Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Saudi Arabia, Greedy Golfers, Trump, Greene and Carlson
Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (Duncan C)
August 3, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
You’re traveling through another dimension; a dimension of drivers, irons and putters; a dimension of fairways, roughs, sand traps and greens. A journey into a land of Donald Trump’s boundless imagination. Your next stop, Cheater’s Paradise, aka Trump on the golf course." – (with apologies to, and great reverence for Rod Serling).
Big paydays, greedy golfers, sparse crowds, protesting 9/11 families, a feisty Donald Trump using the presidential seal, and still pushing The Big Lie, and appearances by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), were in play during this past weekend, when the LIV Golf Invitational Series — financed by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia -- were on display at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “At one point,” according to The Hill, “the crowd gathered near where the trio were watching the action, in a tent just off a tee box, and broke out in a ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ chant.”
While the Saudi-sponsored Tour has attracted dozens of PGA Tour golfers, including some big names, it hasn’t yet obtained a national television package, although that seems like its just a matter of time. Sports business experts believe that the backlash over the league’s funding will be fleeting, and it already appears to be in America’s rearview mirror.
Trump is all in: “I think LIV has been a great thing for Saudi Arabia, for the image of Saudi Arabia,” Trump said of the new league last week. “I think it’s going to be an incredible investment from that standpoint, and that’s more valuable than lots of other things because you can’t buy that — even with billions of dollars.”
Over the years, Trump has had a special relationship with golf: He owns multiple golf courses; had a Golf Channel show called "Donald J. Trump's Fabulous World of Golf"; he’s teed off with some of the greatest to ever play the game, including Tiger Woods; and he received a full-throated endorsement in the 2020 presidential campaign from Jack Nicklaus, considered by many the greatest to ever play the game. And, he’s considered to be a reasonably good golfer … but it is also known that he cheats on the golf course.
Three years ago, I reviewed Rick Reilly’s book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump (Hachette Books, 2019) which details how Trump doctors his scores, takes extra shots, gives himself mulligans, sabotages the shots of other players (he usually gets to the greens first since he rides in a golf cart while other players walk the courses), not to mention stiffing vendors and contractors. "He cheats like a mafia accountant. He cheats crazy. He cheats whether you're watching or not. He cheats whether you like it or not," Reilly told CNN's John Berman on "New Day."
In light of last weekend’s LIV appearance at Bedminster, and with all indications that there might be more LIV tournaments at Trump Golf Clubs, here is my April 2019 story:
Does Donald Trump cheats at golf? You betcha! Can you tell something about the character of a man who persistently cheats at golf? Indeed! Does it reveal something that we already don’t know about Trump? Not at all! The revelation that he cheats at golf, which comes in veteran sportswriter Rick Reilly’s new book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, will definitely not surprise anyone that has observed Trump over the years. At the same time, the revelation will likely have no affect on Trump’s base. So, why tell the story? Because it’s a damn juicy story!
In a remarkably forthright and candid interview with Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort, Reilly, who gave up writing about sports several years ago, condemns Trump – who is a decent golfer -- for basically lying about his supposed winning club championships, cheating on the golf course every chance he gets, and debasing the values of the sport that Reilly reveres.
In 2018, Trump claimed that he won the club championship at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Here’s how Reilly describes what happened:
“They’re playing [for the title, along with Virtue’s son], and the story I’ve heard now three times is that Trump hit it in the water on 16. They see the ball go in the water. Virtue hits it on the green, his son hits it on the green, but when they get up there, because Trump is always way ahead in his own cart, the caddy is lining up Trump’s ball for a putt. Virtue’s kid says, ‘Mr. President, that’s my ball.’ The caddy says, ‘No, this is Mr. Trump’s ball. Your ball went in the water.’ And the kid, who’s 12 or 13 or whatever, goes, ‘Dad, that was a new ball. That’s my ball.’ And Virtue’s like, ‘I’ll buy you another ball.’ Trump sinks the putt on that hole and goes on to win, and that’s how he’s the club champion.”
“He tried to cheat Tiger Woods in a match; Tiger hits it like this, [Trump] hits two balls in the water, doesn’t count either and pretends that he almost tied Tiger Woods. So it doesn’t matter who he is; he has to be the winner.
“What really bothers me is that he told people on the campaign trail . . . he said, ‘I’m a winner; you got to vote for me because I’ve won 18 club championships’ — he says this three or four times — ‘and that’s against the best players in the club.’ But I knew he was lying because he told me how he does it. Whenever he opens a new course that he buys, he plays the first round by himself and calls that the club championship, puts his name on the wall.” (For more on Trump’s doctored “championships” see https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/apr/02/donald-trump-golf-28-club-championships.)
In a story adapted from the book for Esquire, titled “Donald Trump Never Cheats at Golf. His Caddy Does That for Him” (https://www.esquire.com/sports/a26454538/donald-trump-rick-reilly-commander-in-cheat/) Reilly writes that when you are about to play golf with Trump, “brace yourself, because according to my well-placed sources, what you’re about to experience isn’t really golf. It’s more of a paramilitary heavily armed exercise with odd-shaped sticks, using a vague set of rules that requires you to lose, and it will all be over very quickly, so put your memory on “save.” First of all, you’ll play at one of Trump’s courses—since he’s been president, he’s played only at his own courses.”
Cheating at golf is nothing new for Trump. In a 2015 Washington Post story, Reilly told Ben Terris 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,” Terris wrote.
“‘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.”
In making the rounds promoting his book, Reilly has challenged Trump to a match: "I'll play him for 100 grand, (for) either of our charities," Reilly said. "But the rule is, we can't play his course, can't use his cheating caddies, and there's got to be a rules guy with each of us. And I'll play him all day." Will Trump accept the challenge from Reilly, a man he says he already beat? Not on your life!
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