Eric Trump: give Turnberry the Open, get politics sport free

Here’s how: discourage those awful MP versus journo football matches on the grounds there are more than enough middle-aged men and women making spectacles of themselves already in the Palace of Westminster. We don’t need them compounding the problem by lumbering around a five-a-side pitch squeezed into whichever £60 replica top they think best reflects the allegiances of their constituents.

And if discouragement doesn’t work, Home Secretary Suella Braverman can always have them locked up on one of those second-hand barges she’s going to moor in places like Teesport or Harwich or (if she has her wicked way) hard by the office of London mayor Sadiq Khan.

Keeping politics out of sport, on the other hand, well that’s tricky. Keeping Donald Trump out of either is proving trickier still.

Around the same time last week that Mr Trump was revealing news of his own impending imprisonment – possibly, anyway: the charges he faces are worth a 10-year stretch in Sing Sing – his son Eric Trump was writing in the Daily Telegraph.

Was he addressing his father’s indictment over the handling of classified documents, charges which include conspiracy, providing false statements and the obstruction of justice? He was not.

From the first line of his article – “There are few men in history who have done more to promote the game of golf than Donald J Trump” – it looked like he was actually just trying to cheer everyone up by giving us a laugh. It certainly brought a grin to my face.

But he wasn’t doing that either. In fact he was deadly serious, and he went on to use that spurious ‘fact’ to make a case for keeping politics out of sport. In particular, he wanted the storied Open Championship to be handed to the equally storied Turnberry golf course in Ayrshire.

For the uninitiated, the three links courses, its associated golf academy and the five-star Edwardian hotel attached to the estate are all owned by a certain Donald J Trump, he of history-making golf promotion fame. For the record, it posted a £15 million loss in 2021, another reason the Open would be welcome.

The Open was last held at Turnberry in 2009, five years before the Trump Organization bought it. Since 2009 St Andrews has held the Open three times, Royal St George’s twice and, when this year’s event winds up on July 23, so too will Royal Liverpool.

The reason for Turnberry’s apparent exclusion from this top tier sporting event? The Trumps have sniffed the air and caught the whiff of politics.

“In a family so deeply dedicated to the birthplace of golf,” Mr Trump wrote, “never could we have imagined that politics could potentially jeopardise Turnberry’s ability to host another Open. This should not be about politics; it should be about the game of golf.”

Is he wrong? Not about politics intruding in sport. Yes if he really believes it should not.

Donald Trump at his Turnberry golf course (Image: PA)

On January 11 2021, five days after the assault on the US Capitol by supporters of his father, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (R&A) issued a statement on Turnberry’s place in the roster of potential Open Championship venues.

“We have no plans to stage any of our championships at Turnberry and will not do so in the foreseeable future,” wrote R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers. “We will not return until we are convinced that the focus will be on the championship, the players and the course itself and we do not believe that is achievable in the current circumstances.”

By current circumstances they mean while it is still owned by the Trump Organization.

In truth, that’s probably just confirmation of a long-held opinion among the UK’s golfing hierarchy. If it didn’t already hold sway when Mr Trump became the 45th US president in 2016, it certainly will have after his visit to Turnberry in 2018.

Back then there was a noisy, 10,000 strong protest march through Edinburgh. A smaller, though equally vociferous crowd assembled on Turnberry beach when Mr Trump pitched up for a round of golf. He waved at the mob. They responded with boos and chants of ‘No Trump! No racist USA!’.

That’s not what anyone would call a warm Scottish welcome.

Undeterred, Mr Trump took to social media. “The weather is beautiful, and this place is incredible!” he tweeted. “Tomorrow I go to Helsinki for a Monday meeting with Vladimir Putin.”

And now here’s Mr Eric Trump giving Turnberry the full timeshare-style sales pitch in a shameless bid for what you might call Open-handedness – highlighting the history of the course and restating his family’s love of Scotland and connection to it. Oh, and reminding readers of the $200 million he says his father has ploughed into Turnberry since buying it.

“From every blade of grass, to every bunker, every Swarovski crystal chandelier, to the magnificent marble and granite stonework, to the elaborate network of fiber-optic conduit under every golf hole strategically placed for the tournament camera towers, no detail has been overlooked and no expense spared,” he wrote.

Swarovski chandeliers! It’s enough to make you swoon. It’s not enough to make you think Turnberry should host the Open – at least not while it is owned by as divisive, controversial and ethically tainted a figure as Donald Trump.

The fact is politics cannot be kept out of sport, nor should it. Sorry Eric. Sorry Donald. Sorry Turnberry.

Marta Kostyuk, the Ukrainian tennis player who refused to shake hands with Belarusian opponent Aryna Sabalenka at the French Open? She was right. The crowd members who booed her for it? Either idiots or Belarusians.

“Be honestly embarrassed,” Kostyuk said of the boo boys and girls afterwards. “I want to see people react to it in 10 years when the war is over. I think they will not feel really nice about what they did.”

Likewise the decision by the All England Club to bar Russian and Belorussian tennis players from competing at Wimbledon in 2022 was the correct thing to do. The trouble is it hit them in their pockets when the UK’s Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) was fined by the Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association, and Wimbledon denied ranking points. So the LTA caved. This year it will allow Russian and Belorussian players to compete as neutrals as long as they have no funding or sponsorship from either of those states.

Talking of memory, who recalls anything about the 1968 Olympics except the era-defining photograph of US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos dropping their heads and giving a gloved Black Panther salute on the winner’s podium as The Star-Spangled Banner played? That was sport and politics coming together to create an indelible image.

Could that protest still happen today without a ban or a penalty? Hard to see it. Too many sporting bodies now operate proscriptions on political statements. It is ill-conceived and feels like it is geared towards the sensitivities of media partners and heavyweight sponsors, though nobody in authority will ever admit it. Another probable, though unstated reason for the proscription is to appease those countries whose athletes or fans have genuine grievances which can’t be addressed by democratic means (hello Iran!).

As long as political statements stay within laws on hate speech and incitement, they should be tolerated in sport. After all, sport is essentially theatre, and we don’t keep politics out of that. And what politics encompasses – which is everything – sport does too. It is essentially a codified and (Scottish football aside) graceful expression of the full gamut of human attributes and emotions.

Leave the politics in, I say. If that means leaving Turnberry out, so be it.

READ MORE: TRUMP ‘MADE £46M’ FROM GOLF COURSES WHILE PRESIDENT