by Rick Reilly
Just then, a fan hollered out: “You don’t give a sh*t about Puerto Rico!”
Golf takes long hours, piles of money, and manicured acres to play, so it mostly leans toward the rich, except when it leans to the very rich. The people who watch it on TV are the toniest demographic of any sport, which is why the products being pitched are usually luxury cars, Wall Street companies, and watches that cost more than some people’s houses. Those corporate boards lean politically the same way as the players, but they need rich Democrat fans to buy, too, so Trump has been an uncaged lion for them.
Take, for instance, Cadillac.
Cadillac’s Trump problems began with an idle promise Trump made to the Palm Beach County commissioners long before he was president, back when he was trying to get the land near Mar-a-Lago to build Trump International (West Palm Beach). He told them, “If you lease me the land, I promise you I’ll get you a Tour stop.” The commissioner of the PGA Tour then was an achingly quiet guy named Tim Finchem, who would rather administer gallbladder surgery on himself than rock the corporate boat. He knew Trump could rock a cruise liner, and he wanted no part of him as a business partner. So Trump wasn’t getting any Tour stop. No way. That idea was dead. Still, when Trump gets his heart set on something, he will turn oceans into deserts to get it. He wanted a Tour stop no matter what, which meant there was only one other way—buy a course that already HAD a Tour stop.
Enter Doral.
Since 1962, Doral’s Blue Monster course in Miami had been a classic stop on the PGA Tour’s Florida swing, a straw-hat old-school tourney won by no less than Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo. Only the Masters, Pebble Beach, and the Colonial had been Tour stops longer than Doral. So, in 2012, Trump bought the entire Doral resort out of bankruptcy for $150 million—lock, stock, and all four courses, plus the hotel, by far his largest golf purchase ever. He changed the signs immediately, calling it Trump National Doral Miami. He declared Doral’s Tour stop “a major,” which it most assuredly wasn’t, and told the press he now had “the greatest site in Florida,” which he absolutely didn’t. Still, Trump had his wish. Finchem and the PGA Tour would now be coming to him, at his course, and he could take center stage for one week as the New God of Golf. That’s when the trouble started.
The sponsor of the Doral stop was Cadillac, and suddenly, Cadillac was having to share top billing with Trump and his King Kong personality and his shooting-gallery press conferences and his helicopter flying in from West Palm with the giant TRUMP painted on its side, the TV cameras lapping it up. There is only one star at any Trump event and it’s the Donald.
“Trump was getting more commercial air time than Cadillac,” said a person involved in the sponsorship. “He parked his damn helicopter in the middle of the golf course. Here was Cadillac, paying all that money, and the whole tournament was suddenly all about Trump.” Said another, “They were getting dwarfed. No way were they going to get their money’s worth with Trump there.”
Trump loved the attention, driving his supercharged cart up behind golfers (a no-no), interrupting players during practice rounds (not cool), and being sure to be seen whenever and wherever possible (as you’d expect).
“You should’ve seen him,” says one caddy of an American player. “He’d come out to the (practice) range and go down the line with the same script for each guy. He’d come up to the first guy and go, ‘Hey, you’re lookin’ really good!’ Then he’d point to the guy hitting balls next to him and go, “But I don’t know if you can beat THIS guy!’ So then he’d go to that guy and say, ‘Hey, you’re looking really good! But I don’t think you can beat THIS guy’ and so on. Made me wanna hurl.”
Cadillac asked Trump if he could please tone it down and stop flying his chopper in during the tournament. “Maybe you could fly in before play starts?” they asked. He owned the hotel; could he maybe just stay put at Doral for the four days? Trump said he’d consider it, but he kept choppering in during play, a killer cutaway shot for any TV director. Here comes The Man himself!
Worse, the players were starting to grumble about the course. Not long after he bought it, Trump had architect Gil Hanse re-do the Blue Monster. Hanse, with Trump by his side at every step, somehow gave Doral a charm bypass. He added length and difficulty but took out the character. Doral became nothing but a Big Bangers Ball—only long hitters invited. A tournament that had been won by smaller, crafty players like Lee Trevino, Tom Kite, and Ben Crenshaw was now only winnable by the beasts, like Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson (twice). Cue the grousing and grumbling in the locker room. After he finished that first week, a reporter asked four-time major winner Rory McIlroy what his takeaway was on the new Doral.
“My takeaway?” McIlroy said. “Maybe it’s time for me to reconsider my schedule.”
“They made it too long,” says architect Bobby Jones. “Dick Wilson [the original designer] had already made a terrific course, a tough course, but you know Gil [Hanse] was gonna do whatever Donald said.” Says that caddy, “Doral is a disaster now. Way too long. It’s just a slog now. Only 15 guys can win it—the 15 longest guys.”
That, of course, delighted Trump. He loved seeing the best players in the world shoot 78s on his Monster. It was somehow a reflection on his own golf skill. “He’s one of a kind,” Tour star Rickie Fowler said of Trump with a laugh. “He likes seeing us get beat up by his golf course.”
It all became too much for Cadillac. They bailed out. Two months before the election, the Tour moved the tournament from Doral to Mexico. After 55 years at Doral, Trump’s ached-for Tour stop up and emigrated to Mexico on him. “It’s quite ironic that we’re going to Mexico after being at Doral,” McIlroy said with a grin. “We just jump over the wall.”
Today, Doral isn’t half the place it used to be. I visited it in May of 2018 and found it… empty. “Doral is a conference resort,” said the now-late general manager of The Breakers hotel, David Burke. “Big groups, corporate events. But Trump is so controversial now, corporations don’t want to risk pissing their clients off by staying at a property with ‘Trump’ in the title. My buddy runs it and he says they’re empty.”
Forbes confirms this. They report that Doral lost 100,000 booked room nights since Trump took over the White House. Worse, Forbes reports that revenue at Trump’s U.S. golf properties fell by an estimated 9% in 2017. When Trump broke tradition with every modern president and refused to sell his businesses or at least put them in a blind trust, he must’ve figured he’d make much more money his way. Turned out just the opposite. Most financial experts say if he’d have sold it all and put everything into America’s bull market, he’d be worth $500 million more today.
When I visited Doral in May of 2018, it was like somebody had pulled a fire alarm. I stood outside the pro shop at a spot where I could see half a dozen golf holes but only saw one (1) golf cart. The practice range had room for 50 people, but only two were there. There was one kid taking a tennis lesson. There were the standard 100-foot poles waving flags the size of a Chili’s, miles of marble and gold and plush carpet, the standard belching Venetian fountain, just nobody gawking at them. It was so empty that an oddly serendipitous thing happened. Twelve hours after I checked out in the main lobby, a gunman entered that lobby, draped a massive American flag over the front desk, started screaming that he wanted to see Trump, and began shooting the joint up with a machine gun. He shot everywhere—shattering the gilded mirrors, the massive chandeliers, and the huge windows. He was eventually shot in the leg by Miami police and apprehended. But here’s the good thing: The place was so empty nobody got hit. Zero deaths, zero injuries.
It was the rarest event for Trump: A loss even he couldn’t spin into a win. Though he did come up with a pretty good line. “I hope they have kidnapping insurance,” Trump said.
So the next time you hear somebody say, “Name one good thing Trump has ever done for people,” you can point out that he saved a lot of lives that day.
(A note from our Irony Dept.: Trump Doral has manag
ed to sign a pro tour golf event again, but it’s on the PGA’s Latin American Tour. Hope they have machine-gun insurance.)
Dumping the Doral Tour stop wasn’t the first time pro golf ran from Trump. For 36 years, there existed a silly-season event called the PGA Grand Slam. It was a fabricated event, usually played in exotic places, pitting the winners of the four majors against each other, for no apparent reason. In 2015, it was supposed to move to Trump Los Angeles in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. But then Trump opened up his presidential campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants to the U.S. were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Golf buried its head and groaned, but Trump didn’t apologize. Double Down doubled down. He told the Golf Channel he’d received “tremendous support” from the golf world because “they all know I’m right.”
That was too much. The PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, USGA, and PGA of America rose up to yell, “It’s not true.” They issued this statement:
In response to Mr. Trump’s comments about the golf industry “knowing he is right” in regards to his recent statements about Mexican immigrants, we feel compelled to clarify that those remarks do not reflect the views of our organizations.… Mr. Trump’s comments are inconsistent with our strong commitment to an inclusive and welcoming environment in the game of golf.
It’s a triple blue moon when the stodgy world of golf takes a stance on anything political, but this time, it was pissed enough to not just speak but act. The PGA of America refused to play the Grand Slam at Trump’s course and then canceled the Grand Slam altogether. It hasn’t come back since. What do you know about that? A golf-crazy presidential candidate killed two pro golf tournaments in two years.
It hurts Trump deeply when pro golf rejects him this way. He knows pro golf like a blind man knows his room. He knows who’s who, even down to the golf writers.
Once, during the presidential campaign, a pro from Trump Bedminster, Jim Herman, won the 2016 Houston Open. Trump had staked him on Tour to help him get his start, and Herman’s win was a huge surprise. Steve DiMeglio, the longtime golf writer from USA Today, called the campaign in hopes they could fetch him one quote from Trump about Herman. It was a long shot. Trump was stumping in Milwaukee, where it was madness. Every political writer was dying for time with the primary-gobbling phenomenon.
All of a sudden, DiMeglio was on the phone with Trump, who was going on and on about Herman, what a great guy he is, what a great player, “I always believed in him,” and “We’re so proud,” etc., nonstop. Finally, in the background, DiMeglio heard, “Can somebody get him the fuck off the phone? He’s supposed to be on stage! Who’s he talking to anyway?” Then DiMeglio heard, “Some golf writer from USA Today.”
“I heard about that from our political writers for a while afterward,” DiMeglio remembers with a laugh. “‘How the hell did you get Trump again?’”
Now that he’s president, Trump can get some of America’s most famous team-sport pro athletes to play with him. According to TrumpGolfCount.com, he has a pro athlete in his foursome 45% of the time. And why not? Trump is a good player, and athletes are usually good, too, which allows the whole parade to fly along in under three and a half hours, the way he likes it. Among the dozens of athletes he’s played with are Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Kirk Cousins, and John Elway.
He’s always been able to get games with the most famous golfers in the world: Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Greg Norman. As president, that hasn’t changed. So far, he’s teed it up with Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson (twice), Rickie Fowler, and more. Bryson DeChambeau gave him a golf bag. Trump’s most frequent pro partner since he’s been president has been David Frost (four times), not the deceased talk-show host but the journeyman South African.
They all say the same thing: He’s great fun and they have no idea what he shot. Only Rory McIlroy guessed at it. “He probably shot around 80. He’s a decent player for a guy in his 70s.… Sometimes he will give himself some putts, but that’s fine, he’s the president, he can have that luxury.”
Woods: “Our discussion topics were wide-ranging; it was fun. We both enjoyed the bantering, bickering, and needling.… We didn’t have a match and played for fun.” (This, of course, turned out to be a fib, as innocently revealed by Brad Faxon to me in Chapter 4.)
Justin Thomas: “I’ve never seen that many golf carts on one hole in my life.”
Japanese star Hideki Matsuyama got to play one day not only with Trump but also with Japanese prime minister Shinzoˉ Abe. Through an interpreter, he said: “I had no idea what it would be like, only what I’d read in the media, but he wasn’t like they say he is at all. He was fun. It was enjoyable. We chatted the whole day. He asked me so many questions. About Japan. About how I like America. He offered me whatever help I needed. I was really nervous, but at least my first drive went straight.”
Did either leader cheat?
“Well, we weren’t betting. There was nothing riding on it. They weren’t professional golfers. They were just trying to have fun, so it was a very easy and enjoyable day.”
(In other words: Hai.)
Jack Nicklaus likes Trump and stands up for him against critics, but then again, Trump has given him good work at his golf courses, especially Trump Ferry Point in the Bronx.
Trump used to like to tell people he was tight with the late, great Arnold Palmer, too. Once, the golf writer James Dodson was leaving an interview with Trump to go to one with Palmer. Dodson says Trump “crossed one finger over the other and he said, ‘Arnold and I are like that.’” Dodson remembered, “And I told Arnold that the next night at dinner, and he laughed and said, ‘Really? It’s more like this.’ And he crossed his hands and put them at his own throat.”
“One moment stands out in my mind,” Palmer’s daughter, Peg, recounted recently to writer Thomas Hauser of the Sporting News. “My dad and I were at home in Latrobe. He died in September [2016], so this was before the election. The television was on. Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust—like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’—like he couldn’t believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was,’ and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”
Trump often calls Tiger his “good friend,” but it seems to be a one-way friendship. Woods did design Trump World Dubai, though it’s not owned by Trump, only operated by him. Still, Eric Trump—who seems to have gone to the Donald Trump School of Fabulousness—thinks it’s just another sign that they’re super bros. “They’ve been very, very close,” Eric said. “When you combine Trump and Tiger, it’s a match made in heaven. It’s a very amazing combination.”
Yet every time we ask Tiger about Trump, it’s like we asked him about an uncle who’s in Leavenworth. “Well, he’s the president of the United States. You have to respect the office. No matter who is in the office, you may like, dislike personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office.” If that’s true, then why did Woods’ spokesman Glenn Greenspan try to build an O’Hare runway between the two of them? “Tiger is not in partnership with Mr. Trump or his organization and stating otherwise is absolutely wrong. Tiger Woods Design’s contract and obligation is to the developer, DAMAC Properties. Our association ends there. I can’t put it any clearer that Tiger Woods Design does not have an agreement with Mr. Trump.”
When Trump eliminated protection for the 800,000 DACA “Dreamers,” putting American-born young people at risk of being deported to countries they’d never even seen, Woods was in a pickle. The Tiger Woods Foundation is very involved in funding the educations of underprivileged kids from immigrant families. This was everything they didn’t believe in. Its own foundation kids were terrified. The Tiger Woods Foundation had to tweet out:
We are committed to and in full support of our #DACA scholars and alu
mni. Join us in urging Congress to pass the #DREAMAct. #DefendDREAMers.
All doubt was removed the night Tiger went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where Colbert asked him about the presidents with whom he’d played. Tiger recalled Bush 41 (“We played in about two hours”), Clinton (“lotsa cuts,” which is to say, “sliced shots”), and Obama (“very competitive”).
“What about Trump?” Colbert asked.
Woods got a big grin on his face and replied, “You said ‘presidents,’” getting a big laugh from the crowd.
Trump does seem to be friends with Dustin Johnson, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens—20 minutes from Mar-a-Lago—and his grandfather, Art Whisnant (who was once drafted by the Minneapolis Lakers) lives in West Palm Beach. Trump once asked Johnson to come have Thanksgiving dinner with him, according to Whisnant. “They’re tight,” the grandfather says. So tight that on Tuesday of the 2018 U.S. Open week at Shinnecock Hills, New York, Johnson drove clear back into the city to appear at the opening of Trump’s new clubhouse at Trump Ferry Point in the Bronx. Tiger wouldn’t do a Tuesday appearance on Open week if you gave him Queens.
But playing golf with Trump can cause some serious blowback. Take what happened to McIlroy. He got pilloried for it. “History will brutally judge [McIlroy’s] golfing buddy Trump,” wrote Ewan MacKenna in The Irish Independent. “But we ought to judge Rory right now.”
McIlroy was so rattled by the reaction, he jumped on Twitter and vented.