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The Guilt of a Sports Columnist Who Joked About Trump

9/29/2016

Body Double or Cardboard Figure?

While waiting for the grifter Donald Trump to be hooted off the campaign trail, I have ignored my own guilt, as a sports columnist, in his public survival.

In his home town, where he was known the best, he was always a joke, a poseur, a piker, a pisher, as we say in New York. And I contributed to this by using him as a punch line for something gaudy, something trivial, something absurd.

Trump pops up in many columns I wrote over nearly three decades.

Football: I first became aware of Trump in the mid-‘70’s when I met his brother, Freddy, who had gone to grade school with friends of mine. (The Trumps lived in a tony area half a mile from my busy street.) Freddy talked with great respect about his younger brother, the builder.

I met Trump when he purchased the Generals, a football team in a startup league. He held press conferences in his glitzy hotels – free advertising – and signed expensive players like Doug Flutie, but with Trump’s apparently short attention span, details were always vague.

Figure Skating: Through a mutual friend, I got invited to an exhibition in the Garden, where I met the very bright Ivana Trump. The Donald wore a camel’s hair coat, and always stayed on the periphery of social conversation.

Baseball: When George Steinbrenner seemed to have burned out, or gotten himself suspended, I would suggest he sell the Yankees to Trump. I assumed Trump could afford it; now it appears he could not. Later I realized George was twice as smart and had more compassion and social conscience than Trump.

Tennis: Trump had a box at Ashe Stadium, right above the media section. For yooge matches, he would materialize up front, leaning on the railing, like the captain of a ship, but I noticed that his head and eyes never moved. He didn’t watch the ball. I realized he was preening, advertising himself. Or possibly it was a cardboard cutout, one inch thick.

Boxing: I am an abolitionist toward boxing. Let’s start with that. A boxer, Stephan Johnson, died after a fight in the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. A few days later, Trump took my call and I reported his tone as shaken, but his rationale for boxing was this:

“'You have to understand that we do not sanction the fights. That is done by the New Jersey State Athletic Control Commission. All we are is the venue -- and fighting is popular. Every fight sells out. We have other things like gymnastics; they don't sell out. All I know is, boxing sells out.''

So there you have it. It was easy to feel he was a lightweight, who built gaudy buildings and postured. I was always making jokes about Trump trying to build Brasilia on the edge of Manhattan. Now he is the darling of many religious folk and flag-waving patriots.

Rachel Maddow said after the debate the other night that most people would be nervous if somebody with Trump’s facial twitches sat down next to them on an airplane. What did we in New York do wrong in not taking him more seriously? Mea culpa.
* * *
Here are some old columns in which Trump is a convenient target.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/28/sports/sports-of-the-times-about-missing-donald.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/12/sports/sports-of-the-times-a-front-row-witness-to-death.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/07/sports/sports-of-the-times-will-donald-now-become-a-big-wheel.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/20/sports/sports-of-the-times-build-a-better-ball-park-and-the-world.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/08/sports/sports-of-the-times-donald-does-right.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/30/sports/sports-of-the-times-george-howie-donald.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/06/sports/sports-of-the-times-michaels-dances-around-it.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/21/sports/sports-of-the-times-it-s-a-bum-rap.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/20/sports/sports-of-the-times-a-happening-no-matter-what.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/06/sports/sports-of-the-times-ted-turner-peacemaker.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/20/sports/sports-of-the-times-just-five-more-shopping-days-are-left.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/13/sports/sports-times-dancing-rafters-garden-for-knicks-night-remember.html

Jerry Lambert link

9/30/2016 03:36:15 pm

Trump also sponsored a bicycle stage race for a couple of years -
around 1990.

Keep up the great work,
Jerry Lambert

George Vecsey

9/30/2016 05:11:46 pm

Jerry, great to hear from you. Still riding?
I cycle from my house to Main St. these days. Avoid the worst hills in Port Wash.
I forgot to mention the Tour de Trump...but in fact I did have fun with it (and him) in the enclosed link.
He seemed like such a harmless popinjay back then.
Best to you
GV

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/07/sports/sports-of-the-times-will-donald-now-become-a-big-wheel.html

KL Bob

10/1/2016 03:13:14 am

Another guy with a brother named Fred was my intro to Trump, Imus, who had him on his show, fairly often if I recall correctly, in the '70s. They were good friends, or so it seemed, until they weren't. Imus suddenly started saying what a jerk he was.
I was a teenager at the time and a big Imus fan, so if Imus said he was a jerk, he was a jerk.
Imus got that right, 40 years ago.
But who to vote for? What a true mess we're in.
Thanks, George, sorry to be away for a while and happy to be back!

George Vecsey

10/1/2016 09:46:10 am

Bob, nice to hear from you.
Imus, who also has fat-phobia, used to have Trump on a lot. But even then, 20 years ago, he referred to Trump as Butter Butt, meaning he was out of shape even then.
I stopped listening to Imus when his racial remarks became more rabid -- particularly the Rutgers women's basketball. I just stopped. He was still on WFAN then, I have no idea where he is now. Vanished without a trace, on my radar.
Trump next, one can only hope and pray.
Best
GV

KL Bob

10/2/2016 10:26:49 am

Thanks, George, apologies for being away. You remember Imus better than I do, I just kind of have a vague 70s memory on NBC "50 thousand watt radio station" kind of stuff. He used to come in either drunk or high sometimes, yadda yah.
I forgot about the Rutgers thing -- yes way over the top. His skits with Charles McCord often had a racial edge to them.
I'm not a Clinton fan and the other side could have nominated Bozo and won. But Trump?! We're becoming the United States of the Philippines, who have had three losers in the last five elections voting on the populist appeal.
Anyway -- good luck with the Mets. I hope we get to replay '86!

Alan Rubin link

10/2/2016 04:34:37 pm

George--No shame in poking fun at versatile lout in so many sports as he was not running for president at the time.

I never thought that anyone would have made Steinbrenner good by comparison.

I liked Imus when he first started. He was about the same time as Bob and Ray, or a bit after. He was a humorous disc jockey with interesting banter. Unfortunately, he morphed into what he is today.

I find it interesting that Trump is savvy enough to correctly tap into some legitimate concerns within the electorate but completely completely void of offering them anything to improve their lives except offer idiotic and often vulgar hype.

Either his erratic behaviors are so ingrained that he acts totally on instinct or he subconsciously wants to lose the election.

George Vecsey

10/2/2016 10:32:55 pm

Alan, the accountant in the NYT tax story notes that when Trump came to do taxes, Ivana did most of the talking.
That squares perfectly with my memory of Generals press events, where he would hardly know what Walt Michaels did, or what teams were in the league, and Ivana would say (rather patronizingly), "Donald, he is the coach..." I am sure she thought he was limited. She was the brains of the operation.
He has some kind of learning glitch, mixed with avarice and lack of conscience, a scary combination. GV

Brian Savin

10/2/2016 07:14:55 pm

George, what do you think about the Wednesday game? I'm excited about it!
Best
Brian

George Vecsey

10/2/2016 10:33:57 pm

Brian, oddly enough, I do have some thoughts. I will peck them out Monday morning. GV

Hansen Alexander

10/11/2016 05:52:23 pm

Well, George,

You captured all the fraudulence of the con man himself in that short piece. I am still reeling in shock almost 48 hours after foolishly watching the last hour of Sunday night's so-called debate. I have slept little, my anger and disgust so powerful that I feel I might just have a Trump moment myself, lash out at somebody for no good reason, throw a chair across my apartment as if I were Bob Knight. I am often reminded of how you wrote so many columns about college football and began them with the observation that it was impossible for its ethics to sink any lower, and yet it did again and again. I guess that sums up Trump since trying to wiggle out of his blatant claim in a tape released where he said "stars could get away with anything" and meant forcing themselves on women, with a report on a married woman he went shopping with in hopes of having sex. "Locker room talk, locker room talk" is of course an Orwellian defense. I am a reader and writer of erotica myself but I have never read a description where even in the middle of an orgy that a man grabs a woman's vagina like a player grabbing another player's balls at the bottom of a pile. S&M? And in my six decades I have never heard one single person of the male gender think it was a turn on or erotic to grab a woman there. Have I missed something? In law, if you are interested, it is sexual assault.

The problem here, as I may have said before, is that the more you try to satirize the guy he says things that are so far over the top that there is no "margin" for satire. The stunt of paying off woman who have claimed that they were inappropriately sought out sexually by Clinton, but never verified by any credible evidence, sunk to new lows. Until he threatened to have his opponent investigated by a special prosecutor! And then she was responsible for his alleged criminal stalking of women. And she had hatred in his heart. Was this fighting his own inner demons, that are obviously filled with enormous amounts of rage. How can a man who was given so much in life be so angry? What does he really have to be angry out? It is incomprehensible. Other than Hitler's anguished yelps at certain rallies and Mussolini's ability to change his mind four or five times in an afternoon, I have never heard of a candidate in a Democratic system who spent a large majority of his time absolutely yelling about the latest member of his own party not to support him, not to agree with him. The intensity of the rage when he goes after his fellow Republicans is frightening. it gets worse literally by the minute as he tweets this anger through what sound like sleepless nights.

What is left of this horror show? He seems driven to top the last stunt with an even more outrageous one every day. Does he accuse Hillary of having something to do with the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson? Does he drop a dead fetus on the middle of the stage? Does he accuse Hillary in the middle of the debate of murdering Vincent Foster? Would it do her any good to even ask him, "Mr. Trump, have you no sense of decency?" I fear not.

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The Guilt of a Sports Columnist Who Joked About Trump

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