BEE
These two aren’t just hypocrites; they’re ten-timers, full of themselves to the point of bursting, continuing to prop up the rotting corpse of apartheid and racism. They deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history, where their kind belongs—forgotten, condemned, and finally silent.
As a South African who lived through the blood-soaked decades of apartheid, I find myself reaching for the nearest bucket every time Gary Player opens his mouth. The man is a walking vomit-inducer—a 90-year-old relic of racial oppression, still swinging his verbal clubs at the very policies designed to undo the crimes he helped sustain.
His latest tirade against Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), delivered as if it were a birthday gift to himself on November 1, 2025, isn’t just ignorant; it’s a grotesque reminder of why people like him make me want to puke. And then there’s Donald Trump, the orange-tinted white supremacist who can’t stop quoting and praising this fossil, even dragging him into Oval Office lore like some twisted golfing bromance.
These two aren’t just hypocrites; they’re ten-timers, full of themselves to the point of bursting, continuing to prop up the rotting corpse of apartheid and racism. They deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history, where their kind belongs—forgotten, condemned, and finally silent.
Let me start with Player, because without his apartheid-fueled foundation, Trump’s endorsements ring even hollower. Gary Player must shut up. His recent attacks on Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) are the hypocritical bleatings of a man who feasted at apartheid’s table while millions starved. Just days ago, amid the pomp of his 90th birthday celebrations at Sun City—where he once again positioned himself as South Africa’s “greatest sportsman”—Player demanded the repeal of the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act.
He called it a “barrier to investment,” whining about how it’s turning the country into “a land of squatter camps” plagued by crime and unemployment. Spare me the crocodile tears from a man whose wealth was built on the backs of the very informal settlements apartheid created. BEE isn’t perfect—far from it—but it’s a modest, hard-fought mechanism for redress, aimed at clawing back some equity after centuries of legalized theft. Player’s fortune? That’s the direct dividend of that theft, laundered through golf greens and government favors.
Player was apartheid’s golden boy. At the regime’s murderous peak, he counted its architects—Vorster, Botha, Verwoerd’s henchmen—among his closest friends. He accepted their patronage, their prizes, their propaganda tours. While police gunned down children in Soweto in 1976, Player jetted abroad, deliberately smashing the international sports boycott that isolated the racist state.
He posed for photos with apartheid’s generals, lent his fame to whitewash their crimes, and never once condemned the pass laws, forced removals, or Bantustan prisons that crushed Black lives. He did not oppose; he endorsed. He did not protest; he profited. In the process, he became fabulously wealthy—cocooned, protected, and promoted by the odious system of apartheid. He was a direct benefactor of crimes against humanity, of the apartheid crime against humanity itself.
He was the most advantaged white in a system built to advantage whites. Land, loans, contracts, travel—every privilege flowed to him because of his skin. In the 1970s and ‘80s, as the regime’s killing machine revved up—torturing activists, bombing townships, and enforcing “separate development” that starved Black education and economies—Player was globetrotting, winning majors and raking in endorsements.
He broke boycotts by playing in sundown towns of the American South and cozying up to Rhodesia’s white rulers. His conduct at the height of his golf career was nothing short of shameless and despicable. History has no blank pages, and Player’s are stained with the ink of complicity. He wasn’t just silent; he was active in undermining the global pressure that might have hastened apartheid’s end. Black South Africans paid with their lives and livelihoods so he could build an empire—the Gary Player Group, with its $150-200 million annual turnover, sprawling from Florida mansions to Asian ventures.
Knowing this history, it is not surprising that he now comes out, as one of the most privileged beneficiaries of apartheid, to attack Black Economic Empowerment. But it remains deeply disgusting. Therefore, I repeat: Gary Player must just shut up. Because he exposes himself for the racist hypocrite that he is. At 90, he’s not wiser; he’s bolder in his bitterness. His birthday rant wasn’t a call for economic reform; it was a dog whistle to white anxieties, echoing the same “reverse racism” nonsense that keeps inequality festering.
BEE has its flaws—corruption creeps in, elites game it—but scrapping it wholesale? That’s code for “keep the spoils white.” Player’s farms and properties, bought with repatriated millions under apartheid’s protections, now make him clutch his pearls at land expropriation without compensation. Hypocrisy doesn’t get thicker than that.
And into this cesspool steps Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed golf god and architect of modern white grievance politics. Trump doesn’t just tolerate Player; he elevates him, quotes him, praises him like a long-lost brother in bigotry. Their bond isn’t about birdies or bogeys—it’s a shared disdain for equity that threatens white dominance.
Trump, who turned the White House into his personal Mar-a-Lago annex, has invoked Player repeatedly, turning Oval Office moments into cringeworthy tributes to this apartheid apologist. Remember that terrible, vomit-inducing meeting in May 2025, when Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office? It was a farce—the weak and supplicant Ramaphosa squirming as Trump ranted about white farmers under siege, peddling debunked myths of “genocide” in South Africa.
Looming over it all was Gary Player’s shadow. Reports emerged that Player, Trump’s golfing buddy of over 30 years, had teed up the topic during a private round at Mar-a-Lago years earlier. “That’s going to come from him,” Player’s adviser Dave King told BizNews, referring to Trump’s fixation on South African land reform. Player didn’t just whisper; he primed the pump, feeding Trump’s paranoia about “woke agendas” and “reverse discrimination.”
It gets worse—or more stomach-churning, depending on how queasy you already are. Trump has name-dropped Player in Oval Office addresses and cabinet meetings, holding him up as a model of “hard work” that magically erases systemic barriers. In a rambling West Point commencement speech in May 2025, Trump gushed: “To be really successful, you’re always going to have to work hard. An example is a great athlete, Gary Player, great golfer. He wasn’t as big as the other men that were playing against him.
Great, big, strong guys.” Never mind that Player’s “hard work” was turbocharged by apartheid’s racial hand-up—Trump spins it as bootstrap mythology, the same lie he peddles to dismiss affirmative action or DEI as “racist against whites.” At a University of Alabama rally-style commencement the same month, Trump doubled down: “Work hard. Never, ever stop,” citing Player’s supposed small stature overcome by grit. It’s cringeworthy propaganda, laundering Player’s privilege as universal virtue, while Trump guts programs that level playing fields.
Even in lighter moments—if you can call Trump’s bluster light—that Oval Office glow sticks to their bromance. In July 2025, ahead of Player’s birthday, Trump posted on Truth Social: “The great Gary Player, winner of over 150 golf tournaments, and 9 Majors… HE IS A VERY SPECIAL MAN!!!” Player lapped it up, tweeting back about their “friendship.” Trump recounted Player’s golf tips in a YouTube romp with Bryson DeChambeau, marveling at advice on teeing up par-3s: “I never heard this before? Gary Player told me this.”
And on Air Force One en route to Japan in October 2025, Trump bragged about a recent round where 90-year-old Player shot a 70—beating his age by 20 strokes—positioning it as proof of unyielding excellence. These aren’t casual shoutouts; they’re deliberate endorsements, with Player as Trump’s Exhibit A for why equity policies are “unfair.” During that Ramaphosa ambush, Trump even paraded golf trophies alongside policy barbs, with Player’s influence unspoken but palpable. It’s the Oval Office as a 19th hole for racists—cringeworthy, yes, but deadly in normalizing white supremacist talking points.
People like Player—and his loudest cheerleader, Trump—make me want to puke. They are ten-timers full of themselves, hypocrites who continue to support apartheid and racism in new guises. Player’s BEE bashing isn’t isolated; it’s the same playbook he used to dodge boycotts, now repackaged as “elder” wisdom. Trump, ever the amplifier, quotes him to stoke his MAGA base, where “merit” means preserving white gains. Their alliance isn’t coincidental; it’s conspiratorial.
Player’s son Marc once begged his dad to decline a dubious award from Trump kin, calling it “tone deaf. In denial. Wrong!!” But Gary persists, and Trump rewards him with the spotlight. Together, they peddle a fantasy where apartheid’s victims “pull themselves up” like Player supposedly did, ignoring the billions in stolen wealth.
This isn’t ancient history; it’s active poison. South Africa’s unemployment hovers at 33%, crime festers because inequality endures, and BEE—flawed as it is—has created Black millionaires and broadened corporate boards. Scrapping it, as Player demands, would slam the door on progress, echoing Trump’s war on “woke” initiatives that dare address racial gaps. These men, bloated with unearned privilege, lecture from Florida estates and Air Force One about “fairness.” It’s revolting.
They deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Player’s majors won’t erase his moral mulligans; Trump’s tweets can’t tweet away the blood on their shared fairway. Let white supremacists keep quoting their hero. The rest of us see the racist hypocrite unmasked. Gary Player, do us all a favor—shut up. And Trump? Take your golf buddy with you into obscurity. South Africa, and the world, have outgrown your game.
Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an EFF Member of Parliament (MP)
