Brennan: Rory McIlroy takes penalty strokes after golfing with Donald Trump
You’re Rory McIlory and you play golf for a living, so when the new U.S. president calls asking you to play a round with him, you say yes.
Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you? You don’t care that Donald Trump is the most controversial man on earth and the least-liked new president since polling began on that subject.
You’re a multi-millionaire golfer. Your taxes will be lower. And you’re from Northern Ireland, so no one can blame you for voting for him, because you didn’t, because you couldn’t vote.
But because you spend a lot of time in the United States, Rory, and had a pulse throughout all of last year, you probably remember that Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, mocked a disabled reporter and went after Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan for days, among many other disgusting and distasteful antics.
Then again, that’s not your problem, right? It’s not like he has done anything really horrible, like cheating at golf.
Um. Well, actually, he does notoriously cheat at golf, so much so that when rock star Alice Cooper was asked by Q magazine in 2012 to name the worst celebrity golf cheater, he replied, “I played with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say.”
Want a second opinion? “When it comes to cheating, he’s an 11 on a scale of one to 10,” Rick Reilly, a long-time sportswriting colleague, told The Washington Post in 2015.
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I can hear the Trump people now, can’t you? “Fake news! Alternative facts! The media are so unfair, and Alice Cooper is too.”
Actually, the Trumpeters were really hoping that no one would ever find out about the round with Rory. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Sunday that Trump “played a couple of holes this morning,” adding she would not “disclose any of the others that were there.”
She had good reason to be evasive. During the campaign, Trump loved to criticize President Obama for playing golf, adding that he, Donald J. Trump, would be so different.
“I’m going to be working for you,” Trump said. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”
So far, however, it appears Trump has all the time in the world to go play golf, visiting his two courses near his Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida a bigly six times in his first month in office.
I guess when he said, “I’m going to be working for you,” he was talking to the nation’s greenskeepers, clearly an underappreciated voting bloc.
The White House hoped to keep the round with Rory a big secret, but that wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t even dinner time Sunday when there was a leak, and the news got out.
Another leak?! Reince!
It didn’t take long to find out who the awful person was who leaked this information.
It was Rory.
He spilled the beans, telling the golf blog “No Laying Up” that Trump “probably shot around 80. He’s a decent player for a guy in his 70s.”
Translation: Trump probably shot 100.
We know what Trump thinks about leakers, so it’s possible and even probable that Rory isn’t going to be invited back anywhere near Over-Par-a-Lago anytime soon. That could be a blessing in disguise, since he got an earful on Twitter from those who didn’t particularly like his weekend golf companion.
One interesting thread centered on McIlroy’s contention that he “never wanted it to get political” as a reason why he didn’t compete at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. A Northern Irishman, he would have had to represent either Ireland or Great Britain in Rio.
Now, of course, he forever owns those four or five hours he spent with Trump, which probably is as good a definition of getting political as any.
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