by Rick Reilly
Batkin explained how this million-dollar challenge idea didn’t have to stop at golf. It could be done with tennis, sailing, bowling, lots of things. “And you’d be in for all of it,” he said to Trump.
That seemed to make Trump even madder. “Half,” he said. “Otherwise, fuck it.”
Batkin couldn’t believe this was happening. He felt like he might puke. He checked his watch. Seven minutes. He swallowed hard and stared at the most famous business tycoon in the world.
“Donald, why should I change the deal?” Batkin said, firmly. “We have a signed contract.”
Trump, in full scowl, stared at his shoes. Batkin felt like somebody had knitted sweaters for each of his teeth.
In TrumpWorld, this is the moment where the little guy knuckles under. Trump has the money, the lawyers, and the poker face to make you break. It always worked.
Except this time.
“Okay, fine,” Batkin said. He got up to leave.
“Where are you going?” Trump said.
“Downstairs,” Batkin said. “And when they ask me, ‘Where’s Donald?’ I’m just going to say, ‘Oh, five minutes ago, upstairs, he reneged on the deal. Tried to hold me up for half my company.’ And then I’ll take out these papers in my right hand and show them your signature.”
Trump seethed but stayed put. Batkin got in the elevator. Trump’s assistant, Carolyn Kepcher, ran into it with him.
“Andy, you can’t do this! This is bad for everybody. Please don’t do this!”
Batkin held up the papers and said, “Carolyn, we have a signed deal.”
They descended, Carolyn trying to talk him out of it as they dropped. Batkin wasn’t budging. This was a titanic risk he was taking. Why?
“Going into high school,” Batkin recalls, “I was 4-foot-11. I knew all about bullies. My dad taught me how to box. He’d say, ‘You get one good punch on their nose, that’ll do it. You’ll probably get way worse from them, but they won’t come back.’ And that’s what I was thinking about. This guy is just another bully. I mean, it’s Trump, so it was scary. But I knew I couldn’t allow it, or I’d be sunk.”
The elevator opened and they walked into the gilded Trump Tower lobby. Two minutes to go. It was almost time to start the press conference. Batkin was praying for a power blackout.
Finally, with 30 seconds left, he saw Trump’s polished shoes coming down the escalator, like a god descending from Olympus. Trump was giving the packed lobby crowd his half-grin, waving at them, like nothing had happened.
Batkin finally inhaled again.
Trump came to the stage and shook Batkin’s hand. They turned for pictures, all smiles. “I’d never seen that many flashbulbs in my life,” Batkin remembers.
Out of the side of his smile, Trump said, “You think anybody would be here without me?”
Batkin kept smiling and murmured back, “You think anybody would be here if you weren’t holding my million-dollar check?”
11
TRUMP V. OBAMA
Obama ought to get off the golf course.
—DONALD J. TRUMP
I HAVE A BUDDY who has to hide his golf from his wife. She thinks he plays too much, which he probably does, so he can’t post his scores. He can’t talk about his round. He has to make up excuses for why he wasn’t at his desk when she calls.
Trump has the same problem. Not with his wife. With the country. In his first 22 months as president, he played a documented 149 rounds, or about 1 every 4 days, according to TrumpGolfCount.com. He’s taken so much heat about playing too much golf that he tries to hide it. Unlike my buddy, he’s not very good at it.
For instance, one March, he said he was going to be working all day at Mar-a-Lago. But then Trump friend Chris Ruddy posted a picture of him shaking hands with somebody. On Trump’s left hand was a golf glove.
Busted.
One summer day in 2018, as he was getting ready to leave for 10 days in Bedminster, he announced that he was going to be working and taking meetings the entire time. “This is not a golf trip!” The only problem was that when he left the White House, he was wearing a pair of FootJoy golf shoes.
What’s strange is that, before he became president, he said he would do no such thing, ever, never. “I love golf,” he told a crowd at a February 2016 campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again.… I don’t think I’d ever see many of the places that I have. I don’t ever think I’d see anything—I just wanna stay in the White House and work my ass off, make great deals, right? Who’s gonna leave?”
Who? Him. According to NBC News, in his first 579 days in office, he’d spent exactly one-third at one of his properties.
Trump threw gallons of shade at President Obama for allegedly neglecting his duties in favor of the golf course. He criticized him 27 times on Twitter alone for playing too much golf as president. Obama did play a lot of golf. In fact, halfway through his eighth year, Obama had played 250 rounds of golf in his presidency, a figure that astonished Trump. He nearly sprained his tweeting thumbs:
250 rounds… that’s more golf than a guy on the PGA Tour plays!
Well, no. A PGA Tour player plays about 250 rounds per year. Over seven years, that would be 1,750 rounds, not 250. But get this: Over the 2018 Thanksgiving weekend, in Palm Beach, Trump played five straight days, more than anybody on the PGA Tour played that week.
Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf. Worse than Carter
Well, Carter didn’t play golf. Obama also took one-third as many vacation days in his first year as Trump did in his (111). In fact, no modern president took as many vacation days in their first year as Trump. The only one to come close to Trump’s vacation bonanza was Bush 43, who took about 70, mostly to his ranch in Texas, but in much bigger clumps, so the costs were far less.
We pay for Obama’s travel so he can fundraise millions so Democrats can run on lies. Then we pay for his golf.
True, but some golf is more expensive than other golf. Obama played 61% of his rounds at nearby military courses like the one at Andrews Air Force Base, 35 minutes away from the White House. Trump never plays military or public courses. The only local course he plays is Trump Washington in Sterling, Virginia. Mostly, though, he prefers taking Air Force One down to Trump International in West Palm Beach at a cost of $3.6 million per trip. To put that in perspective, Obama’s yearly Martha’s Vineyard vacations cost Americans $450,000, according to Judicial Watch.
Trump relished ripping Obama whenever he played on a big news day. When ISIS beheaded American photojournalist James Foley, Obama was playing in Martha’s Vineyard. Trump even posted a video on Instagram of Obama smiling in a golf cart mixed with footage of the decapitation. In an ice-cold rebuke, he wrote:
Not under my watch.
When Trump became president, he’d see his golf clubs less than he’d see the White House basketball court. Who would have time? He’d be busy fixing the nation’s problems, seven days a week. Except just the opposite happened. Trump is on a pace to play almost triple the amount of golf Obama played. Obama wound up playing 306 rounds in his 2,920 total days in office, or once every 9.5 days. Trump is on pace, over eight years, to obliterate Obama’s number—at 759 rounds, which goes to show you that bone spurs do heal very nicely.
That 759 rounds would be third all-time, behind the record set by Woodrow Wilson’s estimated 1,600 rounds and just a smidgen behind Eisenhower’s estimated 800. Ike played so much golf, in fact, that a bumper sticker got popular: “BEN HOGAN FOR PRESIDENT. IF WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A GOLFER, LET’S HAVE A GOOD ONE.”
Anybody want to put Tiger Woods on a bumper sticker?
Much more importantly, to Trump critics, is that Trump’s golf is exponentially more expensive. Through September 2018—19 months into his presidency—Trump’s far-flung golf trips had cost American
taxpayers an estimated $77 million. Just the Secret Service’s cost of renting golf carts alone to protect him cost over $300,000, according to documents obtained by TMZ.
This might be why one American, Kathy Rentz, a Republican from Pennsylvania, scrawled across her IRS federal tax return, “Not for Trump’s Golf Trips!”
It’s not just the cost, it’s the optics. On May 11, 2018, Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, declared that Trump was too busy to meet with FBI special investigator Robert Mueller. The next day, Trump played golf.
One February, Trump encouraged people to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day with acts of kindness. “It’s not a day to hang out in the park or pull out the barbecue grill,” he said. “It’s a day to do something to help someone else, and that can be as simple as… picking up the newspaper for that elderly person who can’t get to the end of the driveway.” Then he went out and played golf at Trump International. Maybe he was looking for newspapers?
In March of 2018, as 800,000 people were marching all over the country to protest the lack of gun control in America just after the Stoneman Douglas High School mass murders, he played golf.
Remember that round Trump played with pros Woods, Johnson, and Faxon in November of ’17? As they made the turn that day, an aide took Trump aside and told him militants had just shot up and bombed an Egyptian mosque, an attack which would leave 311 dead. Wouldn’t the president want to issue a statement immediately?
“I was in a golf cart with Trump,” Faxon recalled to Medium.com. “I thought he’d have to go back to Mar-a-Lago and make a statement. There were hundreds of lives lost.”
But Trump kept on playing. “The optics are going to look bad,” Faxon remembered Trump telling the pro players. “I’m on a golf course and we have a disaster. The media will take this that I don’t care, I’m gallivanting around with celebrity golfers. In reality, whether I’m in the White House, Mar-a-Lago, or on the golf course, my statement is not going to change.”
FYI: Obama did not post a fake video on Instagram that day of Trump toodling along in a golf cart mixed with footage of bloody mosque murders.
But maybe the most tin-eared moment of his golfing annals was when he tweeted:
Heading to the Southern White House to watch the Funeral Service of Barbara Bush. First Lady Melania has arrived in Houston to pay our respects. Will be a beautiful day!
A day filled with grief and mourning? Let’s play 36!
Sadly, he only got in 18.
What if Obama and Trump played against each other?
Please?
It’s probably never going to happen, but for a time, Trump wanted it to. “His swing looks like it’s coming along beautiful,” he once told the New York Post. “His game looks much better. I’d love to play him for the presidency.” When Trump bought Virginia’s Lowes Island golf course in 2009 and turned it into Trump Washington, D.C., he said he was hoping it would replace Congressional as the home course for Tiger Woods’ annual PGA Tour event (it didn’t) and that he was looking forward to playing it with President Obama. (He didn’t.)
He could’ve. One time, in 2014, Obama was in Westchester and asked his staff to set up a game at Trump Westchester. It’s unclear what happened, but some say Trump wouldn’t allow it because it meant closing down his course for his members for part of the day. He did, however, club Obama over the head with a tweet:
If Obama resigns from office NOW, thereby doing a great service to the country—I will give him free lifetime golf at any one of my courses!
Let’s say there is a god for golf writers and it’s on—Obama v. Trump—18 holes, loser has to wash the other’s limo in a Speedo.
Who would win?
Wait! Before you lay down your bets, let’s consider…
*Cheating…
If Trump is playing, he’s cheating. Apart from conceding short gimmes, Obama does not cheat. Trump always shoots in the 70s whether he did or not. He’s 80 proof. For The Donald, golf is never about improving or the exercise or enjoying the day. It’s about beating you, no matter what it takes to do it. Obama plays like he sleeps with the USGA rule book under his pillow. He’s a stickler. Everything is by the book.
“I can definitely vouch for #44 in his integrity on the course,” emails basketball star Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. “The man knows how to enjoy the game and do it the right way for sure. Except we only played for $1 so the stakes weren’t that high.”
Wait. No mulligans, no my foot slipped’s, no gimme chip-ins?
“No,” Curry writes.
So if we’re playing this match with five USGA rules officials following each president with cameras, then Trump won’t be able to cheat, which means he’ll be out of his element, doing something new, and that’s never good in a pressure match.
Advantage: Obama.
*Putting…
Trump picks up every putt within six feet and, if you’re not a threat, will pick up yours, too. You could park an Airstream trailer in Trump’s Friendship Zone. He gives so many putts, it gets a little emasculating. “A month or so ago I gave a guy a 10-footer,” Trump told Golf magazine in 2010, “and it was more insulting giving it to him then not giving it to him. You don’t want him to think you feel sorry for him. It’s a very fine line.”
You heard that right. Trump gives 10-foot putts. If this were basketball, it’d be the equivalent of saying, “Don’t even bother taking that 3. You’ll never miss that.”
Still, Trump is an excellent putter. Obama not so much.
Advantage: Trump.
*Handicaps…
Obama came into office as a 17 handicap and left as about a 13—“an honest 13,” he says. The ESPN sportscaster Michael Wilbon, a frequent partner of Obama’s on the course, estimates him to be an 11 now. Trump’s 2.8 is a bigger lie than Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman,” but he brags about it so he’d be stuck giving Obama eight shots. That means on the eight hardest holes, Obama could take one shot off his true score for purposes of the bet. To win any of those eight holes, Trump would have to beat him by two shots.
Giant advantage: Obama.
But let’s say they played straight up, with no shots given.
Advantage: Trump.
So who would win?
“I would win,” Trump said at a rally in Bluffton, South Carolina, once. “No, seriously, I would.”
If they had to walk? Obama by 20.
But let’s say they get to arguing. Let’s say Obama catches Trump cheating and fronts him, and Trump throws his phantom Winged Foot punch again. Who wins the fight?
Well, they’re about the same height, no matter what the White House doctor says, but Trump outweighs Obama by a good 75 pounds. Obama, though, is 15 years younger, is light years faster, and works out constantly. Trump’s idea of exercise is, as he told the New York Times, standing in front of a podium for an hour. “That’s exercise,” he says.
Advantage: Obama.
Plus, Obama is left-handed, so if he could slip that first Trump haymaker, he could surprise the big ginger with a hard left and maybe knock him out cold.
At which point, Obama could lean over him and say, “Not on my watch.”
12
PROFESSIONAL PEST
He’s not as smart as we thought he was.
—ARNOLD PALMER
THE WORLD OF PROFESSIONAL golf is just slightly more Republican than a Cabela’s grand opening. In a poll done by Golf.com, players were asked if the USGA and PGA should move their tournaments off of Trump’s courses as a reaction to his incendiary comments about Mexicans and immigrants. A fat 88% said no. Only 4% said yes. A full 42% of them said they’d vote for him again, compared to 20% who wouldn’t. The Philadelphia Eagles and the Golden State Warriors might refuse to come to the White House, but 90% of Tour players would be on the first NetJet there.
Caddies? Not so much.
In October of 2017, at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, New Jersey, Trump became the first standing pr
esident to attend the President’s Cup, a Ryder-Cup-wannabe event that pits the 12 best American players against the world’s 12 best players not from Europe, if that makes any sense. It’s that age-old America versus Australia-South Africa-Fiji-Asia-Latin America-And-A-Few-Others battle. That year, America swamped the ASAFALAAAFOs, 19–11. When it was time for the trophy presentation, Trump and his massive entourage of Secret Service, SWAT guys, press ops, and assistants were all flowing out of his luxury box to the 18th green, when swimming against the tide was a caddy of one of the winning American players. He was stopped cold by two agents, who put big hands on each of his shoulders.
“Sir, where are you going?”
“I’m just walking,” the caddy said. “Can’t I walk?”
“Sir, you’re the only one going this direction. Where are you going?”
Their grips got tighter. They weren’t blinking.
The caddy looked at both of them and sighed. “Look, guys, I appreciate you have a job to do and I mean no disrespect, but I just can’t stand to be anywhere near that motherfucker you work for.”
The agents loosed tiny smiles and let him go. A few minutes later, Trump gathered with the best golfers on the planet, raised the trophy high, and dedicated it to a very surprising group of people.
“On behalf of all the people of Texas, and all of the people of… Puerto Rico and the people of Florida, that have really suffered over this last short period of time with the hurricanes, I want to just remember them and we’re going to dedicate this trophy to all of those people who went through so much.”
It was a bizarre choice. At that moment, Puerto Rico was begging for U.S. help to restore electricity and water and not getting much. The entire $300 million contract to get the electricity turned back on had been handed to a tiny company out of Whitefish, Montana, the hometown of Trump’s then Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose son worked for a time for the company. With thousands of people trapped in their homes without power or water—filling out a grisly death toll that would eventually rise to 3,000 people—a golf trophy didn’t seem all that helpful.