Do Orr, Nicklaus have same Trump writer?
President Donald Trump has been endorsed by Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, who has sent police into the streets to assassinate drug dealers (and homeless children); India prime minister Narendra Modi, who is trying to crush organized labor; and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who has problems with democracy and is trying to kill the press, the judiciary and the central bank. To name a few.
Russian president Vladimir Putin also endorsed Trump. Nobody batted an eye.
Last week, Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Orr and Brett Favre endorsed Trump — and it created a firestorm of controversy. You’d have thought the Taliban, against whom America fought the longest war in its history, had endorsed Trump.
(Wait a minute. The Taliban has endorsed Trump. So has David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.)
Nicklaus was the first of the three iconic sportsmen to make public his endorsement. He posted something of a treatise on Twitter on Wednesday night. Favre followed with a tweet. Orr took out a full-page ad in a New Hampshire newspaper.
Jay Cutler also endorsed Trump via Twitter. For those who might not know, Cutler was a Chicago Bears quarterback who had a certain gift. As Adam Best, founder of the sports website Fansided, tweeted: “Jay Cutler was famous for always throwing to the wrong team during crunch time so this makes sense for him.”
Nicklaus was the big one. The Greatest Golfer of All Time is an old friend of Trump’s. They’re so cozy, in fact, that Trump wrote $20 million into his proposed federal budget for Nicklaus’ favorite children’s charity (as Politico reported last year). What’s that old phrase? “Quid pro quo?”
Charity, then, really does begin in the home. The White House.
“This is not a personality contest, it’s about patriotism, policies and the people they impact,” Nicklaus wrote. “His love for America and its citizens, and putting his country first, has come through loud and clear. How he has
said it has not been important to me. What has been important are his actions. Now, you have the opportunity to take action.”
This made a lot of people instantly pine for Arnold Palmer, who died just before the 2016 election. Although Palmer was a lifelong Republican, his daughter in 2018 indicated to biographer Thomas Hauser that Arnie was having misgivings about Trump.
“My dad was disciplined,” Peg Palmer told Hauser. “He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character. ... What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”
Orr is arguably the greatest defenseman in NHL history. His newspaper ad sent tremors from his hometown of Parry Sound, Ontario, throughout all of Canada.
Orr wrote: “Perhaps you don’t like his tweets or how the President says some things sometimes, and that is your right. But remember, this is not a personality contest; it’s about policies and the people those policies assist.”
(There’s that phrase “not a personality contest” again. Who wrote these things?)
Jack Todd, the longtime Montreal Gazette columnist and the author of five novels and a memoir, quickly went to his blog to hammer Orr:
“But you just had to take money from a Super Pac to put an ad in a New Hampshire paper backing a creep who has torn the United States of America to shreds,” Todd wrote. “A man who has put children in cages, raped the environment, treated women like toilet paper, ridiculed the disabled, called people who died in America’s wars losers and backed Vladimir Putin even as Putin was putting bounties on the lives of American soldiers.”
I have found no evidence that Orr used Super PAC money to pay for the ad in the New Hampshire Union Leader; the ad says “Paid for by Bobby Orr.” So, we must accept the fact that Orr took it upon himself to select the largest newspaper in New Hampshire, where polls are showing that Trump is trailing, to reheat the copy written by Nicklaus’ PR guy.
Favre tweeted, “My Vote is for what makes this country great, freedom of speech and religion, 2nd Amnd, hard working tax paying citizens, police & military.”
Longtime sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, the author of nine books, responded with this tweet: “A reminder that @brettfavre – a man whose biography I wrote – also took pictures of his shriveled penis and texted them to a woman he didn’t know. So judgment, eh, not really his thing.”
It is one thing for an athlete, or any visible figure, to support a candidate for political office. It is another thing to make a public endorsement. When you endorse, you endorse the whole thing.
As USA Today columnist Christine Brennan put it, when you endorse Trump you endorse “a president who has consistently and reprehensibly denigrated women and people of color, who has been accused of sexually assaulting or sexually harassing at least 26 women, who has waged war on Black athletes who speak out about injustice and who has called white nationalists ‘very fine people,’ among many other awful comments.”
Orr said Trump “is the kind of teammate I want.”
In for a dime, in for a dollar. marace@dispatch.com