David Owen On Lessons Learned Playing Golf With Trump

Longtime New Yorker staff writer and former Golf Digest contributor David Owen writes about his time playing golf with Donald Trump long before the developer became president-elect.

Given that only one Trump course made the recent Golf Digest top 200 courses (no Bedminster or Doral!), this might explain why panelists do not rate his courses highly:

Golf publications periodically rate golf courses—the hundred best in the world, the hundred best in the country, the dozen best in each state—and Trump’s relationship with such ratings is complex. He complained to me that golf publications never rank his courses high enough, because the people who do the rating hold a grudge against him, but he also said that he never allows raters to play his courses, because they would just get in the way of the members. “I think we’d have a revolt with our membership,” he explained. “Because, unlike other clubs, every one of my membership lists is perfect. And when you start adding hundreds of raters who want to play golf . . .” Nevertheless, when someone from a golf publication does write something positive, after somehow having managed to slip past the perimeter, Trump quotes it endlessly (and, inevitably, magnifies it).

Owen also shares some of the feedback he got from an "upset" Trump after his story appeared.

He called the editor of Golf Digest to complain, and then he called me, on my cell phone. I was in the city on a reporting assignment unrelated to golf, and had the surreal experience of being chewed out by a future President of the United States while standing among the gravestones in the burial ground next to Trinity Church. He wasn’t upset that one of the article’s illustrations had been of a golf ball wearing a turf toupee that looked a lot like his deeply mysterious hair, or that I’d mentioned his asking two little girls at Mar-a-Lago if they wanted to be supermodels when they grew up, or that I’d described nearly tipping him five dollars after momentarily mistaking him for his club’s parking-lot attendant, or that I’d written that he’d introduced one of his club’s members to me not by name but as “the richest guy in Germany.” He was upset that I hadn’t written that he’d shot 71—a very good golf score, one stroke under par.

I hadn’t written that because he hadn’t shot 71. We hadn’t been playing for score, and we had given each other putts and taken other friendly liberties—as golfers inevitably do when they’re just fooling around. I said something to that effect in the politest way I could think of, but he wasn’t mollified. He was also angry that I’d described his wedge game as “poor.” (On several occasions, he’d had trouble with shots inside a hundred yards, both during our round and on the practice range beforehand.) I reminded him that I had mainly written very flattering things about his golf game, and that I’d mentioned his victories in three club championships and had quoted praise from his caddie and his pro (“You have a very nice bicycle, Donald, even if it’s not as nice as your friend’s”). But none of that made any difference. He wanted the number, and the fact that I hadn’t published the number proved that I was just like all the other biased reporters, who, because we’re all part of the anti-Trump media conspiracy, never give him as much credit as he deserves for being awesome. Such is his now familiar habit of acting like a sore loser even when he’s won.