James Dodson is a reporter and author who likes to write about golf. He ghosted on Arnold Palmer’s memoir. I don’t expect many here are familiar with him, hell, all I know about golf I learned from “Caddyshack” and Tincup”. He recently gave an interview, however, to Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR that may hold some interest for us…
Seems that a few years back, drumpf had been after him to join him for a round at a newly renovated Trump course, his National Golf Club Charlotte, which was near Dodson’s home in North Carolina. Dodson knew enough about drumpf that he was not particularly anxious to attend.
"This PR guy kept calling me and inviting me," Dodson says. "And he kept saying things like, 'Oh, Donald Trump loves your books.' And I kept saying, 'Donald Trump doesn’t read books, I’m told. And he hadn’t a clue who I am.' Anyway, he called three or four times. Finally, I said yes."
What the hell, after all Greg Norman was gonna be there.
But he wasn’t invited in to Trump’s group, which included Norman of course, so he got stuck with some GOP Congress-critter and Eric Trump.
Dodson admired the renovations to the club, but wondered about the financing. Donald had told him earlier that he had “access” to 100 Million bucks…
"So when I got in the cart with Eric," Dodson says, "as we were setting off, I said, 'Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.' And this is what he said. He said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.' Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting."
You gotta love golf a lot to pony up $100,000,000. That’s a shit ton of rubles… but I guess when you go all Cossack on a major economy, you got some left over to invest in a stupid game.
Right.
Dodson’s round ended when the sky opened and it started raining like like a russian hooker pissing on a Sealy Posturepedic and he was ready to cut out as he had a vacation scheduled with his wife. Groppenfuhrer, though, wanted to smooze some more and cornered him as he fled for the door, inviting Dodson to ask some reporter like questions.
Dodson asked him about running for President, and drumpf, typically, said that all over people were asking him to run and save the Republic from the ravages of good government. But drump said he wanted Dodson to take a real hack with his titanium driver, so…
"Now we’re at the door. And he’s still got me in the bro hug. And he says, 'Come on, those are nothing. Those are softballs.' And he says, 'One more for the road. Give me something with some mustard.' And this is what I said: 'Well, OK, fair enough. My wife and I watched The Apprentice for the first time the other night in preparation for coming over here. And, honestly, the question that kept popping up in my head is: are you as big an a--hole as you seem? Or do you just play one on TV? And this is what he did. He dropped my arm like it had caught fire spontaneously, stepped back at least a yard, made that kind of constipated furious pig face he makes, slapped my back, doubled over and popped up laughing like you can’t believe and declared, 'Yeah, it’s fun, isn’t it?'
Dodson ruined the whole thing in the next para, I’ll let you discover that if you want - but what I quoted is a pretty good place to stop.