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COMMANDER IN CHEAT

 

For a very long time, sportswriter Rick Reilly has made me laugh with his insightful story telling. Reilly has a new book, Commander in Cheat:  How Golf Explains Trump, and the Denver Post ran a column about the book, Trump and his cheating at golf - humorous but also disturbing.  Here is the story:

Rick Reilly to Trump: Let’s golf
Colorado native’s book, “Commander in Cheat,” just released
The Denver Post
7 Apr 2019
By Matt Bonesteel

  Elsa, Getty Images

Sportswriter Rick Reilly has challenged President Trump to a golf match.

We haven’t heard much from sportswriter Rick Reilly since he wrote his last ESPN.COM column in 2014 and last appeared on the network itself in 2016, but he’s been keeping busy, most notably with writing “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” which was released last week.

Based on the advance notice and a Golf.com excerpt, the book is about exactly what its title suggests: that Trump’s extremely casual attitude toward the rules of the game are a reflection on his presidency as a whole.

Reilly — a Boulder native who attended the University of Colorado, a onetime Denver Post sportswriter — is making the promotional rounds as the book goes on sale, making a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC. And if there’s one surefire way to sell a book, it’s to challenge the sitting president of the United States to a $100,000 golf match.

“I want to play him,” Reilly said. “I think I’m a 4.5 (handicap). He’s a 2.8. If he plays the 2.8, I’ll play him for 100 grand, (with the money going to) either of our charities. But the rule is, we can’t play his course, we can’t use his cheating caddies and there’s gotta be a rule guy with each of us, and I’ll play him all day.”

“He cheats like a Mafia accountant,” Reilly said. “He cheats crazy, he cheats whether you’re watching or not, he cheats whether you like it or not. He tried to cheat Tiger Woods in a match, Tiger hits it like this, he hits two balls in the water, doesn’t count either and pretends that he almost tied Tiger Woods. So it doesn’t matter whohe 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 gotta 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.”

Reilly also said Trump tells his courses to award him the club championship because of a score he shot at an entirely different course, and that he claims club championships when they’re really the senior club championships.

Trump won his latest claimed club championship — his 20th — last year at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., but Golf.com’s Michael Bamberger discovered that it only came about after Trump challenged that year’s actual club champion — Ted Virtue, the CEO of a New York investment firm — to a nine-hole match-play contest, which Trump won and thus declared himself co-champion (though a plaque on his locker lists him as the sole winner).

The president’s oncourse cheating has been well-documented, even before Reilly’s book came out, a notion that has not been dispelled by a number of his famous playing partners:

• Suzann Pettersen, LPGA pro: “He cheats like hell. So I don’t know how he is in business. They say 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.”

• Actor Samuel L. Jackson, when asked who was the better golfer: “Oh, I am, for sure. I don’t cheat.” Jackson also alleged in 2015 that one of Trump’s golf clubs tries to bill him for membership fees even though he was not a member.

• Alice Cooper, 1970s shock-rocker and noted golf enthusiast: “The worst celebrity golf cheat? I wish I could tell you that. It would be a shocker. I played golf with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Trump, who many admit actually does have some skill as a golfer, has denied just about all of that.

In his 2004 book “Who’s Your Caddy?” Reilly told tales of caddying for the “great, near great, and reprobates of golf.” One of those people (the latter category, one has to assume) was a pre-presidency Donald Trump, a round Reilly was asked about in 2015 by The Post’s Ben Terris.

“Reilly told The Washington Post 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.”

Responded Trump, then running for president: “I always thought he was a terrible writer. I absolutely killed him, and he wrote very inaccurately. I would say that he’s a very dishonest writer . ... I never took a gimme chip shot ... I don’t do gimme chip shots. If I asked his approval, that’s not cheating, number one. Number two, I never took one.”

 

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I tend to agree with those who say "If you cheat at golf, you will cheat at anything." I don't need to recount all of the ways that Trump is a cheater, but below is the ultimate reason why any discerning voter should not support Trump!!!!

2019 NCAA ACADEMIC BRACKET

I may have missed last year's Academic Bracket, but here is this year's.  Visit this site for the story accompanying the bracket, and fore an image that can be enlarged.