Donald Trump’s boast about winning 18 club championships is a lie that’s so over-the-top Crazytown it loses all credibility amongst golfers the second it’s out of his mouth. To double-check, I called the only guy who may want to come close: George “Buddy” Marucci of Philadelphia. Like Trump, Marucci belongs to other clubs than you could fit for your bag. Like Trump, he’s inside the right age bracket, at six years younger than Trump. Like Trump, he’s got all of the money he wishes to play as many club championships as he can fly to. Unlike Trump, he’s as pleasant a golfing businessman as you could locate. Marucci took 19-yr-old Tiger Woods – 24 years his junior – to the remaining hollow of the 1995 US Amateur before ultimately losing.
So, Buddy Marucci, do YOU have 18 membership championships?
“Ha!” he laughed. “No way. I have a few, however nowhere near that many. It’s tough to win a membership championship. I would possibly have 8. Tops.” This is a man who’s been breaking par for the past 45 years. He belongs to almost every creamy direction inside the world – Winged Foot, Seminole, Pine Valley, Cypress Point. If it’s on a pinnacle 10 within the international list, Marucci probably has a locker there. When Trump instructed Gary Player he’d received 18 championships, Player scoffed. “I informed him that if anybody beats him, he kicks them out. So, he needed to win.” Was Trump’s name at the wall of any clubs he didn’t own? Nope. Was it on the partitions at Trump Washington in Virginia, a course that was already up and strolling when he sold it? Nope. Or Trump Jupiter, which became a Ritz Carlton path whilst he bought it? Nope. Was it on the wall at any of his personal courses he’d opened? Oh, yes.
Trump International in West Palm Beach, Florida, has a plaque on the wall that lists all of the men who’ve received the guys’ club championship. Trump seems 3 instances: 1999, 2001, and 2009. But preserve on. The direction wasn’t even open in 1999. Turns out, then-White House spokesperson Hope Hicks admitted to the Washington Post, Trump played in a “gentle starting” spherical on 1 November of that 12 months with “a collection of the early members” and declared it the membership championship.
Congratulations?
On 17 March 17, 2013, Trump tweeted he’d received the club championship again at Trump International. But the plaque for that year lists the winner as “Tom Roush.” The catch? It wasn’t virtually the membership championship in any respect. Trump won the “Super Seniors Club Championship,” which is reserved for players 60 and older at most clubs. Something to be proud of, certain, but now not inside a Super Walmart of beating the fine younger gamers in the club. The difference between “Club Champion” and “Super Senior Club Champion” is the difference between Vanna White and Betty White. “I recall Melania used to ask us ‘What is that this ‘Super Seniors’?’” recalls former Trump Westchester exec Ian Gillule. “And Mr. Trump would say, ‘Oh, Super Seniors is better than just a everyday club championship, honey.’ He becomes announcing it tongue in cheek, but she didn’t understand the difference.”
At Trump Bedminster in New Jersey, Trump once received a senior club championship from 87 miles away. He’d declared that the club should start having senior membership championships for the ones 50 and up. However, he forgot that one of the high-quality gamers on the club had simply become 50. Having zero danger at beating the man, he went up to his Trump Philadelphia direction on the tournament day and performed with a pal there. Afterward, in keeping with a source inside the Bedminster membership, he called the Bedminster seasoned keep and introduced he’d shot seventy-three and should be declared the winner. The pro, trying to stay hired, agreed. His call went up on the plaque. “But then,” says the source, “somebody talked to the caddy up in Philly and requested him what Trump shot that day. The caddy is going, ‘Maybe 82. And that is probably generous.’ He pulls that kind of shit all of the time around right here.”
More than one source described all over again when Trump passed off to stroll into the Bedminster clubhouse just as a worker becomes placing up the name of the newly topped senior membership championship winner on a wood plaque. Trump has been out of the city and hadn’t played in the tournament; however, while he noticed the participant’s name, he stopped the worker. “Hey, I beat that guy all the time. Put my name up there as a substitute.”
Is Donald Trump lying approximately having a three handicap?
Read greater. Of the 18 club championship “wins” that Trump indexed for Golf Digest, 12 are virtually senior or tremendous senior membership championships. So that leaves six actual membership championships. One of the six he lists turned into Trump Westchester 2001 when the membership wasn’t formally open. That leaves 5. The next to become Westchester 2002 when the club was simplest nine holes. If it without a doubt took place, you couldn’t depend on that. That leaves 4, one of all them being Westchester in 2004. Could he have simply received that? “Well, no, I recognize for a fact that’s no longer real,” Gillule says. “He never gained any inside the eight years I worked there. I imply, I loved working for Mr. Trump, but you realize, a few humans take a sure license with the truth.”
We recognize that Trump played inside the 2007 Westchester Men’s Club Championship and turned into knocked out within the first spherical by way of a fifteen-year vintage named Adam Levin. Trump turned into 4-up with 5 holes to play, helped significantly by way of the 60-yr-old calling ticky-tack rule violations on the child, one for accidentally touching the grass interior a danger and solving a small ball mark off the green, both loss-of-hole penalties. That’s when consistent with Levin, Trump said to the small gallery, “The child positioned up a good fight, didn’t he?” A small bonfire lit beneath Levin, who wound up prevailing hollow after hollow, tying Trump up thru 18 and then triumphing on the second playoff hole.
“He didn’t even say ‘Congratulations’ or ‘Good suit,’” remembers Levin, now a records analyst. “He didn’t look me in the attention. He just shook my hand and walked off. He’d sort of been a dick the whole day. We have been together for 5 or six hours, so there has been plenty of time for conversation with me or my mother and father, but all he ever stated was, ‘Isn’t this route first-rate?’ and ‘Aren’t these facilities the first-rate?’ He’s a total asshole with no individual.” That leaves 3 viable membership championship wins, all at one path – Trump International in West Palm Beach. But we already recognize the 1999 win. There may be a lie because the course wasn’t open. That leaves. Of those two – 2001 and 2009 – I have never visible a signed scorecard or spoken to any objective man or woman who recollects him triumphing or now not prevailing. Final score on the “18 membership championships”: Lies 16, Incompletes 2, Confirms zero. By this time, Trump’s nostril has grown goodbye he could putt with it.
The complete aspect bugged me a lot. I started out to itch. I wasn’t angry as a voter. I turned into offended as a golfer. For golfers, the stain of cheating is a lot graver than triumphing or dropping that we live in mortal worry of being called a cheater. Tom Watson accused Gary Player of illegally transferring a leaf far away from his ball on the Skins Game in 1983, and they’ve infrequently spoken considering that. One sheet.
So here changed into Trump caterwauling about 18 golf championships that have been faker than Cheez Whiz, and it began to make me assume. How tons of what Trump says approximately his golf brilliance does the country believe? During the marketing campaign, while Trump stood up in front of 30,000 purple hats and bloviated, “When it involves golfing, only a few humans can beat me,” did humans buy that? Because 50 men at every path in America can beat him.
When Trump held limitless 18-hole conferences at his Florida courses with this high minister and that emperor, had been these leaders returning home to snort at OUR president the manner they laughed at him on the United Nations? Would they think all Americans cheat at golf?
It got me wondering …
Somebody must factor out that the manner Trump does golf is a form of how he does a presidency, that is, to function as though the guidelines are for other humans. Somebody needs to explain that data and facts are to Trump what golf scores and crowd sizes are—“emotions”—malleable and negotiable, flitting this manner and that like a vehicle-lot balloon man. Somebody needs to write that the manner Trump cheats at golfing, lies approximately his guides, and stiffs his golf contractors isn’t that a long way from how he cheats on his better halves, lies approximately his misdeeds, and stiffs the arena on agreements America has already made on the entirety from Iran to climate change. “Golf is like bicycle shorts,” I once wrote. “It reveals plenty approximately a person.” You should write an ebook approximately what Trump’s golfing exhibits about him. Here it is.
