by Rick Reilly
Longtime Los Angeles player and caddy Greg Puga, the 2000 U.S. Mid-Amateur champion, has had Trump in his group plenty. He’s heard about the 68—it’s a staple of L.A. caddy rooms—and he isn’t buying a thimble of it. “Sixty-eight?” Puga says. “There? You gotta be kidding me. I could take him to the Long Beach Putt-Putt and he’s not shooting 68. No way. No how. Not ever.”
To turn a 78 into a 68, you need some clever tricks. Trump has two sleeves full.
*The Invisible Dunk
“I’ve played with him a lot,” says a frequent guest in Trump’s foursomes. “This one time, I was in the fairway and he was right of the green but a little bit down the hill. He didn’t think anybody was watching, but I was. I saw him make a chipping motion from the side of the hill but no ball came up. Then he walked up the hill, stuck his hand in the hole and pulled a ball out. It must’ve been a ball he had in his hand the whole time. Then he looked up and yelled, ‘I chipped in!’ I mean, who does that?”
*The Quick Rake
This is a sneaky little move in which you hit your approach putt and then quickly walk up and rake up what’s left of it, no matter the length, before your opponents can stop you or think to holler, “Hey, wait a minute!” Trump has mastered this move. He does it sometimes before the ball has even stopped rolling. MSNBC cameras caught him doing it once to a ball that had sped five feet past the hole and was gaining speed. By the time anybody can object, the ball is already in his pocket.
*The Ball Switch
“Whenever I’ve caddied in Trump’s group,” says Puga, “he always gets his own cart. He makes sure to hit first off every tee box and then jumps in the cart, so he’s halfway down the fairway before the other three are done driving. That way he can get up there quick and mess with his ball. So this one time—we were on the 18th—he hits first, kind of blocks it right, and jumps in his cart and starts driving away. My guy pures one right down the middle. I mean, I SAW it go right down the middle. One of his best drives of the day. But by the time we get to my guy’s ball, it’s not there. We can’t find it anywhere. And Trump is now ON the green already putting! Where’s our ball? And then Trump starts yelling back at us, “Hey guys! I made a birdie!” He’s holding up his ball and celebrating. And that’s when we realized. That fucker stole our ball! He got up here early, hit OUR ball, and then hurried up and pretended like he made the putt for a birdie. I mean, what the hell?”
Once, Trump played a course with one of L.A.’s more famous holes—a par 5 where Howard Hughes once landed his plane to pick up Katherine Hepburn for a date—that has a pond just left of the green. “I saw Trump’s ball go in the lake,” one of the caddies told me. “I mean, I saw the ripples! But by the time we caught up to him and his cart, the ball was back on the fairway. When we asked him what happened, he said, ‘Must’ve been the tide.’”
Proof Trump cheats is that whenever he plays in front of TV cameras, he goes from hero to hack.
The famous Pebble Beach Pro-Am is a four-day, three-course pro-celebrity clam bake started by Bing Crosby and televised yearly by CBS. This is the one Bill Murray always enters. At the Pebble event, there are really two tournaments going on—the pro one and the team one. Each tournament has a separate cut. In the team one, you make the cut as a team—you and your pro—but Trump’s team never did. He played in it seven times and never made the cut. The closest he came was in 1998 when the whole thing was cancelled for weather. You might say, “Well, there you have it. Trump had terrible pro partners.”
TRUMP SCORES IN TELEVISED TOURNAMENTS
AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (Pebble Beach, CA)
Year: 1993
Trump’s Pro: Paul Goydos
Team Finish: Missed Cut
Pro Finish: Missed Cut
Year:: 1998
Trump’s Pro: Fulton Allem
Team Finish: Weather Cancellation
Pro Finish: Tie 45th
Year: 2001
Trump’s Pro: Jim McGovern
Team Finish: Missed Cut
Pro Finish: Tie 63rd
Year: 2002
Trump’s Pro: Brad Elder
Team Finish: Missed Cut
Pro Finish: Missed Cut
Year: 2003
Trump’s Pro: Brian Claar
Team Finish: Missed Cut
Pro Finish: Tie 42nd
Year: 2005
Trump’s Pro: David Frost
Team Finish: Missed Cut
Pro Finish: Missed Cut
Year: 2006
Trump’s Pro: John Cook
Team Finish: Missed Cut
Pro Finish: Tie 53rd
American Century Celebrity Championship (Lake Tahoe, NV)
Year: 2004
Finish: 56th
Score: –12*
# of Players: 80
Winner: Dan Quinn (hockey)
Winning Score: 74*
Year: 2005
Finish: 42nd
Score: 26*
# of Players: 80
Winner: Billy Joe Tolliver (football)
Winning Score: 76*
Year: 2006
Finish: 62nd
Score: 268
# of Players: 80
Winner: Jack Wagner (actor)
Winning Score: 213
Not true. His pro partners for those seven years were solid Tour players—Paul Goydos, Fulton Allem, Jim McGovern, Brad Elder, Brian Claar, David Frost, and John Cook. But in the six tourneys that finished, Trump’s pro went on to make the pro cut four times. Take a typical year, 2006: The Cook/Trump team finished 111th, but Cook made the pro cut. The weak link was Trump.
The other true measure of Trump’s golf game was the American Century Celebrity Championship at Lake Tahoe, a woodsy course on the California-Nevada border. Tahoe gets a stellar, raucous field of celebs most years—ex-athletes, actors, singers, scratch players, and duffers. Trump played the Tahoe event three times—2004, 2005, and 2006.
In those three Tahoe tries, he never finished in the top half of the field. The first year, he was 56th out of 80, which is not stellar when you consider the field includes players like the famously golf-plagued Charles Barkley. The next time, he finished 42nd out of 80. Finally, in that calamitous 2006 Tahoe tournament, he finished 62nd out of 80 and averaged 89.3 per round, and that’s with Tahoe’s rule that no player can take worse than a double bogey. Then again, Trump may have been exhausted. According to lawsuits raging as this book went to press, he had affairs with two different women at that one single tournament—porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.
So, just to recap, in those three Tahoe tries alone, the man who once said, “When it comes to golf, there are very few people who can beat me,” was beaten by 157 people, or more than 60% of those who tried.
So how is Clinton’s cheating different than Trump’s?
It isn’t. It’s still cheating. But Clinton’s methods were less diabolical and more goofy. Trump’s are often so over-the-top it verges on sad. Clinton wasn’t trying to pretend he was six shots better than he really was. With Trump, the cheating was a path to something more important: I win again. With Clinton, the cheating was more like, “Doggone it. I know I can do this! Let me try again.” (And again. And again.) It’s like the difference between a guy who goes to the bank and steals the pen versus the guy who steals the vault.
Trump’s friends defend his cheating, but in a way you might not expect. “My rounds with him have been some of the most fun days I’ve ever had playing golf,” says Coach Dunleavy. “Yeah, he moves it and kicks it and all that, but no money changes hands at the end. There’s a wager, yeah, but then nobody pays anybody. So that’s not really cheating to me. It’s just fun.”
To show how much fun, Dunleavy tells a story about he and Trump as partners in a game against two of their buddies. Dunleavy hits his approach shot onto the corner of a kidney-shaped green that left him no possible putt. He was going to have to chip it off the green or somehow try to putt through the fringe
and hope it came out back onto the green. Trump, his partner, came over and secretly knocked the ball on to a part of the green where Dunleavy could putt it. Dunleavy picked it up and put it back where it was.
“That’s when Donald starts yelling to the other two,” Dunleavy recalls. “He goes, ‘Guys, guys! I wanna tell you how great a guy Coach is. I knocked his ball over here so he could have a putt at it. But then he put it back! And that’s why he’s an unemployed coach and I’m worth $13 billion.”
5
BUY, LIE, AND CRY
Owning a great golf course gives you great power.
—DONALD J. TRUMP
ONE CHRISTMAS, WHEN DONALD Trump was small, he and his younger brother Robert got building blocks. The next day, Donald asked Robert if he could borrow his blocks to build something big. His brother was happy to lend them. Donald used the blocks to build a huge building that almost reached the ceiling.
“He was so proud of it,” his late mother recalled. The next day, Robert asked for his blocks back. But Donald couldn’t do it. He’d glued them all together.
If Donald Trump could glue together every great golf course in the world and slap his name on them, he would. But he doesn’t. Instead, he takes the ones he owns and pretends they’re the best. As of late 2018, he owned 14 golf courses and operated or will operate another five. The Trump name is on golf courses in America, the UAE, Scotland, Ireland, and, soon, Indonesia.
Trump Golf Courses and Golf Resorts
America
Course: Trump National Golf Club, Westchester
Location: Briarcliff Manor, NY
Access: private
Course: Trump National Golf Club, Bedminster, NJ
Location: Bedminster Township, NJ
Access: private
Course: Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley
Location: Hopewell Junction, NY
Access: private
Course: Trump National Golf Club Philadelphia
Location: Pine Hill, NJ
Access: private
Course: Trump National Golf Club Colts Neck
Location: Colts Neck, NJ
Access: private
Course: *Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point
Location: New York City, the Bronx
Access: public
Course: Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C.
Location: Sterling, VA
Access: private
Course: Trump National Doral Golf Club
Location: Miami, FL
Access: public
Course: Trump National Golf Club Jupiter
Location: Jupiter, FL
Access: private
Course: Trump International Golf Club
Location: West Palm Beach, FL
Access: private
Course: Trump National Golf Club Charlotte
Location: Mooresville, NC
Access: private
Course: Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles
Location: Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
Access: public
Overseas
Course: Trump International Golf Links, Aberdeen
Location: Balmedie, Scotland
Access: public
Course: Trump Turnberry
Location: Ayrshire, Scotland
Access: public
Course: Trump International Golf Links & Hotel
Location: Doonbeg, Ireland
Access: public
Course: *Trump International Golf Club, Dubai
Location: Dubai, UAE
Access: public
Course: *Trump World Golf Club
Location: Dubai, UAE
Access: public
In Development
Course: *Trump International Golf Club & Resort
Location: Bali (Indonesia)
Course: *Lido City
Location: Indonesia
“Somebody made the statement that Donald Trump has built or owns the greatest collection of golf courses, ever, in the history of golf,” Trump once said. “And I believe that is 100% true.”
Would that somebody be Trump? Because nobody who knows golf would say that. His lineup of courses is nice, but since he always buys properties that are in default or bankrupt at, as he often says, “10 or 15 cents on the dollar,” he’s often trying to put rouge on a cadaver. One he bought—Trump Los Angeles—had just fallen into the Pacific. He does not have a single course in the 2019–2020 Golf Digest’s Top 100 American courses, the bible of all golf rankings. In fact, he doesn’t have a single course in the top 175. The best he can do is Trump International in West Palm Beach (178). He does much better overseas, though. Of the three courses he owns in Europe, two are on Golf Digest’s Top 100 World (outside the U.S.) list: Trump Turnberry (10) and Trump International at Aberdeen (64).
His other courses—Trump Los Angeles (CA), Trump Washington (VA), National Hudson (NY), Trump Colts Neck (NY), Trump Philadelphia (NJ), Trump Charlotte (NC), Trump Ferry Links (the Bronx), Trump Doral (FL), Trump Jupiter (FL), and Doonbeg in Ireland—are all bologna sandwiches on white bread. They’ll fill you with golf for the day, but you’ll never salivate about them later.
So that isn’t “the greatest collection of golf courses ever, in the history of golf.” It’s not even the best collection owned by any American now. That would be Trump’s rival, Chicago greeting-card tycoon Mike Keiser, who owns Bandon Dunes resort in Oregon. All four of his courses there are in the Top 100 American list. Keiser also owns Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia (9), Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania (11), and Barnbougle Lost Farm in Australia (23). So the Top 100 list score would be Keiser 7, Trump 2. Although Trump has gotten one bite of revenge: Keiser backed Jeb Bush for president.
But one thing is true of all of Trump’s courses: the attention to detail is immaculate. Everything must be perfect. The man will spend an hour looking at every green on the practice range. The problem is that golf is not a game of perfect. It’s meant to be like nature, played over stream and stones. That’s what makes it better than tennis. Every golf course is different and new and you never know what kind of lie you’re going to get. But Trump golf is stuffy, all too combed and primped, with way too many cart paths and waterfalls and fairways your Foot Joys sink into. Trump doesn’t build golf courses so much as financial statements.
Trump’s first course was Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, an 11-minute drive from his Mar-a-Lago social club and hotel. He built the course in 1999 from scratch. He might have given it such a $50 name because it was such a 50-cent piece of property. It was 300 grungy acres of weedy vacant lots, surrounded on one side by the county jail, on the other by the airport, on another by a string of bail bonds houses and immigration passport/visa joints, and on the final side by a strip joint.
How Trump got Trump International in the first place was pure Trumpaliciousness. It started with the purchase of Mar-a-Lago Club, the gold-dripping mansion Trump bought in 1985. He began complaining that the jets at nearby Palm Beach International Airport were making too much noise over his bedroom. Very unfair. But was that new? Did planes suddenly start diverting over Mar-a-Lago just to spite Trump? Nope. Nothing had changed much in the flight paths for 60 years. In fact, Mar-a-Lago has had a red flashing light on top of it as far back as anybody can remember. Didn’t matter to Trump. It was violating his sensitive ears. He sued.
The first suit went nowhere. Undaunted, he sued then-airport director Bruce Pelley, personally, three times. One time he sued him for assault, complaining that it was as if Pelley were “standing in front of Mar-a-Lago with a noise gun.” The court didn’t buy it. Trump even sued Pelley for fraud, saying that Pelley was purposely sending airplanes to get even with him. Pelley, of course, didn’t control the path of the airplanes. That was done by the FAA and the tower. All three suits died slow deaths.
The truth is Trump wasn’t really after peace and solitude. He was after the scrubby wasteland next to the airport. He was hoping one of the lawsuits wou
ld go through and he could get that land in a settlement to build a golf course for his swanky Mar-a-Lago crowd to play. It didn’t work, but when he was out of lawsuits, he pitched the West Palm Beach County Commissioners the idea of him leasing the land anyway. What good was it doing them? They struck a deal.
(Note: Despite what you see in articles over and over again, Trump did not “win the land in a settlement.” That’s what he told reporters once he signed the lease, but it’s a lie. “Absolutely not true,” says one Palm Beach official who didn’t want to be identified because… well… you know. “His noise lawsuits went nowhere. This was a business deal, pure and simple. But as soon as he signed the lease, he went to the Palm Beach Post and told them he’d won it in a settlement. They wrote it, and it keeps getting repeated over and over.”)
But why would the county want to get in bed with a guy who’d sued them so many times? Because Trump could charm an elephant into doing an arabesque. Just to protect themselves, the county included a clause: Trump could never sue them again. (He would anyway.)
Trump poured millions into that flat-as-a-tortilla land. To make a course that he promised would be “the best in America,” there was only one architect to hire: Tom Fazio. Fazio not only built Steve Wynn’s Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, a course Trump lusted after for its majestic fake waterfall, but Fazio has landed more courses on Golf Digest’s Top 100 list than any living American architect. Trump had to have Tom Fazio.
But Fazio was too expensive, so Trump hired his brother, Jim Fazio. This is a little like wanting Michael Jackson to play at your bar mitzvah but getting Tito instead. At Trump’s order, Jim put in massive dunes where there were no dunes, a 75-foot-high 18th tee box, and a faux waterfall big enough to turn Steve Wynn green. He sodded it with lush grass and posted 889 canary date palms around the perimeter. He bathed his clubhouse interior in gold and put the whole thing behind big, black, screw-you gilded gates that screamed “Keep Out”—even though the whole place was set on leased public land.