Art Davie, who went on to create the Ultimate Fighting Championship, shared his memories of rooming with President Donald Trump as teenagers at the New York Military Academy in a bombshell interview published June 10, 2026.
The revelations come just days before Trump celebrates his 80th birthday on June 14 with a UFC event on the South Lawn of the White House — inside the very octagonal cage Davie himself designed decades ago.
Davie, now 79, described his former bunkmate as exhibiting the same personality traits in adolescence that would later define his political career.
“He was an egomaniac when he was 16,” Davie told the publication. “He was a great flag waver for himself. He wanted everyone to recognize he was the GOAT in everything he did out there.”
‘Cadet Bonespurs’ and Diverging Paths
While Davie enlisted in the Marine Corps and served 11 months and nine days in Vietnam, Trump secured five draft deferments. A Queens podiatrist who rented an office in a building owned by Trump’s father, Fred Trump, provided the final permanent medical deferment for bone spurs. The doctor’s daughters revealed in 2018 that their late father had issued the diagnosis as a favor to the elder Trump. The story gave Trump a lasting nickname among academy alumni: Cadet Bonespurs.
From Brooklyn and Queens to Company E
Trump claimed the bottom bunk in their small two-cadet room when he arrived first in September 1962, according to Davie. Davie, then a 15-year-old private from Brooklyn starting his first year at the private boarding school in Cornwall, New York, took the top bunk. Trump was already in his third year at the academy, located an hour’s drive north of New York City, and served as a 16-year-old supply sergeant from Queens.
The shared quarters in Company E also stored M1 rifles — minus their firing pins — used by cadets for drills and ceremonies.
An Argument Over the GOAT
Even before the acronym for “Greatest of All Time” entered popular culture, Trump was asserting his supremacy. Trump ranked among the school’s best baseball players but was not particularly skilled at soccer, where two fellow cadets from South America dominated.
“I remember Trump and I getting in an argument about the fact that he’s the GOAT when it came to soccer,” Davie said. “I said, ‘No, in baseball, you could say you’re the GOAT.'”
Trump wasn’t satisfied with that assessment. He shifted to nursing a different grievance: he believed he deserved promotion to captain rather than his assignment as supply sergeant. The young Trump also admired President John F. Kennedy, particularly Kennedy’s ability to let the media amplify his star quality without having to boast about it himself.
The Inspection That Split Them Up
The roommates maintained what Davie characterized as a good relationship until an inspection by U.S. Army officers — a lieutenant colonel and a lieutenant. Trump approached the visit with stiff formality, while Davie chatted casually with the lieutenant colonel and joked that the M1 rifles were only pop guns without their firing pins. A pass would have allowed every cadet to wear a small silver star on the right sleeve.
Trump accused Davie of talking to the officers like they were on the streets of Brooklyn, and it became the only serious argument the two ever had. After the Christmas holiday, the pair found themselves reassigned to different rooms. Davie was moved to Section 9 behind the main barracks, where he said cadets received single-bedroom rooms. He has long wondered whether Trump influenced the reassignment.
Davie completed the year and finished high school in Manhattan before his Marine Corps service. He returned home an actual sergeant and later attended St. John’s University. Trump remained at the academy and achieved the rank of captain by his 1964 graduation.
From Bunk Beds to the South Lawn
Davie created and co-produced the UFC in 1993, devising the now-iconic octagonal chain-link cage. That same cage design will appear on the South Lawn for UFC Freedom 250 on June 14, surrounded by a red, white and blue stage beneath a towering star-and-stripe arch with two large screens. Trump has announced the finished project will include a 5,000-seat arena right outside the front door of the White House, with up to 85,000 free tickets distributed between the South Lawn and the nearby Ellipse, where additional large screens will broadcast the fights.
The event marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Public Integrity Project has filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Virginia residents seeking to stop the fight card, though preparations have proceeded. For Davie, observing his old bunkmate host the spectacle on the most famous lawn in America represents the latest chapter in a friendship — and rivalry — that started with a top bunk, a bottom bunk and a dispute about who was the GOAT.
