Free Trump Tower by Jeffrey Robinson Page B

and ended with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
    The place went wild.
    Before he sat down, he asked the audience, “Anyone know what the last thing is that a woman who sleeps with Willie Nelson wants to hear the next morning?” He said right away, “I’m not Willie Nelson.”
    On Sunday, Carson and Warring paired as a team and won the tournament. At the awards’ presentation, Warring whispered to Carson he could only take the trophy home if he agreed to defend it next year.
    Alicia and Carson have been back every year since. And Carson has won it two more times.
    By now the charity tops $10 million a year.
    But Warring has since changed the name of it. He calls it, “Anita’s Play for a Cure.”
    She passed away ten days after Carson first played there.
    As soon as they heard the news, Alicia and Carson rushed back to Omaha—“I don’t care if we have to change planes fifty times,” Carson said—to stand with Warring, holding his hand at Anita’s funeral.
    Three months later, Carson received a call from a woman at Goldman Sachs, asking if he could come to New York to meet with Mr. Green.
    â€œWho’s Mr. Green and why does he want to meet me?”
    The woman was very vague and simply said she was relaying a message.
    â€œFrom who?”
    â€œFrom Mr. Green.”
    â€œBut what does he want?”
    â€œHe wants to meet you.”
    â€œTo do what? Play tennis? Sorry,” he said, “I’m not interested.”
    The next thing Carson knew, Green himself was on the phone. “Please come to see me. I will explain everything when you get here.”
    When he got there, Carson was ushered into Gerald Green’s huge corner office, where the sign on the door read, Vice Chairman. “We want you to come to work for us,” Green said.
    â€œWhy?” Carson admitted, “I’m a has-been tennis player who doesn’t know anything about finance, stocks, shares or the markets.”
    Green said, “You can learn.”
    Carson asked, “To do what? Be your corporate doubles partner?”
    â€œThat’s not what this is all about.”
    â€œWhat is it all about?”
    â€œIt’s about making money.” Green said, “That’s what we do. And one of our major private investors wants you on his investment team. He wants you to help us help him make money.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œKenneth Warring.”
    That afternoon Carson phoned Warring to say thanks, “But what do I know from private investing?”
    â€œYou’re going to learn,” Warring said. “Because I have plans.”
    â€œFor me?”
    â€œFor us.”
    â€œI appreciate it. But that world . . .”
    â€œYou have a degree in business.”
    â€œI have a piece of parchment that says I showed up and handed in enough term papers. Anyway . . . I can’t take a job in New York. Alicia’s show is doing really good. I’m not going to leave without her, and I can’t ask her to give that up for me.”
    â€œHang tight,” Warring said. “I’m working on it. The difficult I can do right away. The impossible takes a day or two.”
    In fact, it was seven days later when Alicia received an offer she couldn’t refuse from NBC—to anchor the flagship six o’clock news at their local New York affiliate, WNBC Channel 4.
    Carson phoned Warring again. “How did you manage that?”
    All he’d say was, “Sorry it took so long.”
    So the two of them moved to New York. Alicia established herself as a media personality, while Carson worked hard to learn the world of Wall Street.
    Although he wasn’t sure he’d figured it out enough by 2008, when the world’s financial markets went into meltdown, other people believed that Carson knew what he was doing because he was asked to join Goldman’s “Internal Team,” the secret collective of traders,