The real truth about Donald Trump's golf game

Another club championship!

(Donald Trump, golfer)

Over the weekend, Donald Trump sent this out via social media:

What a rich text!

Trump not only touts that he won — at age 77! — but also spends several sentences pre-butting the idea that he cheated in some way.

There was “no hanky/lanky” he assures you — comforting! — because there were so many Secret Service officers around. (Which does, of course, suggest that Trump might well have cheated if he wasn’t being so closely watched.). The reason he won, Trump explains, is that he is “just a good golfer/athlete.”¹

Um, ok.

By my count, this is the second club championship that Trump has won this year alone. Back in January, he took took to the Internet to note that he had won the senior club championship at Trump International — his course in Florida.

And it’s at least Trump’s 3rd senior club championship at the course. He also won it in 2012 and 2013. Trump also claimed to have won the club championship (not just for seniors!) in 1999, 2001, 2009 and 2018.²

Trump, in fact, has said he has won 20 club championships during his playing career.

“I've won a lot of club championships,” Trump told Golf Digest in 2014. “Anytime I win a club championship, I'm proud of those rounds. Club championships are like our majors.”

Trump and golf is something I know a whole lot about. In fact, there’s a big chunk of my latest book — “Power Players: Sports, Politics and the American Presidency” — dedicated to it.

And, like a lot of things with Trump, there’s exaggeration (and fabrication) built into his whole (golf) persona.

Trump is, according to everyone I talked to, a good golfer. Maybe even a very good golfer — particularly for someone his age. He is a single digit handicap — meaning he usually shoots somewhere between 5 and 10 strokes above par in each round.

Luke Kerr Dineen, the play editor at Golf magazine and someone who has analyzed the swing of every president for which there is footage, told me of Trump:

“He hits the ball a long way off the tee. And he focuses singularly on hitting the ball off the tee. To him that’s the sign of a good golfer. Putting and all these other details are not as telling as your ability to hit the ball.”

That analysis is almost too on the nose; Trump, hyper-focused on bashing the ball off the tee and not at all concerned with the other, more nuanced aspects of the game.

Trump’s obsession with hitting it long cropped up recently when he was playing golf at his course in Scotland. After hitting a well-struck drive, Trump turned to the press corps and said: “You think Biden can do that? I don't think so. Biden doesn't hit a 280 right down the middle, does he? Biden can't hit an 80 down the middle.”

(Sidebar: Joe Biden, at least when he was younger, was a very able golfer. Much more on that here.)

In doing research for the book, I asked a whole lot of people how Trump gets away with “winning” so many club championships.

I learned something interesting about that claimed 2018 club championship that might shed some light on the matter.

From the book:

The story goes like this. A man named Ted Virtue (not making him up), the CEO of MidOcean partners, played in and won the club championship in 2018. (Virtue helped finance the movie “Green Book,” which won the Oscar for best picture in 2018). Sometime after Virtue’s win, Trump bumped into him at the club and somewhat jokingly told him “The only reason you won is because I couldn’t play.”  Trump proposed that he and Virtue play a 9 hole match for the title of club champ. Trump won.  Hence the plaque on the wall. 

Which is, of course, not how club championships work. Not at all.

Two other Trump tricks I learned about:

1. Trump often plays the first round at a new course he owns and then declares himself the club champion for having shot the lowest round at the course (thanks to Rick Reilly for that one)

2. Trump, in a random round, shoots lower than the winning score shot during the club championship — and subsequently declares himself the de facto club champion.

In fact, during his club championship victory earlier this year, Trump wasn’t actually even in the state for the first round. (He was in North Carolina for the funeral of “Diamond” — of “Diamond and Silk” fame/infamy.)

As the Daily Mail noted at the time,

Insiders told DailyMail.com that competitors arriving for day two of the contest on Sunday morning were surprised (although not exactly shocked) to see his name at the top of the leaderboard with a five-point lead over the overnight leader.

He apparently told members that he had played a cracking round on Thursday and that would count as his first day's score.

Uh, yeah, no.

Put simply: The chances of a single digit handicap shooting — at age 77 — five strokes under par are roughly the same as the chances that Trump is, in fact, 6’3” and 215 pounds. Basically, zilch.

As Mediaite noted wryly:

Two weeks ago, the very same course hosted a tournament put on by Saudi-backed LIV Golf — an event which featured many of the best players in the world. Trump’s claimed score of 67 was better than all but one of the 48 players in the final round of that tournament. Legendary 6-time major champion Phil Mickelson shot 75 that day — 8 strokes worse than the score Trump says he posted on the very same layout.

There is a special kind of mania to a person who not just lies but feels the need to send that lie far and wide.

For Trump in golf, as in life, good is never good enough. Whether it’s his personal wealth, his political accomplishments, his weight or, yes, his golf game, Trump can’t help himself — he has to wildly exaggerate to comport to some winning standard that he maintains in his head.

That his claims are —on their face — laughable — doesn’t even register with him. He has to keep lying bigger and bigger to be the best. And so he does.

1. Trump also, later, sent out the phone number of the head pro at Bedminster to verify his score. And, yes, the head pro at Bedminster works for him.

2. Yes, Trump claims to have won the club championship while he was president.