Longtime sportswriter Rick Reilly has written a new book about how President Donald Trump cheats at golf. The author will be in Tempe, Arizona.
Rick Reilly is ticked off, and who can blame him?
If you want proof, look no further than “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” Reilly’s relentless takedown of how President Donald Trump cheats at golf, and what that reveals.
The book is not a left-wing political attack on Trump — Reilly, long one of the most-famous and most-decorated sports columnists in the country, wasn’t interested in writing that kind of book, not explicitly.
Thus, it’s a golfer’s attack on Trump, or at least on the way Trump plays the game, a game Reilly reveres as revealing of character. And he doesn’t like what he sees in Trump. He chronicles incident after incident, like Trump throwing sportscaster Mike Tirico’s ball from the fairway into a bunker.
To hear him tell it, Reilly didn’t really want to write this book. He was happily retired in Italy, writing scripts and novels and basically chilling out.
Then he started reading President Donald Trump’s tweets.
Reilly had met Trump a few times. He played golf with him for a chapter in his book, “Who’s Your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf.” Of course Trump’s boasts, exaggerations and outright lies got Reilly’s attention.
But it was the golf stuff that Reilly couldn’t stomach.
Specifically, Trump’s claim that he had won 18 club championships. Reilly exhaustively investigates this and doesn’t find evidence that Trump has actually won any (with the exception of playing his new courses first, then claiming that makes him the first club champ).
As any good writer would, Reilly uses golf to reveal larger truths. Or, in this case, lies.
The thing is, Trump isn’t a bad golfer. That makes Reilly all the madder.
But he’s not planning to be mad forever. Writing the book didn’t make him want to come out of sportswriting retirement.
“No, no, I’m going back to Italy,” he said. “I’m going back to my paddle board, my piano and all the books I was reading, and meditation. I mean, this totally screwed up my meditation. I’m just angry all the time now and I was getting so peaceful.
When: 7 p.m. Friday, April 12.
Where: Changing Hands Tempe, 6428 S. McClintock Drive.