump in Palm Beach the day of Barbara Bush’s funeral, an event Trump was uninvited to. Eruzione says Trump is “so much fun” to play golf with partly because you can needle him. “We’re playing along,” Eruzione recalls, “and I finally said, ‘Mr. President, you’re a very talkative guy, but I haven’t once heard you say, ‘That one’s good, Mike.’”

  But never in the history of golf has anyone taken a gimme chip-in until Trump did that day with me. I was in the hole for a 5 and he was lying OFF the green in 5, and he said, casually, “Well, I guess that makes this good,” and he scooped the ball up.

  I was gobsmacked. We were playing a $10 medal bet—i.e., a total-score bet—so every shot counted. Even if he could’ve chipped it close—which he wouldn’t have—he’d have made a 7.

  “Did you just take a gimme chip-in?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “Well, yeah, ’cause you were already in for 5.”

  By the time I got my jaw refastened, he was driving off in the cart. I put the scene in my book. When he was running for president, the Washington Post asked him about that gimme chip-in. Trump had a very odd answer: “I don’t do gimme chip shots. If I asked his approval, that’s not cheating, number one. Number two, I never took one.”

  So that clears THAT up.

  In the end, the scorecard said he beat me. The rules had been pulverized into Gerber’s pea puree by then, so I paid up the $10. Then he bought lunch. It’s not the money; it’s the winning.

  “I played with him once at Trump L.A.,” says Ken Slutsky, a golf executive and investor. “At the end he said, ‘You owe me $27.’ I said, ‘Donald, you cheated on every single hole. I’m not paying you a dime.’ He just kind of shrugged and left. He didn’t seem to care.”

  Trump’s cheating during a round is legendary, but his cheating after the round is just as sharp. His score always gets what I call the Trump Bump. He may wrap up a very sketchy 77 at noon. On the ride home, it’ll be 75. By dinner, 72.

  It’s not just his score that gets the Trump Bump. It’s anybody’s score he likes. The legendary golfer Lee Trevino tells about the time he played one of Trump’s courses, shot a 72, and then ran into Trump in the locker room.

  “What’d you fire?” Trump asks.

  “Seventy-two,” Trevino says.

  Trump is delighted and wants to start introducing the legend around his clubhouse. “This is the great Lee Trevino. He just shot a 70!” For the next person, it was, “You know who this is? Lee Trevino! He just shot a 68!” Then it was, “He just shot a 66!”

  Says Trevino, “I had to get out of there before I broke the course record!”

  It’s not just golf scores that get the Trump Bump. It’s also net worth, crowd sizes, body weight—up or down—whatever makes him the winner.

  Even his buildings. His 68-story Trump Tower in New York City, for instance, isn’t really 68 stories. It’s 58. There’s a story in the stories. When Trump Tower was finished, his 664-foot building came up 41 feet shorter than the nearby 705-foot GM Building. Trump thought, well, his first 19 floors are commercial, what was to keep him from listing the first residential floor as the 30th, instead of the 20th? If he did that, he could add 10 floors instantly, and the top floor would be listed as the 68th, which would make it at least sound taller than the 50-floor GM Building. So that’s what he did. He liked the idea so much he did it for his 90-story Trump World Tower (actually 70 stories), too.

  It seems a harmless kind of lie, but it caused a problem for NYC firemen in April of 2018, when a Trump Tower apartment caught fire. The information the 911 operator was getting was that the fire was on the 50th floor. But firemen on the street counted only 40 floors up to the flames. Were there two fires? What the hell was going on?

  I’m 6-foot-1. I’ve stood next to Trump many times and we’re always eye to eye. I also stand eye to eye with Barack Obama. When you look at pictures of Obama and Trump together, they’re about eye to eye. It all jibes. Yet when the White House doctor announced Trump’s size and weight in January of 2018, Trump was suddenly “6-3, 239 pounds.” That height and weight conveniently kept Trump one-tenth of one body mass index point from being categorized as “obese.” At his true 6-1 height, he’d have had to weigh 12 pounds less to avoid The Big O. Now, it’s possible that Trump grew two inches since the last time I stood with him, but, since he’s in his 70s, it seems unlikely.

  Sometimes, the White House Trump Bumps for him. Remember short-lived White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci? On his first day on the job, The Mooch was trying to illustrate how competitive Trump is. “I have seen him throw a dead spiral through a tire,” Scaramucci said, according to reporters who recorded the session. “I’ve seen him at Madison Square Garden, with a topcoat on, standing in the key and he’s hitting foul shots and swishing them. He sinks three-foot putts. I don’t see this guy as a guy that’s ever under siege. This is a very, very competit
ive person.” All that was fine until the White House released the transcript of Scaramucci’s briefing. Somehow, the “three-foot putts” had turned into “thirty-foot putts.”

  Trump often ballyhoos the 68 he says he shot once at a famous and difficult Los Angeles country club course, which would be some incredible feat, even for a vanity 3-handicap like Trump. It’s a course that’s tighter than Chris Christie’s underwear, full of peril, tricky greens, and bunkers deep enough to hide a Mack truck. So when Trump came barreling up to the clubhouse one afternoon bragging he’d just shot a 68, it was instantly met with swimming pools of skepticism. “No way,” members sitting on the porch at 18 said to him.

  But there’s a reason Trump’s friends call him Double Down.

  “Yes, I did,” he said. “And it was a legit 68, too.”

  Is there any other kind?

  The head pro at this particular club is a rules stickler. He serves as a rules official for the PGA of America. He would sooner play in five-inch marabou heels than commit a rules violation. As soon as Trump left, he immediately summoned the two caddies for the group into his office. The two caddies, still in their white overalls, came in and sat down. The pro closed the door.

  “So,” he said. “Mr. Trump says he shot 68 here today. Is that true?”

  The two caddies looked at each other.

  “No way,” said one.

  “No f*cking way,” said the other.

  “Seventy-nine at BEST,” said the first.

  The 68, they said, came with tosses, kicks, and golf balls getting free rides back to the short grass. It came with do-overs, takeovers, and floating mulligans. It came with very little sounds of plastic balls actually going into little plastic cups. “He played really well that day, but I don’t think he shot a 68,” says longtime NBA and college basketball coach Mike Dunleavy, who was in the group. “There was some moving of balls around, some other stuff.” There was so much trickery and fraud, it was impossible to know what he’d really shot. Somewhere in the high 70s, they’d give him. For anybody else, high 70s on that course would’ve been a save-the-scorecard kind of day. For Trump, it wasn’t nearly enough.