Do Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus Let Trump Cheat When They Play Golf?
Donald Trump is a big fan of golf: As of September of last year, he'd visited one of his courses on a quarter of his total days in office. But Trump stayed closer to home during the government shutdown, and this weekend made his first return to Florida in more than two months. At the Trump National Golf Club Saturday, he played with two of the best golfers of all time-Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus.
Saturday's game wasn't the first for Trump and Woods, who’ve known each other for years. When asked his opinion of the president in 2018, Woods replied,"He’s the president of the United States and you have to respect the office. No matter who’s in the office, you may like, dislike the personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office." When the reporter followed up by asking Woods if he had any comment on the state of contemporary race relations, Tiger said he did not. "I just finished 72 holes," he replied, "and I’m really hungry."
Trump was a big fan of Tiger's response. "The Fake News Media worked hard to get Tiger Woods to say something that he didn’t want to say," the president tweeted. "Tiger wouldn’t play the game - he is very smart. More importantly, he is playing great golf again!"
Nicklaus is a Trump supporter and longtime donor to Republican candidates. He attended the president’s inauguration, and Trump appeared in a Golf Channel special honoring the athlete. "People like Jack, they have a desire to win," he reportedly said during the special. "They never give up, they never quit. He’s a man that’s led a truly exemplary life; his family, his work ethic, his championship status. He’s a very exceptional man."
Trump doesn’t leave his penchant for dishonesty in the Oval Office-the president is a reported golf cheat. One of Trump’s other pro golfer buddies, Suzann Pettersen, told a Norwegian paper last year that the president "cheats like hell."
"So I don’t quite know how he is in business," Petterson said. "They say that if you cheat at golf, you cheat at business. I’m pretty sure he pays his caddie well, since no matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there." Samuel L. Jackson has backed up the claim that Trump is a cheater, and Alice Cooper implied that Trump was the "worst celebrity golf cheat."
Trump is not the only world leader to prove an improbably adept golfer. Former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, whose authoritarian heir Trump would one day "fall in love" with, was, according to North Korean state media at least, one of the best golfers ever. They reported that Kim finished his first-ever game 38-under par, and apparently scored between five and eleven holes-in-one.
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