a little research<\/a> uncovered that his high school batting average was well below the Mendoza line.<\/p>\nYearbooks exist, as do newspapers. Combing through them in search of clues about Trump\u2019s playing career paints an interesting picture of Trump\u2019s brief moment as a soccer player at NYMA, and helps add even more depth to arguably the most polarizing leader in US history. Some accounts describe Trump as an incredible athlete, while others are starkly different. Many describe him as a bully, a character trait that was only hardened amid NYMA\u2019s culture of hazing and rigid discipline.<\/p>\n
As for Ticktin\u2019s claim? NYMA actually went 3-8 in 1964. The truth about Trump sometimes feels hard to find. Other times, it\u2019s right there out in the open.<\/p>\n
New York Military Academy, where Donald Trump played soccer in his youth. Photograph: courtesy of Pablo Maurer<\/p>\n
The misadventures of Donald Trump\u2019s early childhood have been well-documented in several books and interviews. There\u2019s the story about how he used to glue his brother\u2019s building blocks together to keep him from using them, or how he grew so frustrated with his music teacher in second grade that he allegedly punched her in the face. By age 13, Trump had formed a fascination with switchblades after seeing West Side Story. When his father Fred discovered a large cache of the knives in his son\u2019s bedroom, he shipped him away to military school.<\/p>\n
The NYMA of the 1960s was entirely unlike the sleepy, near-abandoned campus that exists today, with a well-documented culture of hazing and abuse akin to Full Metal Jacket.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe man who was the commandant of the junior school was a really narrow-minded martinet named Theodore Dobias,\u201d remembers Sandy McIntosh, one of Trump\u2019s former classmates. \u201c[When Trump first arrived, Dobias] told him to make his bed for instance, and Trump said \u2018screw you.\u2019 Dobias punched him out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most instructors were hardened veterans, many of whom had served overseas during the second world war. Individual discipline aside, they also pitted students against one another, as Dobias did during twice-weekly \u201ccage matches\u201d, where one student would beat another into submission.<\/p>\n
Dobias was also the coach of the school\u2019s football and baseball teams, and eventually Trump simply learned how to get on his good side.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think Trump ever played sports before military school, but he saw it as a way of getting in with this guy, which meant his survival, really,\u201d says McIntosh. \u201cI never think of Trump as particularly intelligent, just wily \u2026 I think he figured out how this guy operated and so, very soon, he was able to get in this guy\u2019s good graces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s exploits \u2013 or lack thereof \u2013 on the baseball diamond and gridiron are well documented, in part because of the outsized place those two sports have held for decades in American society. Soccer, especially during Trump\u2019s NYMA days in the early 60s, was almost fully marginalized. Trump\u2019s claim that he could\u2019ve gone pro as a baseball player is at least logistically plausible. He could\u2019ve never done so as a soccer player, because there was no genuine pro league to speak of.<\/p>\n
There was, though, the Dutchess County Scholastic League, a collection of small schools scattered throughout tiny hamlets in the Hudson Valley and just beyond. Trump became part of it in the fall of 1963, joining NYMA\u2019s soccer team after suffering an injury playing gridiron football.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump during the period of his youth when he played soccer at New York Military Academy. Photograph: courtesy of Pablo Maurer<\/p>\n
Years earlier, NYMA had won the league under the guidance of a British coach and his son, the star forward on the team. By the time Trump arrived, NYMA\u2019s \u201cbooters\u201d, as they were so often referred to in the local paper, were under the guidance of someone with a lot less experience: Col Paul Curtin.<\/p>\n
Curtin arrived at NYMA in 1962 hoping to stay busy after a decorated military career. During a three-year stretch of the second world war, he had tracked hundreds of miles through the Burmese jungle and had flown resupply missions over the Himalayas to support Chinese forces in the China-Burma-India theater. Later, Curtin taught military and war tactics at Harvard. This time on the frontline did little to prepare him for the touch line.<\/p>\n
\u201cCurtin didn\u2019t know anything about soccer at all,\u201d remembers Alfred Harrison, a teammate of Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Many of the players did, though. They had been brought up with it. At the time, NYMA had earned a reputation as a safe haven for well-connected military families throughout South and Central America, and some of those figures \u2013 such as Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista \u2013 shipped their children north to the Hudson valley for protection, as much as anything else.<\/p>\n
Yearbooks and newspaper clippings make it obvious enough that many of those South American and Central American kids, the sons of officers and diplomats, made up the core of NYMA\u2019s soccer team. The attacking line was Colombian and Venezuelan, the midfield Mexican. Trump, who seems to have played full-back, was joined on the backline by an Argentinian and a Peruvian cadet. As president, Trump has leveled racially charged insults at a laundry list of those same countries. As a member of the NYMA Knights soccer team, he was practically the only white person on the field.<\/p>\n
Many former NYMA cadets remember racial tension at the academy and on its sports teams, though those memories frequently come with the usual disclaimers that accompany insensitivities from long ago \u2013 \u201cit was a different time,\u201d et al.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost everybody on the team called [the Latino kids on the team] \u2018spics,\u2019\u201d Harrison says. \u201cBut they called themselves that, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all called each other names, let\u2019s put it that way,\u201d says Paul Curtin, the son of coach Curtin and another member of the team. \u201cIt sounds awful today, and none of it was politically correct, but it was meant in fun. It was all part of the culture of the school, but no one was singled out.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you didn\u2019t learn to speak Spanish, though,\u201d Harrison says, \u201cyou didn\u2019t get the ball.\u201d<\/p>\n
A newspaper clipping regarding New York Military Academy, where Donald Trump played soccer in his youth. Photograph: courtesy of Pablo Maurer<\/p>\n
Not long before Trump joined the soccer team, he was nearly kicked out of NYMA.<\/p>\n
He had risen from private to sergeant to captain of an entire company by his senior year, but his time in that role would be short-lived. During a dorm inspection, Trump discovered that another cadet had improperly made his bed. Trump tore the bed apart, angering the cadet, and the confrontation eventually culminated with Trump allegedly attempting to throw his classmate out of a second-floor window. It wasn\u2019t Trump\u2019s only instance of violent behavior, and it eventually caught up with him.<\/p>\n
\u201c[One of these kids] ended up in the hospital,\u201d McIntosh remembers. \u201cHis parents got on to it, and they threatened a big lawsuit \u2026 If it would\u2019ve been anybody else, they\u2019d have busted [Trump] to private or sergeant or put him away somewhere where people couldn\u2019t see him.\u201d<\/p>\n
What happened instead was that Trump retained his rank and was reassigned, essentially given a captaincy of a unit that had no supervisory role attached to it.<\/p>\n
Sixty years on, many of Trump\u2019s soccer teammates recall the early roots of the cult of personality that surrounds him today. On weekends, Harrison remembers, Trump\u2019s parents would always arrive for visits with a young woman in tow, a rare sight at the all-boys academy. In the school\u2019s yearbook, Trump is labeled NYMA\u2019s \u201cladies\u2019 man\u201d, pictured strolling arm in arm with, one would assume, his girlfriend. On closer inspection, something about the photo feels off.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause she was the secretary at the school,\u201d Harrison says, laughing. \u201cThey just took that photo to make him look that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s personality, at times, also drew in an army of followers. Harrison remembers approaching Trump\u2019s table during his senior year to serve him when working as a waiter in the mess hall.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe always had the goon squad,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cHe would sit on the end, as the officers did, and ahead of him three rows down were these big, burly guys, like almost kind of a mafia thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s goon squad might have fit in well on the soccer pitch. In that era, matches were largely kick-and-run affairs, dominated by the longball and a defensive approach centered around brutality. Harrison remembers playing a team based in Monticello in the Catskills, with players who arrived wearing bulky and hard-shelled baseball catcher\u2019s shin guards.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were big and rough, and kind of plowed over everybody,\u201d says Harrison. \u201cMost of the Spanish players were used to a higher level of play and not used at all to getting pushed around.\u201d<\/p>\n
Box scores for about half of the team\u2019s matches can be found at the Newburgh Free Library, and they reveal a bit about Trump\u2019s contributions. On weathered rolls of microfiche, alongside articles about the space race and the Kennedy assassination, NYMA\u2019s season comes to life.<\/p>\n
NYMA struggled in 1963, though they weren\u2019t terrible. Playing in matches that featured four 15-minute quarters, the team managed to keep it close in most of their games and even managed a victory over Rhinebeck, by most accounts the best team in the league during that era.<\/p>\n
Trump is listed as a full-back or half-back in box scores, though it seems he was also sometimes excluded from the starting 11. NYMA\u2019s backline gave up a little more than two goals a game.<\/p>\n
Curtin, whose father coached Trump, remembers a conversation he had with his dad years after Trump left NYMA, but well before Trump became president.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father said that he was a good athlete and he was coachable,\u201d Curtin says. \u201cAnd that he had a territory to cover and he did, he had responsibility to protect the goal and get the ball away. Given his limited exposure to soccer, he did well, apparently.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the soccer team, I would put him in the top 25% of the players,\u201d adds Ticktin, the same teammate who also suggested that the team had been undefeated.<\/p>\n
Other former teammates describe seeing the early origins of Trump\u2019s modern-day habits.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump was presented with the Fifa peace prize by Gianni Infantino at the World Cup draw. Photograph: Evan Vucci\/AP<\/p>\n
\u201cHe called me shoulders all the time,\u201d Harrison says, on account of his rounded shoulders. \u201cIt was like the \u2018Sleepy Joe\u2019 thing. He\u2019s always been giving people those nicknames.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump may have adapted well to the sport, but he didn\u2019t captain the team, as some reports have suggested. Javier Angel Sustaeta, a Mexican four-year letterman in soccer, captained the team.<\/p>\n
Trump, then, seems to have been an average player, understandable and not entirely unexpected given his limited exposure to the sport. Perhaps the same bone spurs<\/a> that allegedly kept him from being drafted into the US military and shipped to Vietnam a few years after graduating from NYMA also affected his play on the soccer field.<\/p>\nNew York Military Academy, where Donald Trump played soccer in his youth. Photograph: courtesy of Pablo Maurer<\/p>\n
McIntosh had known Trump and his family since he was a young child, having belonged to the same beach club. He was several years younger than Trump and when he finally arrived at NYMA, Trump had been tasked by his father with looking over the new student. From under the cover of a green military tent, Trump would regale McIntosh and others with his tales from military school, often over games of canasta.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe just delighted in telling me about all the hazing that went on,\u201d McIntosh says, \u201cand all the things that I could expect \u2013 to be beaten up and so forth. He just seemed to enjoy that a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few days shy of Trump\u2019s graduation in 1964, the two were walking around campus when Trump turned to McIntosh and asked him a question.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe asked me if I\u2019d remembered a certain baseball game he was in, and I did,\u201d McIntosh recalls. \u201cHe asked me to tell him about it \u2026 we were losing, the bases were loaded and he was up at bat. And he hit this blooper that went up over the third baseman\u2019s head and fell in behind him. That caused all of the fielders and the shortstop to rush over to get the ball \u2013 meanwhile some of the runners came in and we won the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump looked at McIntosh and paused.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d McIntosh remembers Trump telling him. \u201cI want you to remember this: I hit the ball out of the stadium, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe made me repeat it back to him,\u201d McIntosh says, laughing.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s insistence on exaggerating the truth, or fabricating stories entirely, can make things easy to debunk. There\u2019s the box score from the game, sure, but there\u2019s also the fact that NYMA never played at a stadium. The school didn\u2019t even have an outfield wall to hit a home run over. Their baseball field barely even had a backstop.<\/p>\n
The depth of Trump\u2019s interest in soccer is equally easy to unpack. After leaving NYMA, Trump returned to New York City. About a decade later, he took an interest in Pel\u00e9 and the New York Cosmos, eager to surround himself with the glitz and celebrity of the briefly popular team. In recent years, he was connected to unsuccessful bids to buy clubs in South America and the UK. Even more recently, his cozy relationship with Infantino led to him being awarded the Fifa peace prize, just months before he ordered strikes on Iran. This July, he will play a part in presenting the World Cup trophy to the eventual winners, and will almost certainly play at least some role in the tournament news cycle before that.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump was an average player on the field. More than a half-century later, he\u2019s become a much, much bigger and more relevant player off of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Drive north from New York City and into the Hudson valley. Take Exit 17 and follow Route 7…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-685638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}