Commander in Cheat

by Rick Reilly

  I don’t agree with everything my friends or family say or do, but I still play golf with them. To be called a fascist and a bigot by some people because I spent time in someone’s company is just ridiculous. I hope, to some degree, this clarifies my decision to accept the invitation.

  He also said he’d “think twice” about doing it again.

  Trump really is tight with the one and only Long John Daly, who calls him his “great friend” and who came to the White House three months into Trump’s reign with no less than Sarah Palin, Kid Rock, and ultra-right-wing rocker Ted Nugent. There, the foursome gleefully posed for a mocking photo in front of a painting of Hillary Clinton. Seems right that Daly would be one of the first celebrities Trump invited. Between them, Trump and Daly have fathered eight children and married seven different women.

  Then there was the night a gaggle of Tour players and officials visited the White House. Among the Tour players were DeChambeau, Jason Bohn, Kevin Streelman, and Billy Hurley. Tour commissioner Jay Monahan was there, too.

  “We walk into the Oval Office about 8 p.m. and there he is at the desk, still in his suit,” Streelman recalls. “He jumps up and goes, ‘My golf guys!’ He seemed happy to see us and he couldn’t have been more friendly. He let us take pictures, showed us around, and then he goes, ‘You guys want to see the Lincoln Bedroom?’ Next thing you know we’re in the Lincoln Bedroom.… Then he says, ‘Come with me.’ We’re in the Private Residence! He knocks on this one door, pretty loud, and goes, ‘Melania? Are you decent? I got some guys I want you to meet.’ After a while, she came out and we got to meet her, too! I mean, it was awesome! It was like we were his golf buddies and he was just showing us around his house! Just like a normal guy!”

  (Trump also has a fun little trick he likes to play with visitors. He’ll show people a button under his desk. It looks important. “You want me to push it?” he’ll say. Before they can holler, “No!!!” he hits it. Instantly, a butler brings him another Diet Coke.)

  Trump also calls Tour superstar Phil Mickelson “a good friend.” They’ve played a couple times together, plus Mickelson is scheduled to design a Trump-operated course in Bali. But since the election, Mickelson has gone stone-cold mum on the subject. When I asked Mickelson about his friendship with Trump, he looked me right in the eye for about 10 seconds, smiled, and walked away.

  Then there’s Bernhard Langer, the sensational German who’s dominated the Senior Tour. Trump says Langer is a “friend” and even offered a story about Langer to defend his own outrageous lie that “3 to 5 million people voted illegally” to help Hillary Clinton win the popular vote tally. Trump declared that Langer, a Florida resident, had been unable to vote at his usual polling place while several people “who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote” were ushered through.

  It’s a lovely story except for one small fact: Langer is a German citizen. He can’t vote here.

  One of Trump’s goals when he got into the golf business was to someday see a golf major played on one of his courses. Since the Masters is permanently held at Augusta National (GA), that left him three options: the U.S. Open, the Open Championship (formerly the British Open), and the PGA Championship. It took him about 20 years, but the dream is about to become real. In 2022, the 104th PGA Championship will be held at Trump Bedminster.

  The PGA announced the selection years before even Trump himself thought he’d ever be president. When Trump started running and began insulting everybody from Muslims to McCain, the PGA czars started getting nauseous. “What could we do?” says one PGA official. “We had a signed contract. We couldn’t back out.” If Trump is re-elected in 2020, that PGA would be in the middle of his fifth year.

  A U.S. Open, though, might be out of the question. Even Trump admits that if he really wants a U.S. Open he’s going to have to take his name off Trump Bedminster, which is his best chance to land one. “But my courses are all booming,” he explained. “Without the name, they don’t boom.” Which is an odd thing to hear from a man who has declared that all his courses are the greatest layouts on the best pieces of property with the best members in the world. Why would they need the name?

  U.S. Open sites are set through 2027, and none of them are at Trump properties. Eight of those next nine will be in states where Trump has courses, and most of them will be played on tracks that he’s said are inferior to his, including two at the “highly overrated” Pebble Beach.

  Nobody better buy a damn shirt.

  As to a Trump overseas course hosting an Open Championship in Europe, it’s remotely possible, just not anytime soon. His course in Aberdeen is getting passed over left and right. Word was it would host three years of Scottish Opens beginning in 2019, but now the Scottish Open will go to a rival course two hours away, The Renaissance Club, designed by American Tom Doak. If it weren’t for his name on it, Trump Turnberry would absolutely get the Open Championship. Since Trump bought the course, he’s improved it so much it’d be a joke not to have one there. But the R&A has announced its Open schedule through 2022, with no Trump Turnberry in sight.

  “He’ll never get an Open Championship as long as he’s the president,” says John Huggan, the Scottish golf writer. “And, for sure, not as long as his name is on the course.” Huggan says it’s a bad match: Trump plus the walking dandruff balls that run the Royal and Ancient, the governing body that runs the Open. “All those R&A stiffs—‘Oh, jolly good,’ ‘More tea?’, and all that—and here comes this extroverted blowhard. No way. They’d never do it.”

  Would it help if he dedicated a trophy to them?

  13

  EWWWWW

  It doesn’t really matter what [they] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP

  AMONG THE INVITED AT the opening of Trump Bedminster in 2004 was the former owner of the estate, bankrupt car legend John DeLorean, then 79. Trump was standing with a gaggle of golf writers when DeLorean drove up in a golf cart with his girlfriend in tow.

  “Trump introduced them to everybody,” remembers Eamon Lynch, a columnist and Golf Channel personality. “He and Trump visited for a while. Then DeLorean left. Trump turned to us and said, ‘The poor guy. He’s a very old, sad figure. He’s lost all his money. And worst of all, his girlfriend is a solid 4.’”

  Trump looks at women the same way he looks at golf trophies. They’re fun to collect and it’s okay to cheat to get them. When he introduced me to Melania the first time, he said, “Look at her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at her!”

  “I just did look at her.”

  “No, look at her! Up and down. It’s okay.”

  “Donald, I’m not going to look at her like that.”

  “Look at her! She likes it!”

  So, red-faced, I quickly looked down at her shoes and back up in 1/10th of a second. He was grinning.

  “All real.”

  As his women employees at Trump Los Angeles found out, he’s not particularly interested in women for their SAT scores. This is how he’s always been. Even at military school, he was called “ladies’ man.” The idea that women are individual human beings with brains and goals and ideas doesn’t register much under the big orange canopy. At Trump Turnberry, it came out that the men get more than twice the bonus the women get, according to The Scotsman.

  The most important quality in a Trump wife is that she be a 10 who doesn’t play golf, doesn’t care much about business, and doesn’t watch too carefully. At that same Bedminster opening where Trump was holding court with that same gaggle of writers, a man in a suit came up with news. “Guess what? The Trump family has been selected Golf Family of the Year!”

  Lynch remembers Trump thanking the guy, who then drove off. “Then Trump turns and says to us, ‘Well, that tells me I can’t get caught having an affair for the next year.’”

  That’s not easy. To Trump, women are like French fries. He knows he should stay away from them,
but he can’t keep his hands off. That can cause trouble for a man as famous as he is. A TV producer who spent time around him remembers Trump’s infamous security guy, Keith Schiller, standing behind them during certain shoots. “He’d say, ‘Don’t shoot the redhead’ or ‘Stay off the blonde.’ So I’m trying to frame the shots in these weird ways to keep these women out of the shot. It was nuts.”

  Someday, at the Smithsonian Museum, they should have an exhibit on the 2006 weekend Trump spent at the American Century Celebrity Challenge in Lake Tahoe, California, perhaps with a vat of Purell for afterward.

  Despite the fact that he’d just turned 60, Trump, who was married at the time, not only played three full days of golf, he managed to bed a porn star, sleep with a Playmate of the Year, and grope a second porn star, as alleged by her two female friends. You talk about stamina.

  NBC’s golfapalooza, held at the Edgewood Tahoe resort in Lake Tahoe, is a boozy soup of golf and groupies and celebrities, many of them A-list pro athletes. That July, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, and Ben Roethlisberger played. They also sprinkled in a few golfing nonathlete celebs, like actor Anthony Anderson, broadcaster Al Michaels, and comedian Ray Romano. Trump, with a hot NBC show called The Apprentice in its second year, was as sought after as any of them.

  The presence of all those celebrities is why so many eligible women end up congregating for the wild nights at the official tournament hotel, Harrah’s Casino. It’s a Guys Gone Wild kind of weekend. Adult-film studio porn-house Wicked Pictures even had a booth in the gifting room to hype its latest, uh, releases. It stocked the room with swag and stars, including two of its leading ladies: Stephanie Clifford, aka “Stormy Daniels,” and Jessica Drake. Cleavage and lipstick ready, the XXX stars lured plenty of male celebs in, including a certain amorous real estate owner in a red hat named Donald J. Trump, who’d seen Daniels earlier that day on the golf course. He came in and got a very famous photo with her, much to his regret 11 years later.

  But it didn’t stop at the photo. They got to talking, flirting, dining, and, finally, according to Daniels, having sex that night in Trump’s suite.

  Judging just on virility, you’d have to agree a 60-year-old man bedding a famous porn star is something of an achievement. But it wasn’t good enough for Trump. He apparently went for seconds. According to Jessica Drake, Trump came back the next morning to the Wicked booth and began flirting with her, too. He invited her to walk with him during his round that day, which she did. He got her number and invited her up to his suite that night. That made her a little queasy. She’d heard stories from Daniels about Trump “chasing her” around his room “in his tighty-whities.” So she brought two female friends as backup.

  “When we entered the room,” Drake recalled at a Gloria Allred–run press conference, “he grabbed each of us tightly in a hug and kissed each one of us without asking permission. He was wearing pajamas.” Trump asked them a lot of questions about life as a porn star, and then they left “30 or 45 minutes later,” Drake said. She says Trump called her later and offered her $10,000 for sex. As a form of seduction, Drake wasn’t impressed. In fact, she said it wasn’t “acceptable behavior for anyone, much less a presidential candidate” and tagged him a “sexual assault apologist.”

  Even two porn stars didn’t do the trick. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Trump allegedly fit in a bedding of Playmate Karen McDougal, whom he’d been having an affair with and had flown in for the occasion. How’s that for depth of douchery? When you’re cheating on the mistress with whom you’re cheating on your wife, you’ve entered a kind of infidelity Inception.

  And where was his new bride of six months, Melania, during these Mattress Olympics? Back in New York with their new four-month-old baby, Barron.

  This wasn’t the first time Trump cheated at a golf tournament. He cheated on his then-girlfriend soon-to-be wife Marla Maples at the 1993 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, according to San Francisco Chronicle society columnist Pat Steger. She wrote in her column:

  Donald Trump had a great time at… Pebble Beach, but not such a great time was had by Marla Maples who joined him mid-tournament—which meant that the gorgeous blond model he brought with him, who does Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogs, had to go home to L.A.

  Stranger still, Maples had flown in with a wedding dress in her suitcase, expecting to marry Trump that Saturday afternoon, but Trump 86’d it at the last minute, Steger wrote. True to form, Maples was pregnant with daughter Tiffany at the time.

  And now let’s all break for a shower.

  The irony is Trump has been one of the best friends the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Tour ever had. He knows the players, knows the tournaments, and loves being involved. And, yes, it’s probably just coincidence that his favorite LPGA star is also one of its most photogenic players, its blond bombshell, Natalie Gulbis.

  Gulbis, a four-time tournament winner, first met Trump at the LPGA’s season-ending ADT Championship, at Trump International in West Palm Beach, Florida. The ADT was as fancy as it got in the LPGA, a crescendo that featured only the Tour’s 30 best players. It even allowed Trump to show off Mar-a-Lago—where the players and top officials stayed. Trump relished the idea of 30 female golf pros at his disposal. He’d come down every morning of the tournament and weave through the omelettes.

  “Natalie!” he roared one morning in 2005. “Congratulations on making it to your first Tour championship. I see you’re leading the tour in birdies this year. What do you think of the course?”

  Gulbis was amazed. “How did he even know that?” She loved how he seemed to care about her, asking so many questions, inquiring about her love life, advising her on agents and corporate sponsor and moves to make in her career.

  “He believed any notion that I should accept less money than a PGA Tour player for appearances or endorsement contracts was just plain wrong,” she told a reporter. He even tried to help her love life. At the time, Gulbis was dating the aforementioned Roethlisberger, the 6-foot-5 Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, but he’d eventually break it off with her, leaving Gulbis publicly heartbroken. Trump told more than one friend that Roethlisberger broke up with her because she had “no tits,” according to golf writer Kevin Cook. What was Trump’s love advice to Gulbis? Lie. “From now on I want to read that you dumped him,” he insisted.

  Trump was lavishly generous at the ADT, and the players loved it. But it wasn’t long before they experienced some Trump trickery. In fact, it was the first year, 2001. The players had torn it up in Round 1 with some low scores. Trump wasn’t having that. A Trump course is not a welcome mat. He sent his crew out that evening to shave lake banks and speed the greens up to faster than the hood of a Buick, and had them stop cutting the rough, according to players. As a result, nearly every player in the field scored worse from Round 1 to Round 2, which is unheard of in pro golf unless there’s suddenly bad weather, which there wasn’t. The winner, Hall of Famer Karrie Webb, was six shots worse that second day. The redoubtable Annika Sörenstam, who finished second, was also six worse. Major-winner Grace Park was nine.

  The Trumpster was delighted. He kept driving around in his turbo cart, asking players, “How about this course, huh? Tough, huh? When’s the last time you shot this high?”

  “When I was nine,” one said.

  “He definitely instructed his staff to change the preparation of the golf course,” says LPGA Hall of Famer Dottie Pepper, now an on-course reporter for NBC. “How do you prepare for one course on Thursday and then have to play a completely different course Friday? The players were ticked off. But there was nothing we could do. And the LPGA wouldn’t stand up to him. They’d just say, ‘It’s Donald Trump. We’re lucky to have him.’”

  But were they? Letting Donald Trump host a women’s golf tournament is like letting Justin Bieber babysit. There’s bound to be trouble. For one thing, Trump would kick off the pro-am by having his 727 buzz the course, causing panic in Palm Beach. The West Palm Beach airport switchboard would
light up with people sure a plane was crashing. “People would be freaking out,” says one airport official. “Are we getting bombed?’”

  “Everything he does to the country now, as president, he did to us beforehand, in golf,” says a then-high-ranking LPGA official who doesn’t particularly want the most powerful man in the world knowing who she is. “Like, he sent us this astronomical bill for the media hospitality. He charged us for more media than you could’ve possibly crammed in that room. There weren’t even that many there to begin with, but he charged us for way, way more that weren’t there. And he kept unloading merchandise he didn’t want from his pro shop right out in front.

  “One of my closest friends came and brought a group of people to see the tournament. So I said, great, let’s all have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. We sat behind a big door, totally hidden, so Donald wouldn’t bother us. After a while, I looked up and saw him coming in. I’m like, ‘Uh-oh.’ He sees us, pulls up a chair, without even asking, takes off his jacket and says, ‘Well now I know why Oprah is such a big fat slob.’ Well, my friend is from the south. She’s very proper. I thought she was going to swallow her fork. Why was he bringing up Oprah around us? We weren’t even talking about Oprah. ‘You know, she was here last weekend; she couldn’t stop stuffing kiwi tarts in her face!’ We just sat there, silent.”

  If you think that was awkward, you should’ve heard what was happening at the nine-story Palm Beach County jail that overlooks the third hole. “It hangs over that green,” Pepper recalls. “Their rec area was on one of the upper floors. There was this one inmate who would climb up on the netting above. This guy was like Spiderman, just hanging way up on it. And he’d taunt the players the whole time, cat calls and all the usual gross stuff. I think they finally changed their P.T. time.” Trump says this absolutely never happened, and then put up some very expensive tall trees to block the prison views.