You may have seen the headline, the one I ran on this very site: “The Secret Service Caddy: Trump’s Scottish Handicap.” I wrote it, and I own it. I put a story out there based on bad footage, a cheap narrative, and the kind of easy answers that make for good copy but lousy truth. I was wrong. The facts, as they always do, came bubbling up from the muck. And this is the real story of what happened on that golf course in Scotland.
The Frame-by-Frame
So I went to work, not with shoe leather, but with a magnifying glass and a phone. I didn’t trust the footage the big papers were running. They were edited for outrage, not for facts. I got my hands on the raw video from a local news crew. Frame by frame, I watched the whole thing. The President lining up a putt, his back to the Secret Service agent. The agent bent down, his hand in his pocket. A small, round object appeared and dropped to the turf.
It looked like a ball, all right. White and round. But something was off. The way it bounced, the way the light hit it. It wasn’t a pristine white. It had a strange, mottled look, like a bad egg. I started making calls.
The Scotch Egg Theory
I tracked down a greens-keeper who was there that day. He’d been dismissed as a crackpot by the other reporters, but he was a man who knew his turf. “They were eating,” he told me, his Scottish accent thick with scorn. “They had a wee tray of Scotch Eggs on the cart, you see. A real delicacy.”
I hung up and went back to the video. I blew up the frame where the object hit the ground. The strange coloring, the texture… it wasn’t the dimple of a golf ball. It was the breading of a hard-boiled egg. And when the President’s hand came into the frame, there was a smudge of sausage meat on his thumb.
The Hard Truth
The truth was a lot less scandalous than the headline. The Secret Service agent hadn’t dropped a new ball. He was just reaching for a snack, a humble Scotch Egg that popped out of a side pocket. It wasn’t cheating on the fairway; it was just a man with a case of the munchies.
I wrote the story, but the editor won’t touch it. It’s too mundane, he said, too funny. A good story, he said, needs a villain, not a hard-boiled egg.
Oh well. Some stories, you don’t write for the papers. You write them for the books.
Yours Truly, Jack Hammer.
