Long before President Donald Trump was preparing to celebrate his 80th birthday with an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn of the White House, he was a 16-year-old supply sergeant from Queens claiming the bottom bunk in a small two-cadet room at the New York Military Academy. In a bombshell interview published June 10, 2026, his former roommate Art Davie — the future founder of the UFC — pulled back the curtain on the teenager who would one day occupy the Oval Office.
The timing is almost too perfect. On Sunday, June 14, President Trump will mark his milestone birthday inside an eight-sided chain-link cage that Davie himself devised decades ago. The two men, separated by everything from politics to a literal partition wall in 1962, are about to be linked again in front of a global audience.
Bunkmates in Company E
According to Davie, now 79, Trump arrived first to their shared room in September 1962 and grabbed the bottom bunk. Davie, then a 15-year-old private from Brooklyn beginning his first year, took the top. Trump was already in his third year at the private boarding school in Cornwall, New York, an hour’s drive north of New York City.
Their quarters in Company E doubled as a repository for the M1 rifles — minus their firing pins — that cadets used for drills and ceremonies. And even at 16, Davie said, Trump was already nursing the grievances that would become familiar to American voters more than half a century later.
“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.”
An Argument Over the GOAT
The acronym for “Greatest of All Time” hadn’t yet entered the popular lexicon, but the sentiment certainly had. Davie recalled one specific dispute over soccer — a sport Trump was not particularly good at. Two fellow cadets from South America held that distinction on campus. Trump was, however, one of the school’s best baseball players.
“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.'”
That wasn’t good enough. Trump pivoted, Davie said, to his bigger complaint: he believed he should have been promoted to captain rather than serving as supply sergeant. Trump was also enormously impressed by President John F. Kennedy, particularly with how the media amplified Kennedy’s star quality without Kennedy having to boast about it himself.
The Inspection That Split Them Up
The roommates had what Davie described as a good relationship until one inspection day. U.S. Army officers — a lieutenant colonel and a lieutenant — were checking the cadets’ quarters. A pass meant every cadet could wear a small silver star on the right sleeve, and Trump took the visit with stiff formality. Davie, meanwhile, chatted casually with the lieutenant colonel, even joking that the M1 rifles were “only pop guns” without their firing pins.
Trump was furious, accusing Davie of talking to the officers like they were on the streets of Brooklyn. It was the only serious argument the two ever had. When school resumed after the Christmas holiday, the pair had been reassigned to different rooms. Davie was sent to Section 9 behind the main barracks, where he said cadets were given single-bedroom rooms. He has long wondered whether Trump had a hand in the move.
‘Cadet Bonespurs’ and Diverging Paths
Davie finished out the year and completed high school in Manhattan. He later enlisted in the Marine Corps and served eleven months and nine days in Vietnam, returning home an actual sergeant before attending St. John’s University.
Trump, by contrast, stayed at the academy and made captain by the time he graduated in 1964. He went on to secure five draft deferments. The last was a permanent medical deferment from a Queens podiatrist who rented an office in a building owned by Trump’s father, Fred Trump. The doctor diagnosed bone spurs. In 2018, the podiatrist’s daughters said their late father had provided the diagnosis as a “favor” to the elder Trump. Among academy alumni, the story earned the future president a lasting nickname: "Cadet Bonespurs."
From Bunk Beds to the South Lawn
Davie went on to create and co-produce the UFC in 1993, devising the now-iconic octagonal chain-link cage. That same cage design will sit on the South Lawn for “UFC Freedom 250” on June 14, ringed by a red, white and blue stage under a towering star-and-stripe arch with two large screens. Trump has said the finished project will feature “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 coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Public Integrity Project has filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Virginia residents hoping to halt the fight card, though preparations have continued. For Davie, watching his old bunkmate stage the spectacle on the most famous lawn in America is the latest twist in a friendship — and rivalry — that began with a top bunk, a bottom bunk and an argument about who was the GOAT.