LATE IN THURSDAY NIGHT’S presidential debate, Joe Biden and Donald Trump exchanged barbs about a subject neither had likely prepared to discuss: golf.
Explaining why he believes he is “in very good health,” Trump said “I just won two club championships, not even senior, two regular club championships. . . . He [Biden] doesn’t do it. He can’t hit a ball fifty yards. He challenged me to a golf match. He can’t hit a ball fifty yards.”
Biden responded that he would “be happy to have a driving contest” with Trump, and spoke about his own golf handicap, confusingly saying it was either 6 or 8 when he was vice president. “And by the way, I told you before I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?”
“That’s the biggest lie—that he’s a 6 handicap—of all,” Trump said.
Biden, once an avid golfer, has hit the links a couple of dozen times as president so far. Trump spent all or part of about 300 days of his presidency golfing, more than any other president.
Clearly Trump loves the game of golf. He not only plays it, but he follows it on TV. He promotes it. He buys and builds golf courses and fancy resorts.
Trouble is, Trump’s rules-are-for-suckers worldview applies even when it comes to the game he loves. That is, he cheats.
Golfers take the rules seriously. After all, Rule 1 of the Rules of Golf as published by the United States Golf Association (USGA) says this: “You are responsible for applying your own penalties if you breach a Rule.”
These are more than mere words. Consider:
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During the 1925 U.S. Open, Bobby Jones famously called a one-stroke penalty on himself, causing him to finish that single stroke out of a first-place tie.
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During a sudden-death playoff for a 2010 PGA event, Brian Davis’s clubhead brushed a reed on his backswing while he was in a hazard. He assessed himself the (then-)requisite two-stroke penalty, effectively ending his chance at a first-ever tour win.
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Kate Wynja had seemingly won the 2018 South Dakota high school championship. But when she realized she had signed a scorecard showing a 4 on a hole where she had made a 5, she alerted tournament officials to the error, knowing full well that it would mean disqualification.
That a golfing legend, a journeyman pro, and a high school kid would demonstrate such integrity is a big part of what makes the game’s devotees so passionate—and Trump’s considerably more relaxed approach to its rules so galling.
In a small but telling example from his 2019 book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, Rick Reilly describes the bemusement of professional golfers, their caddies, and other knowledgeable observers at Trump’s claim of having a low-single-digit handicap. “He’s more like a 10 or 12” was their consensus. (Note to non-golfers: the lower the handicap, the better the player.)
Intrigued, I decided to check things out for myself on the USGA’s Golf Handicap Information Network (GHIN), which does the number-crunching to calculate a player’s official USGA Handicap Index; it’s an “index” to account for differences among golf courses. I logged onto GHIN.com, navigated to its Handicap-Lookup page, followed a few straightforward prompts, and there it was: a handicap index of 2.5 for the, ahem, Honorable Donald J. Trump, playing out of Winged Foot Golf Club. (Why designate Winged Foot as his home course when he has eighteen Trump-branded courses of his own? Because Winged Foot is certified, old money, blue-blooded golf course royalty, and Donny from Queens cares deeply about such things.)
When I last checked his index, back in 2020, it was 2.8. So Trump has supposedly become a better golfer as he has gotten older, quite an accomplishment.
An index of 2.5 is impressive for pretty much any amateur, much less for a 78-year-old who is in something other than ironman-triathlon-ready shape.
The GHIN system allows you to see how Trump claims to have performed on some specific courses. When I looked four years ago, GHIN listed a score of 96 shot on a course having a slope of 123. (For “slope,” think “degree of difficulty.”) To a player with a handicap as low as Trump’s, 123 equates to a pretty easy golf course. Unless two or more limbs were immobilized by plaster casts at the time, such a player would not, ever, shoot a 96 on such a course.
As of 2024, that score is no longer listed in Trump’s GHIN entry. But it does still list a score of 70 coupled with a slope of 147. That’s an extremely good score on an extremely difficult course. How difficult? When set up to host the U.S. Open, Pebble Beach has a slope of 147. In other words, Trump’s extremely good score is—literally—unbelievably good. Or said yet another way, many of the scores shown for President Trump are lies. (Except for the now-disappeared 96. That one I believe.)
GHIN users are required to post their results on the day a round is played so that the system will always be ready with an up-to-date index based on a golfer’s twenty most recent scores. Here, though, is what the GHIN system had to work with to crank out that 2.5 for Trump: one score from 2021; one from 2016; two from 2015; seven from 2014; four from 2013; one from 2012; and four from 2011. That’s a decade-long stretch during which Donald Trump played literally hundreds of rounds of golf . . . and posted just twenty of them. (And that ignores the scoring lacuna between 2011 and 2024.)
In other words, Trump ignored the system’s requirements and reported just the scores needed to produce the desired ego-inflating low-single-digit handicap, including made-up scores like that 70—especially made-up scores like that 70. And despite the many games he has played in the last four years, he has posted only one additional score to GHIN since 2020, and it was sufficient to drop his official USGA handicap index from 2.8 to 2.5.
In still other words, he lied.
BACK IN 2020, thinking the USGA would be concerned about this, I sent an email to its Handicap Department describing what I had found and asking: “Why has the USGA allowed Donald Trump to claim an index of 2.8? Or to put it more bluntly, why haven’t you booted him off the GHIN system?”
When I hadn’t gotten a reply a week later, I phoned USGA headquarters and left the same questions in a voicemail. A USGA representative returned my call later that day, and I posed my questions for a third time.
Her reply was impressively (and lawyerly) crisp, perfectly pitched to swat away a crackpot obsessing over Donald Trump’s handicap: “The USGA provides GHIN as a service to member clubs. The administration of the GHIN system is the responsibility of each member-club.”
Undaunted, I soldiered on and sent a version of the USGA email to Winged Foot, but this time I laid on the stewardship angle pretty thick: You have a special standing in the game. You’re hosting the U.S. Open in seven months! For the sixth time!
No reply for a week. So I called Winged Foot and was connected with a thoroughly pleasant woman who said that she had indeed read my email and passed it along to the club’s general manager. I asked to speak to the GM. Alas, he was “out of the office,” but she said she would give him the message. When another week passed without a reply, I called and left another message. I never heard back, though. I think Winged Foot’s GM must have been alerted by what I assume must be another of the USGA’s acronymic, member-club services: CAWS, the Crackpot Avoidance Warning System.
WHY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER?
The USGA’s mission statement provides some guidance: “The United States Golf Association promotes and conserves the true spirit of the game of golf as embodied in its ancient and honorable traditions. It acts in the best interests of the game for the continued enjoyment of those who love and play it.” But then why turn a blind eye to Trump’s clear abuse of the GHIN system? And why pass the buck to Winged Foot?
Even if Winged Foot’s powers-that-be don’t care about the handicap-reporting compliance habits of so distinguished a member owing to more noble “for-the-good-of-the-game” reasons, shouldn’t they at least be bothered by the PR implications of having their name appear on such a lie-laden GHIN screen? Why hasn’t someone from Winged Foot called Donald Trump and said: “Mr. President, you own eighteen #!@% golf courses! Why not use one of them as your home course instead of us?!?”
And in a canary-in-a-coal-mine sort of way, shouldn’t the seepage of these kinds of micro corruptions into such institutions be cause for concern . . . that even so trivial a pastime can be affected by a prominent golfer’s disdain for its heritage as a game where the word “honor” is supposed to mean more than simply who tees off first on the next hole? Or were Bobby Jones and Brian Davis and Kate Wynja simply, to invoke Mr. Trump’s sneering label, “losers”?
I am booked for an early tee time tomorrow with three good friends. After a pleasant eighteen holes, I shall sit down with them to have a burger and a beer. One of us will remind the others that we need to enter our scores into the USGA’s system, at which point I will tap the GHIN app on my phone. Maybe I’ll just post whatever score strikes my fancy at that moment. Why the hell not—it seems that rules are for suckers, after all.
John Guaspari, the author of several books and many articles on business management, has retired to Walpole, Massachusetts, where he writes articles of more general interest (like this one), plays golf, and tries to decide just when the time has come to give up that silly game and toss his clubs into the nearest dumpster.