TRUMP CARD

He’s one of the world’s richest and most bombastic business men — and Donald Trump always gets his way. Which is why no-one’s betting against him hosting a future US Open on his own New Jersey creation. SIMON LEWIS reports from New York.

D ONALD TRUMP has more in his sights than good ratings for his hit TV show The Apprentice — he is also targeting a US Open championship.

Extremely ambitious businessman that he is, even he does not believe he can oust Tiger, Phil and Co. on the course. Instead, the real estate tycoon turned TV presenter wants to host the biggest tournament in American golf on his very own course.

Trump, whose first golf course development opened in 2000 in West Palm Beach, Florida, has given the world a further four layouts in the United States and Caribbean, with another one planned for the birthplace of golf — and his mother — in Scotland, where he dreams of creating “the world’s greatest golf course”. The 60-year-old’s current flagship course, however, is the two-year-old Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a 35-mile drive west of his Manhattan home and business headquarters and it is to there he wants to bring the US Open.

The omens are good. Bedminster has already been selected by the United States Golf Association to host the 2009 Junior Amateur and Girls’ Junior Amateur championships, and Trump sees that decision as the first step on the long and winding road to hosting the USGA’s premier event.

“We just got the juniors, girls and boys. Hopefully that’s phase one,” Trump said. “Literally every single aspect of Bedminster has been designed for the highest standards of the USGA. It’s 20 minutes from the Lincoln Tunnel. It’s soft rolling hills in Jackie Kennedy horse country. It’s designed for majors — and I’d be honoured to have them.”

Whether Trump’s larger-than-life appearance, approach to his business and burgeoning television career fits with the blazered brigade of decision makers at the USGA is an altogether different matter, however. Last week Trump re-ignited a nasty public spat with talk show host Rosie O’Donnell, and regardless of the quality of his golf courses, episodes like that will not endear him to the American game’s powers that be, suggested Curt Sampson, author of The Mast e r s.

“Whether you like his hair or his style, and I don’t,” Sampson told USA Today, “Trump has accomplished something great with his courses. But the USGA doesn’t view trading barbs with O’Donnell as very politic.”

There have also been further setbacks to Trump’s golfing ambitions. In March, the property developer was enraged with Golf Digest magazine when they axed his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach from its 2007 list of ‘America’s 100 Greatest Courses’. Trump hit back by saying his course, which Florida Golf Magazine rates as “the best course in Florida”, was unfairly cut because he refused to advertise in the magazine.

“Golf Digest is a disgrace to their profession. They should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump blasted when he learned his 27-hole course had slid out of the rankings from its previous berth at No. 84.

Trump, known to fans and foes alike as ‘The Donald’, has countered fears that awarding his course the US Open will put him centre stage at the expense of the championship by saying: “This course is greater than I am.”

And no-one could argue he is not serious about the operations of his Trump Golf company, which has invested in excess of $200 million ( g 154m) into the development of those five courses. Nor is his company a newcomer to hosting tournaments, His Trump National GC in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, has staged an LPGA event while the TNGC in Florida has hosted the LPGA’s season-ending ADT Championship for five years in a row and is slated to do so again in 2007. Bedminster, though, has been built with majors in mind and it is no coincidence that Trump chose the former estate of supercar manufacturer John DeLorean as the place to do it.

Not only does the course have easy access to New York City, it is also a short drive from USGA headquarters in Far Hills, New Je r s e y . Indeed, the USGA executive director David Fay is reported to be a member of the club and regular player of the course. Awarding US Open golf championships is a little more complex and involving than that, however. Trump “will have to get in line like everybody else” if he wants Bedminster to one day be home to the tournament, Sampson said, and the USGA has already announced the host US Open courses for the next seven years through to 2013.

“Just because you’re a few minutes from Golf House (USGA HQ) doesn’t mean you’re going to land the US Open,” said Marty Parkes, the USGA senior director of communications. First of all, Parkes said, a club must apply for consideration.

Then an evaluation team from the USGA determines the course’s suitability as a US Open test for the world’s best golfers, and its capacity to cope with and cater to the huge numbers of spectators, sponsors and media members. Bedminster’s designer, Tom Fazio, says his layout should tick all the boxes on the USGA’s shopping list. In terms of infrastructure, the region around New York City’s no stranger to hosting major championships, whether it be Shinnecock Hills and Bethpage on Long Island, Winged Foot in the northern suburbs of Westchester or New Jersey’s won Baltusrol.

And then there’s the course, outstripping Medinah, the longest major venue in history, by 50-odd yards at 7,610 yards from the championship tees.

“It would look spectacular on TV,” said Fazio, who admitted Trump was very stringent in his design requirements. “He has a new idea every minute. There’s never a dull moment.” Indeed, every teeing ground, fairway and green has been designed with viewing areas and space for grandstands in mind. And the area known as the

“Trump Horseshoe,” which envelopes the fifth, sixth and seventh holes, has space for a gallery of 20,000 fans. The one thing Bedminster lacks, according to Fazio, is “a pedigree, a tradition.” Yet there is a precedent for new courses being added quickly to major championship rotations.

When billionaire Herb Kohler developed Whistling Straits on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin nine years it took him just two years to win the right to stage the 2004 PGA Championship. Now Whistling Straits is looking ahead to hosting his year’s US Senior Open, 2010 and 2015 PGA Championships and the 2020 Ryder Cup.

Trump also has plans for staging the Ryder Cup, both at Bedminster and at his planned Trump International Golf Links, near Aberdeen. His 36-hole resort on more than 1,400 acres of dunes and linksland known as the Menie Estate, overlooking the North Sea, will cost an estimated $1 billion if it wins planning approval from the local authorities. That now looks like a big ‘if ‘.

This month his beloved Scottish project hit the skids. Already a year behind schedule, his development has become quagmired following protests from a number of environmental groups who all say the construction of the courses will irrevocably harm the protected nature reserve on which a third of the land stands.

Poor Mr Trump. With his late mother, Mary Anne Macleod, hailing from the Hebrides, there is a romantic edge to his plans, yet there is always a bottom line with The Donald. A five handicapper, Trump says he owes much to golf, which he took up as a student in the late 1960s at the University of Pennsylvania, becoming a member of Winged Foot not long after he graduated.

“I’ve made a lot of money on the golf course, not from playing golf, but from being on the course with people I made deals with,” he has said. “Golf is an amazing business tool. You can learn a lot about a person’s personality.”

Whether the USGA decide Bedminster is worthy of their championship, however, could well come down to what they think of Donald Trump’s personality.