Donald Trump Cheats At Golf

SteveHolt10 years ago

The world can forgive a lot of things, but cheating at golf is a hard one to let go.

Apparently, no one in this world cheats at golf like Donald Trump. The self-proclaimed billionaire and presidential candidate was exposed by The Washington Post as being a serial golf cheater.

From The Washington Post:

One morning in the mid-1990s, Mark Mulvoy was on the sixth hole of Long Island’s Garden City Golf Club with Donald Trump when the skies opened, and they ducked for cover under a nearby awning. The rain let up a few moments later, and Mulvoy, then the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, returned to the green. When he got there, he found a ball 10 feet from the pin that he didn’t remember seeing before the storm.

“Who the hell’s ball is this?” he said.

“That’s me,” the real estate mogul said, according to Mulvoy.

“Donald, give me a f—— break,” Mulvoy recalls telling him. “You’ve been hacking away in the g—— weeds all day. You do not lie there.”

“Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time,” he recalls Trump replying. “I have to cheat just to keep up with them.”

…

“The worst celebrity golf cheat?” the rock star Alice Cooper said in a 2012 interview with Q magazine. “I wish I could tell you that. It would be a shocker. I played with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say.” (“I’ve never played with Alice Cooper,” Trump said. “That’s a terrible thing to say about people, especially me.”)

“Golf is like bicycle shorts: It can reveal a lot about a guy,” said Rick Reilly, the sportswriter who hit the links with Trump for his 2004 book “Who’s Your Caddy?” in which he lugged clubs for several of the world’s best golfers and VIP amateurs.

…

Reilly told The Washington Post about an afternoon when Trump wrote down scores he didn’t actually achieve on his scorecard, conceded putts to himself by raking the ball into the hole with his putter rather than striking it properly (“He rakes like my gardener!”), and even called a gimme — something a player might claim for a two-foot putt — on what should have been a chip shot.

“He took the world’s first gimme chip-in,” Reilly said. At one point, Trump, after taking a number of second shots, told Reilly to “make sure you write that I play my first ball. You don’t get a second ball in life.” In life it may or may not be true that a person gets a second chance; and yet, as Reilly wrote, on holes 1, 13 and 17, Trump did indeed get a second ball.

We’ve all had our bad days on the course (Well, maybe not Dan Regester). It’s tough to etch out that 97 on the scorecard and call it a day, but golf is a gentleman’s game, and gentlemen don’t cheat. Golf is for people with integrity.

Trump clearly isn’t a bad golfer. He has a funny-looking swing, but it obviously can get the job done — as evidenced by this tee shot below:

I will concede this: I appreciate how little Donald Trump cares about what other people think. A “gimme chip-in” is perhaps the most absurd golf tale I’ve ever heard, but you have to respect the boldness of trying to get away with that. I’m not surprised at all. I mean, this is the guy who once said he thought poor people and children shouldn’t be allowed to play golf.

Trump owns dozens of courses around the world, and many of them are considered to be among golf’s top-tier. That’s all fine and might even be enough for a playing partner to ignore Trump’s persistent cheating habits, but a real man takes his quadruple bogey, grabs his ball, takes a swig of his beer, and heads to the next hole unscathed. Short-term memory is a benefit in golf. In reality, Trump probably shoots an 86 and writes down 75.

Shaving strokes is for the Patrick Reeds of the world, I’d prefer a president who aligns more with Jordan Spieth..

[via Washington Post]

Image via YouTube