by Rick Reilly
Now all he had to do was talk Trump International up. Nobody on earth better at that. His course was going to be “the best course anywhere in America,” he said. It was going to be “incredible” and “amazing,” and there was “going to be nothing like it in the world.” And it was pretty good, if your taste runs to fake Eiffel Towers in front of your hotel. But it’s like a woman who’s late to the beauty stylist. After a while, you just can’t hide your roots. Unseemly things kept happening.
Take, for instance, the Palm Beach County Jail, which stands nine stories high and looms over one of the holes. In the first couple of years the course opened, the exercise yard was on one of the higher floors, so inmates would climb up the fencing and yell awful things at the well-heeled players. “It used to be you went past there and the guys in the exercise yard could see you,” says a man who played there often as a guest. “And man, they’d get on you. ‘Hey, white boy! You come in here and I’d have you for lunch!’” As author and member James Patterson likes to say, “Little criminals up there, big criminals down here.”
Then there was the infamous Black Swan Murder. In 2001, a man named Cyril Wagner—the guest of a Palm Beach doctor—was playing the 17th when a big black swan known as “Alex” came at him with menace. Mr. Wagner swung an iron at it. Alex didn’t duck and was struck dead. Wagner said it was the swan or him, self-defense. Trump banned Mr. Wagner forever. “But I probably sold 20 memberships out of that,” Trump told me. Man, you talk about lucky!
Then there was the topper, the night in April 2018 when the strip joint that sits on the corner of this seedy area, Ultra, hosted none other than porn star Stormy Daniels. As part of her “Make America Horny Again” tour, Ms. Daniels stormed Ultra, dancing to Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and coming undressed as Wonder Woman. She performed to a sardined house, some of whom paid as much as $1,000 to see her, all within a 9-iron of Trump’s golf club. It’s unclear whether Trump International members got a discount.
The president wasn’t there, but almost everybody else was. People stopped their cars in the parking lot just to get their picture taken in front of the marquee. The parking lot was jammed with limos and pickups, the kind of event that could unite both sides of the aisle.
“I’d pay $35 to see what the big guy got his hands on,” one limo driver said. One gentleman said he was only there to “support the First Amendment.”
A true patriot.
Ready for a little quiz?
Okay…
1. Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., is in what city? (Hint: It’s not Washington.)
2. Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles is where? (Hint: It’s not Los Angeles.)
3. Trump National Golf Club Charlotte is in what town? (Hint: It’s not Charlotte.)
4. Where is Trump National Golf Club Philadelphia located? (Hint: It’s not even in Pennsylvania.)
5. What’s so international about Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach? (Hint: Not much.)
Answers:
1. Trump Washington is in Sterling, Virginia, a 45-minute drive from the White House.
2. Trump Los Angeles is in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, 75 minutes south of L.A.
3. Trump Charlotte is in Mooresville, North Carolina, an hour from Charlotte.
4. Trump Philadelphia is in Pine Hill, New Jersey, about 45 minutes from Philly.
5. Trump International is in West Palm Beach, Florida, which isn’t very international at all. The vast majority of members are American citizens.
And if that little subterfuge bothers you, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Trump’s m.o. when he buys a golf course is always the same: Buy, Lie, and Cry.
Buy: Trump always buys at the bottom. He gets deals, whether it’s a decrepit hotel, abandoned land, or a golf course that’s gone bust. Then he pours money into it, just never as much as he says. Whenever you hear Trump talk about how much money he poured into a golf course—“$200 million” “$250 million”—you can divide that at least by 10. Then he slaps his name on it and begins to…
Lie: Because Trump is the greatest press wrangler in American business history, he immediately begins talking up his courses so big you’d think he’d just put 18 holes inside the Taj Mahal. Every course is set “on the greatest piece of property anyone’s ever seen. And that’s not me saying that.” (Yes, it’s usually just him saying that.) Every course is “way better” than (insert name of famous course in the same state). “And that’s guys at (insert same course name here) telling me that.” He needs to talk it up so he can convince people to pay $200,000 to join a course that two years before was a goat track.
Now it’s time to…
Cry: At the very same time he’s telling the world how awesome his piece of property is, he’s suing the cities they’re in for overvaluing it.
Take Trump Westchester (NY), his second course. Trump bought it in 1996 when it was a vanilla sort of course known as Briar Hall Golf and Country Club in Ossining, New York. It was owned by the bank, which sold it to him for $7.5 million. Trump immediately bulldozed it and put Fazio the Lesser on it. He built a typically immaculate and overwrought course—the waterfall on No. 13 is over 101 feet high and is so fake looking you’re sure you saw it on Fantasy Island. Trump started talking it up like it was the greatest thing since the Vardon grip. “This will be the best course in New York,” he crowed, fully aware that New York has Shinnecock, Friar’s Head, and a dozen other showstoppers. He signed up celebs—for free, of course—Yankees skipper Joe Torre, Jack Nicholson, and Hugh Grant. Trump even gave Bill Clinton a freebie. It was a hit.
On his financial-disclosure declaration during the presidential campaign, he valued it at $50 million. In fact, he valued ALL of his golf courses at $50 million, for a whopping total of $700 million. That’s a statement that belongs in a padded room. No way. Never. Fifty million for a golf course like Trump West Palm Beach with no hotel and no land to build homes on? Preposterous. The golf world howled at that canard.
“I’ve evaluated over 3,500 courses in America, Canada, the Caribbean, all over,” says Larry Hirsh, a golf course value analyst for Golf Property Analysts near Philadelphia. “And I can only recall one property that we appraised anywhere near $50 million.”
Which course?
“I can’t say. But it was a very well-known multi-course golf resort that most every American golfer knows. It has more than two courses, I can tell you that.”
Was it a Trump course?
“No.”
(My guess: It’s got to be Pebble Beach, Pinehurst, or Bandon Dunes.)
What’s the most expensive 18-holes-only course you’ve ever evaluated?
“Somewhere in the $20 millions,” Hirsh said.
Okay, so Trump’s $50 million value for each of his courses is just a flat-out Double Whopper with extra cheese. But get this: At the same time Trump was saying Westchester was worth $50 million, he was suing Ossining for its $11 million tax valuation of it. His lawyer said that was way too high. Trump insisted it was only worth $1.4 million. That’s a $48 million difference, if you’re scoring at home.
Says Patterson, “I’ll give him $1.6 million for it right now.”
With two under his belt, Trump started thinking even bigger. He bought the 450-acre Bedminster, New Jersey, hunting and horse estate of the former car tycoon John DeLorean, whose Back to the Future car company had gone belly up and who had personally gone broke in a cocaine scandal. Trump got it for a song—$35 million. Trump started interviewing course designers, but this time with a twist.
He started with one of America’s best golf designers, Bobby Jones, Jr., the son of the legendary architect Robert Trent Jones. Jones is from New Jersey, so it piqued his interest. But when he sat down in Trump’s office for the interview, Trump had a surprise.
“You’ll design and build the course, but your name won’t be on it,” Trump said.
Jones had to blink a few times.
“Excuse me?” he said. “
Whose name will be on it?”
“Mine.”
More blinking.
“Wait. You want me to ghostwrite your golf course?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Jones passed. Trump got Fazio instead, the real one this time, Tom. Turns out Fazio loves Trump. “He’s just so much fun,” Fazio says. “I love the guy. He’s crazy. He’s nonstop. He has so much energy. He’s so funny and he never stops. The guy never sleeps. He calls you at all hours. Good thing he doesn’t drink. Can you imagine all that on booze? Oh man.”
Fazio took the job, but only if his name was on it. Even then, he had his regrets. “Donald would constantly chopper out (from New York City), wanting to talk details. Details, details, so many details. So, finally, my son just moved onto the grounds for the entire project. No way I was going to deal with Donald every single day. Besides, I don’t work weekends and the guy never stops working.”
Eventually, Tom stopped working for Trump and stuck to just being friends. “He uses Jim,” Fazio says. “He does good work and he’s much cheaper. And it doesn’t matter to Donald. He just tells people, ‘This is by Tom Fazio’ anyway.”
Bedminster—which now has 36 holes—is also a hit. It’s already held a woman’s major, the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open, and will hold the 2022 PGA Championship.
After Bedminster, Trump went on a buying spree. In 2002, he bought the partially ocean-swallowed Ocean Trails in Rancho Palos Verdes and called it Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles. In 2009, he bought a course in Pine Hill, New Jersey, and called it Trump Philadelphia. He bought a course called Branton Woods in New York and called it Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley. That was an adventure in itself.
The contact point for the sale was longtime golf executive Ian Gillule, who was working for the seller, Eric Bergstol. Gillule got Trump interested in the course, and Trump suggested they go up and see it that Saturday. But that wasn’t going to work for Bergstol. “No, no, no, definitely not Saturday,” Bergstol said. “I have to be discreet. We’re having a member–member (tournament) on Saturday. None of the members know I’m selling it. Tell him Monday. We’re closed Monday. He’ll have the whole place to himself.”
Trump wasn’t budging. “I’ll never forget what he said on the phone that day,” Gillule remembers. “He said, ‘You tell Eric that on weekends I make million-dollar deals. On weekdays, I make billion-dollar deals. You tell him I’ll be there Saturday, but I’ll be discreet. Nobody will know I’m there.’”
“Discreet” and “Trump” go together like “gasoline” and “soup.” Trump and Gillule drove from Manhattan up to Hudson Valley in Trump’s white Rolls-Royce. “As we pull up, I see that the carts are all staged, dozens and dozens of them, all in a row,” Gillule recalls. “All the players are gathered there and the pro is giving everybody instructions. And it was literally like Rodney Dangerfield showing up in Caddyshack. He pulls that big white Rolls-Royce right up on the curb in front, gets out, and yells, ‘Hey everybody! How you doing? I’m buying this place!’”
In 2012, Trump bought the former The Point Lake and called it Trump National Golf Club Charlotte. Trump made a ton of changes on that one, not all of which pleased the course’s original designer, the golfing legend Greg Norman. Trump was playing with Norman and two writers and Norman seemed pissed the whole round, they say. Might have been because Trump told Norman he wouldn’t change anything, and on the first three holes they played, Norman saw that he’d changed something on every hole. He was frying. He’d hit his shot, get back in the cart, glare at Trump, and speak to nobody. Trump came over to Golf Digest’s Jaime Diaz and said, “Greg is behaving very poorly. He should be better. The fans should be entertained by him.”
If you think Norman was pissed that day, you should hear him talk about what Trump did to one of his next purchases—Doonbeg in Ireland.
“That was my favorite course I ever built by hand,” Norman remembers. (A “by-hand” golf course is one that is built almost entirely without bulldozers or tractors, one that threads itself through the natural landscape without moving much earth.) “It was just my baby. We worked with the environmentalists, hand in glove, to build a course that they wanted, the developer wanted, and the community wanted. It was my passion, my labor of love.”
Trump bought it, kept the clubhouse, and practically redid the entire course. Most Irish golf critics have panned the Trump version. “Usually, there’s an unwritten code,” Norman says. “You call the architect and talk over any changes. But, not in this case, I guess.… To have somebody else come in and change it all around, that really bothered me. So I just switched off. I haven’t gone back. I don’t want to go back. I’ll never go back.”
When an architect agrees to work for Trump, he needs to understand the “for” part. It’s Trump’s course and he’ll get it the way he wants, even if it makes no sense. You just draw it up. “He’s the boss,” Tom Fazio says. “What are you gonna do? He writes the checks.”
But here’s the crazy thing: Trump is actually a pretty good golf architect. At his 36-hole Trump Washington, he worked nothing short of a miracle, without Fazio’s input, stealing holes from the lesser 18, rerouting the course to better showcase the Potomac River, and building a couple world-class par 3s. “It’s a much, much better facility than it was prior to him buying it,” says member Gary Newman. “And it was all him doing the work.”
So if Trump was the architect for Trump Washington, did Trump stiff Trump? Because he’s famous for short-changing architects. One prominent American architect refuses to work for him. “He called me about doing a course, so I asked around. All the references I got were the same. He does a lot of jerking you around, trying to sucker you.”
Architect Gil Hanse has worked a lot with Trump. Not long ago, though, Hanse got up at a corporate dinner, gave his speech, and then said, “I’ll take any questions you have, except ones about Donald Trump.”
It’s not so much the promises Trump breaks or the lies he tells, it’s the sheer volume of them. For three years, freelance documentary maker Matt Howley and his crew followed Trump everywhere for Golf Channel’s Donald J. Trump’s Fabulous World of Golf. The idea was to showcase Trump’s burgeoning golf-course empire. They had carte blanche access to Trump, who loved the attention. It meant more sizzle, and more sizzle means more members, and more members means more initiation fees in his pocket.
“Donald Trump really treated us well,” Howley says. “He was great. He knew everybody’s name, asked a million questions. He was very kind.”
There was only one problem. “I was always introduced as the president of the Golf Channel,” Howley says with a laugh. “One time, he introduced me as the president of Golf Channel and this whole Japanese table of businessmen got up and bowed to me. I didn’t know what to do, so I bowed back.”
If Howley wasn’t the president of Golf Channel, then he and his crew were suddenly from 60 Minutes, especially if they were walking through the dining room at Mar-a-Lago. “He’d go from table to table, shaking people’s hands and saying, ‘Yeah, 60 Minutes is with me.’”
Why wasn’t the truth good enough? Why wasn’t, “This is a crew from Golf Channel. They’re documenting me for my show,” impressive enough for Trump?
“Because that’s his gold standard for TV—60 Minutes,” Howley says. “He always goes for his gold standard. I got used to it. After a while, I started to believe I was with 60 Minutes. Honestly, just from spending so much time around him, I found myself lying much more than I used to. My friends started getting on me about it. They’d be like, ‘Dude, that didn’t happen that way. Why are you lying about it?’ You tell enough lies and you sort of forget after a while.”
When you toss that much bullshit around, it’s hard to remember where the piles are. For instance, Trump once said of the former Lowes Island Club he turned into Trump Washington, “This place, when it’s finished, will be the finest club anywhere in the country. There will be nothing like it.”
But,
wait. That’s almost exactly what he said about Trump Los Angeles when it opened: “No one has ever seen anything like this. There is nothing that you can compare it to.… It’s going to be the greatest, most spectacular golf course that you’ve ever seen.”
But that can’t be, because that’s almost exactly what he said about Trump Jupiter: “It doesn’t get any finer.”
But how can that be when he promised Trump Doral would be “the finest resort and golf club in the country”?
Now you’re completely confused, because he declared Trump Turnberry to be, “The greatest golf course anywhere in the world. Everybody knows it.”
Speaking of manure, Trump also says, repeatedly, “I’ve been given more golf environmentalism awards than anybody.” That’s the Moby Dick of fibs. He hasn’t been given one legitimate golf environmental award. Not one. Zero.
He is proud of the great numbers of people he employs at his golf properties, but, as ever, those numbers get the Trump Bump. “I employ thousands of people,” he told Golf Channel’s David Feherty. “I take care of their kids’ educations… [pause]… well, indirectly.”
Wait, indirectly?
If that’s true, can Trump say he fights fires because some of his taxes go to the fire department? Does he save people’s lives because the city hospital gets subsidized?
Sometimes the gap between the truth and the Trumps is so great you couldn’t cross it with a Cessna. Take Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in the Bronx, New York.
The Truth: In the early 1980s, the City of New York decided to build a golf course on a condemned garbage dump. They got Jack Nicklaus to design it and went through two or three developers trying to get it made. Finally, they gave up and did it themselves. By 2008, it was almost done. They hired the Trump Organization to operate it, as long as it agreed to build a $10 million clubhouse and handle the grow-in of the greens, which usually takes a year and a half. Sweet deal for Trump, who didn’t have to pay the city a cent the first four years it was open. It finally did open in 2015—with 15-foot-high letters that read: TRUMP LINKS.