THE ART OF THE ATHLETIC DEAL
Donald Trump’s Remarkable Journey From High-School Benchwarmer to Imaginary Hockey Superstar
By Rob McConnell – Monday, September 8, 2026
There are athletes, there are sports fans, and then there is Donald J. Trump—a man who can stand beside a championship team for five minutes and somehow leave convinced that he scored the winning goal.
Recently, Trump was depicted in a Team USA hockey uniform standing over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who was dressed in Team Canada colours and had apparently been tripped. It was meant to show Trump as the powerful American enforcer humiliating Canada.
There is only one tiny problem with this heroic portrait: no credible evidence shows that Donald Trump has ever played organized hockey at any age, for any school, club, league or team. There is not even reliable public evidence that he can skate.
Trump in a Team USA hockey sweater is therefore rather like putting a goldfish in a Mountie uniform. It may be colourful, but it should not be mistaken for a résumé.
THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING HOCKEY CAREER
Trump attended the New York Military Academy from approximately 1959 until his graduation in 1964. This is important because the academy actually had a varsity hockey program during those years.
The academy’s surviving 1964 yearbook carefully lists students’ sports, letters and athletic honours. Cadets who played hockey are identified as hockey players. Some received varsity hockey letters, and one received the captain’s award.
Trump is not among them.
No hockey roster carries his name. No team photograph shows him holding a stick. No personal record awards him a hockey letter. No contemporary account describes him skating, shooting, checking, passing, goaltending or spending two minutes in the penalty box for excessive self-promotion.
This is particularly significant because Trump was never known for hiding an accomplishment. If he had once skated past a frozen puddle while carrying a broom, we would probably have heard that the Montreal Canadiens offered him a contract.
The fairest conclusion is that Trump did not play organized hockey at NYMA and that no credible evidence places him on a hockey team anywhere else. It is impossible to prove that he never rented skates or shuffled around a public rink, but recreational survival against a handrail is not the same thing as playing for Team USA.
YES, HE REALLY DID PLAY SPORTS
To be fair—and satire works best when the facts remain intact—Donald Trump did participate in organized sports as a young man.
The evidence supports his participation in baseball, soccer and American football at the New York Military Academy. School material and later accounts also mention limited intramural basketball, bowling and softball.
He was tall, physically strong and extremely competitive. Former classmates remembered him as an energetic athlete who wanted to win. Those are legitimate points in his favour.
Unfortunately, Trump’s recollections eventually developed the same problem as one of his buildings: the advertised height became considerably greater than the measurable height.
BASEBALL: THE BAMBINO OF HIS OWN IMAGINATION
Baseball was unquestionably Trump’s principal school sport. He played varsity baseball, primarily at first base, and some accounts say he also pitched. He appears in the 1964 varsity team photograph. A former coach praised his ability and coachability.
Had Trump stopped there, history could have recorded him accurately as a genuine high-school baseball player.
But stopping at “genuine high-school player” is not the Trump method. Trump later claimed that he had been one of the best baseball players in New York State. Stories circulated that professional organizations—including the Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Red Sox—had taken an interest in him. Trump suggested he might have pursued professional baseball if players had earned more money.
Then researchers did something terribly unfair: they looked at the records.
Surviving newspaper box scores paint a much less Ruthian portrait. One reconstruction calculated a batting average of approximately .138. Research reported in the book Lucky Loser found five senior-season box scores in which Trump recorded one hit in eighteen at-bats—an average of .055 in those documented games.
A .055 average means that the baseball was not so much meeting the bat as applying for a restraining order.
The available evidence does not necessarily capture every game he played, so it should not be treated as a complete lifetime statistic. It does, however, make the idea of Trump being a coveted professional prospect exceedingly difficult to accept. Baseball analysts consulted about the claim concluded that such performance would not have attracted a major-league organization.
Trump’s version of events nevertheless remains magnificent. In his personal World Series, every hit was a home run, every scout carried a contract, and the only thing standing between him and Cooperstown was insufficient money.
Apparently, baseball lost its greatest star because young Donald decided there was more financial security in Manhattan real estate. Somewhere, Babe Ruth is presumably breathing a sigh of relief.
AMERICAN FOOTBALL: A SHORT SEASON, A LONG LEGEND
Trump also played American football at military school, apparently for one season. Accounts say an injury helped end that portion of his school athletic career.
This qualifies him as a former high-school football player. It does not qualify him as an NFL veteran, a legendary quarterback or the reincarnation of Vince Lombardi.
In adulthood, Trump became much more consequential in football as the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League. He signed prominent players, pushed the spring league toward direct competition with the NFL and participated in the USFL’s antitrust lawsuit.
The league technically won the lawsuit—but received damages of three dollars, later increased by interest to $3.76.
It may be the only championship in sports history whose prize could be carried home in the coin-return slot of a vending machine.
The USFL soon collapsed. Trump blamed others. Others blamed Trump. In that respect, it may have been the purest sporting experience of his life: tremendous publicity, enormous claims, somebody else holding the bill and no danger of Trump personally being tackled.
SOCCER: THE UNDEFEATED THREE-AND-EIGHT SEASON
Trump played on the NYMA varsity soccer team during his senior year, apparently as a defender. His appearance in the 1964 team photograph confirms that this was not merely another story produced decades later.
One former teammate subsequently claimed that their team went undefeated with an 11–0 record.
Contemporary records tell a different story: the team appears to have finished approximately 3–8.
Going from 3–8 to 11–0 is an extraordinary statistical achievement, although it occurred many years after the final whistle and required no additional training. It is the kind of comeback only memory can provide.
Trump deserves credit for playing soccer. But this was one season of high-school competition—not an international career and certainly not evidence of skating ability. Grass is not ice, soccer boots are not skates, and kicking a ball does not prepare a man to represent the United States in hockey, unless the entire American team has missed its flight.
BASKETBALL, BOWLING AND OTHER SUPPORTING ROLES
Various school accounts associate Trump with intramural basketball, bowling and softball. These activities reinforce the picture of a physically active teenager who enjoyed competition.
They do not reveal a hidden professional career.
There is no evidence that the New York Knicks were waiting outside his dormitory. No professional bowling tour appears to have mourned his decision to enter real estate. No softball historian has demanded that number 45 be retired.
Still, participation deserves acknowledgement. Most adults would be pleased to say they played several school sports. Trump, however, appears constitutionally incapable of being merely pleased. If he once returned a bowling ball to the rack, the story eventually becomes the night he bowled a perfect 300 while negotiating peace in the Middle East.
GOLF: THE SPORT THAT FINALLY FIT
Golf became Trump’s most visible adult sport. He has played extensively, owns golf courses and participates in club competitions. Unlike hockey, there is abundant photographic evidence of him holding golf clubs and standing on golf courses.
Trump regularly describes himself as an excellent golfer and has claimed numerous club championships. Critics have questioned how some of those championships were conducted, whether he competed under the same conditions as other players and whether his scorekeeping benefited from unusually patriotic arithmetic.
Stories about Trump’s golf habits—including moving balls, improving lies and ignoring inconvenient strokes—have circulated for years through writers, playing partners and former associates. Trump has rejected accusations of cheating.
What can safely be said is that he loves golf, owns the venues and often wins at those venues. Owning the course may not guarantee victory, but it certainly reduces the chances that the trophy committee will lose your telephone number.
Golf is also ideally suited to the Trump philosophy. The player announces his own score, expensive real estate is involved, everyone must remain quiet while he speaks, and after four hours he can blame the wind.
THE ATHLETE BY ASSOCIATION
Much of Trump’s adult sporting identity has come not from competing but from standing near people who do.
He has owned a football team, promoted boxing matches, appeared at professional-wrestling events, hosted championship teams, awarded medals, attended major games and operated golf courses and skating rinks.
His organization’s association with the renovation and operation of Central Park’s Wollman Rink created a commercial connection to skating. It did not turn him into a skater. Henry Ford built automobiles, but nobody awarded him the Indianapolis 500.
Trump has been presented with hockey jerseys and ceremonial hockey sticks. He has hosted Stanley Cup champions and discussed international hockey exhibitions. These are honours and publicity opportunities—not games played.
A personalized jersey proves only that somebody knew how to spell the recipient’s name.
TEAM USA’S IMAGINARY ENFORCER
This brings us back to the image of Trump looming over Prime Minister Carney in hockey uniforms.
Political cartoons are not required to be literal. Their purpose is to exaggerate, symbolize and provoke. The cartoon may be trying to portray Trump as the aggressor and Canada as the opponent he believes he has knocked down in a trade confrontation.
But as a representation of athletic history, it is pure fantasy.
Trump was never a documented hockey player. He was never selected for Team USA. He has no known skating-sport record. There is no evidence he ever endured an early-morning hockey practice, blocked a shot, took a bodycheck, repaired a broken skate lace or spent a Canadian winter driving a child to a freezing arena before sunrise.
Putting Trump in an American hockey sweater does not make him a hockey player any more than wearing a captain’s hat makes someone commander of an aircraft carrier.
Prime Minister Carney may also lack an illustrious hockey résumé, but the issue is not which politician would win an actual game. The issue is the deliberate use of hockey—the sport most deeply woven into Canada’s national identity—to portray the American president as physically dominating Canada.
That imagery becomes especially insulting when the supposed American enforcer has no documented history in the sport he is using as a political costume.
THE FINAL SCORE
Donald Trump was a legitimate multisport high-school participant. He played baseball, football and soccer, with smaller involvement in other school athletics. That is the factual record, and it should not be erased merely because his later stories became inflated.
But he was not the baseball phenomenon he has sometimes portrayed. He was not a professional football player. He was not an international soccer star. Most importantly for the current cartoon, he was never a documented hockey player or skating athlete.
His greatest sporting achievement may be transforming ordinary participation into a personal mythology large enough to require its own stadium.
Donald Trump did not make Team USA.
He made Team Trump—a franchise with one player, one coach, one referee, one scorekeeper and an owner who declares victory before the puck is dropped.
And if the official record shows that he lost?
Do not worry. A corrected score will soon be posted on Truth Social.
My name is Rob McConnell and I AM CANADIAN.
Email me at iamcanadian@rel-mar.com