What do Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il and Trump have in common?

What do Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-il and Donald Trump have in common? All four men were spectacular cheats.

The Jumburton announces Dallas’s record attendance.

What do Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong Il and Donald Trump have in common?

Bad hair? Worse tempers? Yes to both, but all four men were also spectacular cheats.

Stories have begun emerging about Trump’s notorious golfing behaviour but we’ll get back to that in a minute.

First there was Stalin, whose villa in Sochi was fitted with a billiard table designed to meet his specific needs. When you’re hovering around the 167cm mark, a regular billiard table is going to be too tall. Best get the table lowered. Then there was his billiard cue, which was weighted to make his shots more powerful.

None of this really mattered, of course. Anyone who played against Stalin knew the secret to a long life was to ensure the Soviet leader won. Every time.

Then there was Chairman Mao who, in an attempt to prove his robust health as he clicked into his 70s, claimed to have swum a 15km stretch of the Yangtze river in 65 minutes. That’s either a world record or there was one helluva current.

Kim infamously shot five holes in one in the first round of golf he ever played (it has since been claimed that the ‘1s’ on his scorecard were supposed to represent bogeys, not aces, but whose going to tell Dear Leader that?).

Back to Trump. Actor Samuel L. Jackson, rocker Alice Cooper and former boxer Oscar De La Hoya are among those to question the new US President’s ethics on the links.

Trump is not only the leader of the free world but the owner of 18 club championship titles — including one from 1999 at a course he owned that was yet to even open.

“Donald, what he does is he tees off first so we go off to our balls and what do we see but Donald Trump right in the middle of the fairway,” De La Hoya has said. “He said, ‘Hey look, I found my first ball’.”

On the next hole, a par three, Trump finds the bushes but takes off ahead of his group again. Lo and behold, he is three feet from the hole.

“And by the way, I’m picking it up,” De La Hoya quoted Trump as saying. “It’s a gimme.”

Sportswriter Rick Reilly said he saw Trump even claim a chip shot as a gimme. “When it comes to cheating, he’s an 11 on a scale of one to 10,” Reilly said.

In the post-truth world, perhaps what was traditionally known as cheating is merely “alternative scoring’’.

Lie of the land

Alternative facts are coming thick and fast. Following on from Trump press sec S ean Spicer’s claims of “yuuuuge” crowds at the presidential inauguration, the Dallas Stars NHL franchise posted their home attendance on the jumbotron in this week’s game against the Washington Capitals as 1.5 million.

San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich was also feeling the spirit when discussing star player Kawhi Leonard’shealth.

“Kawhi is out with an injury that’s not really an injury but hopefully it will heal quickly. I apologise. I just gave an alternative fact. I shouldn’t have done that. But it wasn’t a lie, so don’t try to pin that one on me.”

Rubbery figures

Big on alternative facts are the New England Patriots. The Pats may have cracked yet another Super Bowl appearance — to be played in Houston on February 6 AEDT — but you get the feeling it will be opponents the Atlanta Falcons who will get most of the love. Why? New England are the team everyone loves to hate following on from the painfully long-running ‘Deflategate’ scandal in which megastar quarterback Tom Brady wassuspended for the first four games of the season after being caught up in a conspiracy to — wait for it — use footballs that were approximately one and a half pounds per square inch flatter than they were supposed to be. Gasp! Boo, hiss.

Brady is a winner, regardless of his methods, so it makes a lot of sense that Trump is desperate to attach himself to the 38-year-old. Trump loves telling anyone who will listen how close the two are but Brady doesn’t seem as keen to share details of their mutual mancrush.

“Why does that make such a big deal?’’ Brady said last week. “I don’t understand that ... I don’t wanna get into it but just — if you know someone, it doesn’t mean that you agree with everything that they say or do.”

This was an NFL season that started with African-American players refusing to stand for the national anthem and could end with Trump’s buddy lifting the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

It gets weirder still. The man who banned Brady, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is the one who will hand the over the silverware. Should Goodell need some advice on handling such tricky transactions he could call FFA chief executive David Gallop, who was put in the same position in 2011 when he bestowed an NRL winner’s medal on Manly’s Brett Stewart — a man he had suspended for four matches two years prior after Stewart was hit with sexual assault charges. Stewart was cleared of any wrongdoing but his anger towards Gallop will probably never fade.

Chocs in a box

When your name is Coco, you’re going to get your share of jibes. First-time Australian Open semi-finalist Coco Vandeweghe has been copping it all her life.

And so it continued at Melbourne Park this week. When she won through to the semi-finals, an item attached to a piece of string came over the wall at Rod Laver Arena for her to sign — a Coco Pops cereal box. Coco saw the funny side and had a laugh before signing it.