by Rick Reilly
But keep on your toes, ballerinas, because it’s a wild dance.
3
THE KID WITH THE BIG SHEKELS
You gotta watch those guys at Cobbs Creek. They’ll take your teeth.
—DONALD J. TRUMP
IF YOU WERE BORN a son of Fred Trump, you heard one thing over and over: Win, win, and then win some more. Whatever you have to do, be a winner. Fred Trump constantly urged his boys to be “killers.” Life as a Trump was not about hugs or picnics or bedtime reading. It was about winning. Nothing else mattered.
“The stories you hear about Fred,” says Jack O’Donnell, vice president of Trump Plaza Casino from 1987 to 1990, “he was pretty rough on the boys—win, win, win, strict, strict, strict—always finish on top. That’s not easy.”
Donald took to sports and no wonder. Every day, sports gave young Donald the chance to prove to his father he was a winner. A naturally good athlete—“I was always the best athlete,” he once boasted, “Nobody ever talks about that”—Trump likes to say that at one time he could’ve been a pro baseball player. “But those weren’t good times for baseball in terms of, you make $2,” he told golf podcaster David Feherty. So he chose a career in real estate instead. So, to recap: Major League Baseball was dying to get Donald Trump, but they weren’t paying enough to suit him, so he broke their heart and joined his dad’s business.
It’s no wonder Trump fell in love with golf. Every round of golf comes with 18 chances to win, plus the 19th chance—my final score versus yours. I beat you. I win. You’re a loser. Trump’s love affair with golf has far outlasted any romance he’s had with any woman or career or party affiliation.
Fred, a second-generation German, played, but only rarely. One day when Trump was young, his dad took him out to a golf course called Forest Park near Queens. Young Donald didn’t play that day but says his father “was, potentially, a very good golfer. He probably only played 10 times in his life, but he had a beautiful swing.”
Donald himself didn’t take up the game with passion until college in the late 1960s, and I could give you 1,000 guesses where and you’d never get it.
It was Philadelphia’s scruffy Cobbs Creek, aka “The Crick,” a goulash of gamblers and hustlers and out-of-work steelworkers. It was a public track, full of $2 weekend hacks and $100/hole sharpies and Penn students. One of those students was Trump, who’d drive the 10 minutes from Penn’s Wharton School of Business to play it with his buddies. “I remember Trump,” says Bob Steele, 76, a Cobbs “Cricker” since 1962. “He didn’t sneak on. He paid. You could tell the kid came from big shekels. I remember he was always yakkin’. Good-lookin’ guy, though. He stood out from the rest of ’em. Well dressed, you know? When he ran for president, I saw him on TV and I said, ‘Hey! That guy was a Cricker!’”
If you were a true Cricker, you bet on everything before, during, and after the round, and then bought a cold beer from out of the trunk of Cornbread’s car, sat under the trees, and laughed and argued about it until dark. They played for knee-knocking amounts for the time—$50 Nassaus. Carry-over skins. Pig and Wolf. Vegas. If you could think of a bet, somebody would give you action. And not just golf bets. One time, a guy named Lou bet he could carry two guys and their bags on his back up the 100-yard hill at 17—and did.
So it was that the millionaire’s son learned the game among the carpenters and bus drivers and spike-shoed grifters on a course that needed a shave and a clean shirt. “I had friends that were golfers,” Trump told Golf Digest. “I’d never played golf—I always played baseball and football and stuff. And so I’d go out to Cobbs Creak… a public course, a rough course, no grass on the tees, no nothing, but it was good, and great people. All hustlers out there. I mean, more hustlers than any place I’ve seen to this day. I played golf with my friends, and then I started to play with the hustlers. And I learned a lot. I learned about golf, I learned about gambling. I learned about everything.”
They were expensive lessons. Says Steele: “The hustlers here, man, they’d see some yokel show up in a panama hat asking for a game and they’d send the poor guy home without even hamburger money.”
There were Row Boat and Frankie and a dozen other guys, unafraid to break the rules to break your wallet. Even pioneering black pro and consummate hustler Charlie Sifford would show up now and then. This was a place full of guys with holes in their pockets, the better to drop an extra ball when nobody was looking. And when they were out of sheep to fleece, they’d fleece each other.
“One time, Frankie was playing another hustler for $50,” remembers Steele. “So it’s tied up on 18. The guy Frankie is playing hooks it left into the long gunch and can’t find it. All of a sudden, the hustler goes, ‘Hey! I found it!’ Frankie comes running over, pissed. ‘You slob! How you gonna find your ball when it’s in my pocket?!?’”
As a Cricker, Trump learned (a) it’s not cheating if you don’t get caught; (b) if you trash talk enough, your opponent might choke; and (c) the best stroke in golf is the one where your opponent writes you a check.
At the Crick, he honed a swing with a powerful move through the ball. It starts way, way inside and so flat it’s almost parallel to the ground. But on the downswing, he gets it back on plane, then slams violently through the ball, propelled by a furious turn of the hips, the kind of hip turn you rarely see in amateurs, nearly Sam Snead-like, with a big follow through. He’s a president who gets off bombs. “He outdrove me every time,” Bill Clinton once lamented.
“For me, it’s all about the hips,” he once told Golf Digest’s Jaime Diaz. “Just get them out of the way as fast and as hard as I can and let the arms really swing through. I read about the hips a long time ago in Ben Hogan’s book, and it became my simple key, and I’ve stayed with it. It might look a little crazy, but the more I clear, the straighter I hit it.”
“What most impressed me,” Tiger Woods blogged after playing him, “was how far he hits the ball at 70 years old. He takes a pretty good lash.”
Unfortunately, the rest of his game isn’t nearly as good. Former tour star and now Fox golf analyst Brad Faxon played with Trump in West Palm Beach. “He’s good off the tee, hits this nice draw every time,” Faxon says. “His irons are OK. He’s a poor chipper. He’ll do anything not to chip, so he’ll putt anytime he can, even out of bunkers if he can, around water. He’s an OK putter. He’s a 4 [handicap] tee to green and a 20 [handicap] chipper.”
“I’m pretty much a natural golfer,” Trump has said, humbly.
Golf + Trump is an odd couple, because in golf the most revered thing is not winning but honor. Jack Nicklaus may be the game’s greatest winner, but The King will always be Arnold Palmer, for the way he showed kindness to princes and plumbers alike. Bobby Jones was so taken with the idea of honor that he refused to turn pro, despite winning seven majors. Wasn’t gentlemanly. It wasn’t until Tiger Woods that the idea of scorched-earth winning came along. Woods’ father, Earl, once told me they used to have a mantra they repeated after every victory: “We came. We saw. We won. We got the fuck out of town.”
Still, Woods would rather finish last than cheat. Every day, in every tournament, in every state, players report violations on themselves that nobody else saw. Hale Irwin once missed the playoff at the 1983 British Open by one shot because he says he whiffed a one-inch putt on the final day. Nobody saw it but Irwin. In golf, that’s enough. Not long ago, a South Dakota high schooler named Kate Wynja was about to win the state championship in a rout when she realized she’d signed for a 4 on a hole when she’d actually made a 5. Nobody else knew. Wouldn’t have made a lick of difference in the outcome. But she immediately told officials, who had no choice but to disqualify her. She lost not only the individual title but her team’s state title. Even Jack Nicklaus himself was impressed. He tweeted:
Congrats to this young lady for using golf as a vehicle to teach us all life lessons on honesty and integrity.
In golf, you don’t cheat your opponent. You don’t cheat your friends. You d
on’t cheat, period. But somehow—either from his father drilling into his brain or the Crickers drilling into his wallet—this was lost on Trump. “Win or else” flattened “honor of the game” in a one-round knockout. Trump had to win, no matter what, and those great spaces of golf allowed him the cover to do it.
“He found a game that suits him to a T,” says O’Donnell. “He has such a short attention span that makes golf perfect for him. You stand on the tee box for a minute and chat, then you hit, then you go your own way. It’s very short periods of concentration. But the best part is that it’s all self-regulated. He can cheat any time he wants.”
When college was over, he took all that to the country clubs, where Trump figured out that not only could he pencil-whip his very un-Crick opponents even easier, but his quick charm and solid game could also help him grease the rails to the top.
“There was this [New York] banker who was really going to do bad numbers on me,” Trump told Golf Channel’s David Feherty on a podcast, referring to his Atlantic City casino bankruptcies. “I was playing one day and we needed another person. Here’s this [banker] at the course. They said to him, ‘Would you like to join the group?’… He was a terrible golfer, terrible.… Now, I’m in deep trouble. I owe this man tens of tens of millions of dollars. So he topped his first ball, topped his second ball. This goes on for two or three more holes. I finally said, ‘Do me a favor. Take your hands in a V, point the V to the shoulder. Strengthen your grip.’ He had a terrible weak grip. The guy winds up hitting the nicest ball of his life. It goes out to the right and hooks back into the fairway. He says, ‘I’ve never hit a shot like that! That’s the nicest shot I’ve ever hit!’ He ends up playing the best he’s ever played.… So he sees me the next day and says, ‘Hey, can we work this out over lunch?’ And I worked it out with him in about 10 minutes. So, who knows, without golf, maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here!”
No other sport captivated Trump like golf. He became addicted to the constant competition, hole by hole, day by day. And not just the bets. He came to see his handicap as a kind of contest, too, one he has to win daily.
“I’d say he’s a solid 7,” says Trump’s permanent caddy at his Washington course, A.J. (He prefers I don’t give his last name.) “He really gets through it. He can drive it a long way. For a 72-year-old man, he’s amazing. He has a little trouble around the greens, but he can flop it [hit a very high and soft chip] from anywhere. He’s amazing with the flop. He can have his hot putting days, too. Sometimes, not so much.”
“I’d say he’s a legit 10,” Faxon says. “He’ll probably get mad at me for that, but I think that’s about right.” Four-time major winner Ernie Els played with him and declared him to be “an 8 or a 9.” LPGA great Annika Sörenstam has played with him at least twice and says, “I would say he’s a 9 or 10.”
So the caddy and the pros who make a living in the game estimate his handicap to be somewhere between a 7 and a 10. The only problem with all that is Trump insists his handicap is a 2.8. In the world of golf handicaps, that difference is huge. If Trump is a 2.8, Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter. No possible way. It would take a 9 handicap five good years of hard practice to get to a 2.8 and Donald Trump doesn’t practice.
Former Republican Speaker of the Florida House Will Weatherford played with Trump in 2015 at Southern Highlands Golf Club in Las Vegas, the day of the Floyd Mayweather–Manny Pacquiao fight. “He was a lot of fun,” Weatherford recalls. “When you play with Donald, you do a lot of listening. He was telling stories, entertaining us the whole way around.”
Was he a stickler about the rules?
“Not so much. I remember on one par 3, he hit his first shot way out of bounds. Teed up another and I think that one was lost, too. The third one landed about 12 feet from the hole. He made that putt. I’m pretty sure he gave himself a 2 on that hole. Look, I take mulligans, too. I’m not judging.… But then later, he was apparently telling people he was a 2 or a 3 and that they should call Will Weatherford and I’d confirm what a great golfer he is. I mean, if he’s a 2, that’s news to me. I’ve played with 2s and that didn’t look anything like a 2.”
What was he then?
“Well, I’m about a 12 or 13 and I wouldn’t say he was any better than me.”
When you look up Trump on GHIN.com—the USGA’s online handicap search site—he’s listed as a 2.8. But, as of press time, he’d only posted 20 times in the past seven years. Seven years? For an avid golfer like Trump, that’s preposterous. In golf, honor demands that you post every round, good or bad, high or low, so that the bets are fair. You finish your round, shake hands, go straight to the computer, post your score, pay off the bet, and then drink your beer, in that order. If people see that you don’t post your scores, your phone is going to stop ringing. Even the people Trump plays with post their scores. In 2016 alone, Rudy Giuliani posted 16 times. Tony Russo, a noted Washington lobbyist, posted 20 times just in the summer of 2018. Anybody who only plays three times a year would be a 22.8, not a 2.8. We know the 2.8 is a lie because, as president, he’s averaging about 80 rounds a year, according to TrumpGolfCount.com, a slavish accounting of Trump’s golf activity. If he’s playing an average of 80 rounds a year, and only posting 3 rounds, that means he’s leaving 95% of them off.
So what’s he doing? He’s cherry picking. He’s only putting in his showiest rounds. Even with the scores he posts, he’s either shaving multiple shots off his total or inflating the difficulty of the courses he played. The GHIN system takes your 20 most recent scores, throws out the worst 10, and averages the best 10, factoring in course rating and course slope. But take a look at those 20 scores:
• He posted only one score in all of 2016, and two in 2015. So which do you believe? The Trump who says he’s great at golf, who wants you to vote for him because he’s a golf champion, who tweets about playing golf all the time? Or this Trump, who apparently only plays every time Germany wins a war?
• Look at the “slopes” of his scores. Slope is the relative difficulty of a course. The computer is much more impressed with the 100 you shot on a 130 slope course than the 100 you shot on a 115 course. The average course slope is about 120. Fifteen of the 20 scores Trump posted were on courses with slopes of over 140. Anything over 140 is insanely hard. That’s like a skier who only goes down double black diamonds. Only the most sadistic courses in America are over 140. Just to give you an idea, Augusta National is a 137. Bethpage Black in New York is harder than Chinese algebra, and it’s only 144. I play once a week on some pretty good courses, and the highest slope out of my last 20 is 135. So Trump could be tricking the GHIN computer by plugging in the slope of the way-back pro tees—even though everyone says he plays the normal tees—to make whatever score he shot look more impressive to the computer, which drives his handicap lower. Again, it’s dirty and unscrupulous but—you gotta admit—kind of genius.
• He posted a 68 in October of 2017, and then deleted it. Now, do you know any golfers who would delete a 68? Most would get the scorecard blown up and make wallpaper.
Date: 6/16
Score: 77
Course Rating/Slope: 72.4/134
Differential: 3.9
Date: 5/15
Score: 85
Course Rating/Slope: 73.0/144
Differential: 9.4
Date: 5/15
Score: 81
Course Rating/Slope: 71.6/140
Differential: 7.6
Date: 10/14
Score: 86
Course Rating/Slope: 74.7/149
Differential: 8.6
Date: 10/14
Score: 84
Course Rating/Slope: 74.7/149
Differential: 7.1
Date: 7/14
Score: 75
Course Rating/Slope: 69.5/137
Differential: 4.5
Date: 7/14
Score: 83
Course Rating/Slope: 71.8/135
Differential: 9.4
Date: 6/14
Score: 78
Course Rating/Slope: 72.2/137
Differential: 4.8
Date: 6/14
Score: 77
Course Rating/Slope: 73.1/143
Differential: 3.1
Date: 6/14
Score: 76
Course Rating/Slope: 71.9/139
Differential: 3.3
Date: 8/13
Score: 70
Course Rating/Slope: 72.3/147
Differential: -1.8
Date: 7/13
Score: 76
Course Rating/Slope: 70.2/132
Differential: 5.0
Date: 6/13
Score: 79
Course Rating/Slope: 73.0/144
Differential: 4.7
Date: 6/13
Score: 79
Course Rating/Slope: 71.6/140
Differential: 6.0
Date: 7/12
Score: 76
Course Rating/Slope: 73.9/144
Differential: 1.6
Date: 6/11
Score: 74
Course Rating/Slope: 73.0/144
Differential: 0.8
Date: 5/11
Score: 83
Course Rating/Slope: 74.7/149
Differential: 6.3
Date: 5/11
Score: 83
Course Rating/Slope: 74.7/149
Differential: 6.3
Date: 4/11
Score: 84
Course Rating/Slope: 74.7/149
Differential: 7.1
Date: 9/09
Score: 85
Course Rating/Slope: 74.7/149
Differential: 7.8
*Self-reported
So why go to such lengths to gin up a fake 2.8 handicap? What’s so bad about being a 9? According to the National Golf Foundation, only around 3% of men over 70 are single-digit handicaps. Most 70-somethings would give their dentures for that. Why must he pretend he’s a 3, a phony number he can’t play to from the red tees? Put it this way: Jack Nicklaus is a 3.4 on GHIN.com. If you needed a partner for a death match, loser cleans the Fallujah Denny’s with a toothbrush for the rest of his life, would you take Trump or Jack Nicklaus?
