Andrew Giuliani . . .

Unruly brat or good kid who just wanted to play golf at Duke?

By Dave Kindred

Illustration By Glue Kit

December 2008

Early in 2008, Rudy Giuliani's son was kicked off the Duke University golf team. The coach portrayed the kid as a hot-headed bully. Andrew Giuliani fired back with a lawsuit. Here a skeptic might have thought, Oh, great, another sniveling, silver-spooned brat.

That might well be true. It might also be too easy. There is the question asked of me by a friend/Duke graduate. It goes, " 'Sniveling, silver-spooned?' And how exactly does that make him different from every other Duke student?" One thinks of those Dukies painted blue at Coach K worship services.

Hearing Andrew Giuliani's name, even the angels of tolerance among us would click on the YouTube video, "Guiliani's [sic] Funny Son." The year is 1994, and we see Rudy making his New York City mayoral inauguration speech. Andrew, 7 years old, has jumped from his chair and stands at the lectern just off Rudy's right hand, the boy chubby-cheeked with thick blond hair, a match for Daddy in a dark suit and tie.

As Rudy Giuliani's voice rises: " . . . to give our children a stronger and a healthier city"—the memorable image is not of the former New York prosecutor who would run for president on the America's 9/11 Mayor ticket.

Instead, we remember little Andrew doing his Rudy impression. Terence Mulvey, then a New York police officer in the mayor's protective unit, thinks of the moment as "so hysterical that I see it now and still think it's funny." The boy is a ham and mischief-maker, and at his daddy's shining hour Andrew Giuliani has the time of a rambunctious kid's life.

Though on the video we hear only the mayor, the boy is also speaking. Andrew dominates the video with Rudy in the background, unaware of his son's dead-on act. They gesticulate in tandem, their heads bob together, and we see the imp's lips form the words that we hear from the mayor. "It should be so," father and son say, "and it will be so."

Let us note that at Rudy's second inauguration, in 1998, the young Giuliani remained seated and mute. For years, in fact, he went unseen and unheard. But there was a messy divorce, with Rudy leaving Andrew's mother. And after Rudy's third marriage brought his son more of life's baggage, Andrew surfaced in early 2007 to say he has a strained relationship with his father.

Now comes the ruckus at Duke, where Giuliani, a senior sociology major, is the university's latest athletic cause celebre.

On Feb. 11, 2008, two weeks after his father quit the presidential race, Andrew Giuliani was booted from the school's golf team. He looks like a Nicklaus—fair-skinned with sun-brightened blond hair—and at 5-feet-10, 210, to quote a witness, he's "built like a brick house." Never more than a second-stringer at an elite program, he made national news in July with the lawsuit against the university and golf coach O.D. Vincent.

Giuliani claims he was unfairly dismissed. The suit argues that his enrollment at Duke constituted a contract in which his payment of $200,000 in tuition and fees across four years brought him, among other things, lifetime access to the university's golf facilities. The suit asks for that access, compensatory damages, exemplary damages, legal fees and a ruling that student-athletes enjoy contractual rights.

Duke's argument is that no such contract has ever existed and that the university's golf opportunities are a privilege, not a right.

The school's independent newspaper favors the administration. In an editorial, The Chronicle called Giuliani's case "tenuous at best, vindictive at worst and, on its face, without merit in any court of law."

Both sides mostly agree on the precipitating events, though Giuliani's suit portrays them as trivial, and Duke's account suggests darker possibilities.

Giuliani's suit summarizes coach Vincent's allegations against Giuliani as (1) "throwing and breaking a club," (2) walking ahead of a playing partner, (3) "gunning" his car engine as he drove fast out of a course parking lot, (4) "during a football game that was part of the team's training session, Andrew played harder than some of the other boys wanted to play," and (5) being "disrespectful" to a trainer. Not to mention the Flying Apple Incident, about which we'll get to more in a minute.

Duke's answers claim that Giuliani (1) slammed a putter against his bag, breaking a driver that he then, against golf's rules, replaced in competition, (2) injured a teammate in that football game, (3) drove "at a high rate of speed at the entrance to a golf course frequented by members and their children," (4) was "verbally abusive and physically confrontational" with a Duke coaching staff member, and (5) violated "consistently the rules and integrity" of golf.