Hunter Mahan retired from the PGA Tour aged 39. This is why.
“I obviously enjoyed it but once I stepped aside and left it – waking up in the same bed every day, taking care of the kids – it’s a complete change of pace and I’m very happy with that. You can’t just show up on Wednesday and play professional golf. There’s too much competition and too many great players.
“If you’re not totally committed, it’s going to beat you up and wear you out. That’s where I left it. I had a few tournaments left in that season a few years ago and I was so done with the grind of playing golf. It took over my life in a negative way and I had to step away.
“I loved the game but the professional game is a different thing. It’s such a high level and requires so much out of you.”
Mahan, who reached as high as fourth on the Official World Golf Ranking, explained that the pressure of trying to compete also took its toll on his mental health.
“I got so anxious. When you really feel anxiety, it’s like ‘I cannot be in another hotel room, the walls are closing in on me right now and I’ve got no space’. I got tired of being at a certain point every day to do the same thing over and over again. I was like, ‘I need to get out of here.’
“That’s what I literally did. I was in Truckee and I couldn’t even make it to the golf course. I said, ‘We’re going home.’ I couldn’t hit another ball on another range. You never really know when you can turn it around.
“Golf is so compassionate in that way. You can struggle and go in the dark and you can come out of that tunnel. But I was done going through it. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.
“I’m 41 now and I’m a young person. I’ve got four kids who are ten and under. I’ve got so many things I want to do with them. I don’t want them to live my life, I want to be part of theirs.”
When Jay Monahan spoke with the media Tuesday at the Players Championship about the current state of PGA Tour Enterprises and the future of professional golf, something crystallized for me in a way it had not previously. That it took me this long to clearly see the chessboard may be evidence of my own naivete, but at least I got there eventually.
Every faction within the PGA Tour is essentially at war.
Some people are trying to survive, some people are trying to gain territory, and some people are losing territory and desperately trying to protect it. No one wants to be deposed, everyone wants to save face, and everyone wants to stay rich.
The PGA Tour Policy Board can’t agree on how to finalize a deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia because they can’t agree on how their own house should be run. The players are locked in a class war with each other. The board of directors and the Tour’s new investors think the players are mostly rubes and naifs in matters of business. The money people want everyone to wake up and start figuring out ways to earn a return on the billions they invested in a flawed product.
In the middle of that war is Monahan, a man who — despite making a litany of mistakes over the last several years, which he again copped to on Tuesday — still somehow managed to earn a promotion amidst all this.
If you’re a consumer of pop culture (as I am), it might sound like a season of Succession. But everything we’ve gathered, after talking to dozens of people, suggests the boardroom squabbling on Tour has far more in common with the plotlines on Veep. Much like with modern politics, the clash of egos and everyone’s thirst for power ultimately creates a stalemate, and in turn protects the status quo. Monahan hasn’t needed to be successful to keep his job, he’s just needed to keep players divided into various factions, insulating himself from being removed.
When Sky Sports reporter Jamie Weir asked Monahan directly if any of the player directors on the policy board had asked him to resign at any point during the last nine months — something that happened in December, multiple sources told No Laying Up — Monahan did his best to dodge the question without giving a straight answer, pivoting quickly into a string of corporate word salad.
“You know, there’s been a lot of good spirited debate amongst our board. I don’t think that would be a surprise to anybody, you know, given the events of last summer,” Monahan said. “But we are a unified front. Our Policy Board continues to perform and function at a very high level with great support of our player directors, and the formation of PGA Tour Enterprises, with a new board, a new board comprised of four members of SSG, seven players, or six player directors and Joe Ogilvie, who is a liaison director, myself and Joe Gorder, who is the independent director serving on that board. I’m excited to work with both boards. For me, honored to serve as commissioner and now be a member of the PGA Tour Policy Board, and also honored to be CEO of PGA Tour Enterprises and be a part of that board, and committed to working with each of those boards to make sure we’re moving this business forward and achieving what we can achieve to its full capacity.”
To be fair to Monahan, he was dealt a difficult hand two years ago when the Saudis showed up on the scene and started handing out money to economically-anxious golfers, but that doesn’t mean he’s handled any of this well. In poker terms, it was like he folded 15 hands in a row, then went all in with ace high, even though it was obvious he’d be called. I talked to a Tour player at Riviera this year who was still pissed that Monahan never even took a phone call from the Saudis when this whole thing started. And when the PGA Tour recruited the 9/11 families to be part of their PR campaign, then turned around had Monahan smiling next to Yasir Al-Rumayan on CNBC, it felt like one of the most hypocritical moves in the history of sports. At a time when the PGA Tour desperately needed a galvanizing leader, he has managed to make every public appearance feel like he’s on an earnings call with analysts and shareholders, trying to put a good spin on another tepid quarterly report.
“There are always things when you look back that you would do differently,” Monahan said Tuesday. “Obviously when you look back to last summer I could have handled that better, and I’ve taken full responsibility and accountability for that. That’s on me. But we’ve moved on, and we’ve made so much progress since that point in time and I have learned from it. I’ve been humbled by it. I think I’ve gotten stronger as a leader.”
Monahan does have a handful of sympathetic allies within the membership. It would be unfair to say he is universally disliked.
“You look at what Jay has done since he took over,” Rory McIlroy said. “The media rights deal, navigating us through COVID, the strategic alliance with the DP World Tour. I would say creating PGA Tour Enterprises, we were just able to accept a billion and a half dollars in the business. People can nit-pick and say he didn’t do this right or didn’t do that right, but if you actually step back and look at the bigger picture, I think the PGA Tour is in a far stronger position than when Jay took over.”
Another PGA Tour player texted me Tuesday when I asked for his thoughts on Monahan: “He’s actually great in person, but really struggles in front of cameras. You should see the patience he shows with guys like Grayson Murray. Almost Buddha like.”
But for the most part, reviews from players have been lukewarm at best.
“Trust is something that’s pretty tender, so words are words, and I would say in my book he’s got a long way to go,” Xander Schaffele told reporters Tuesday, when asked what level of confidence he had in Monahan. “He could be the guy, but in my book, he’s got a long way to go to gain the trust of the membership. I’m sure he’s got the support of the board, since they were with him making some of those decisions, but for me personally, he’s got quite a ways to go.”
When Monahan was asked by Adam Schupak of Golfweek how he felt about Jon Rahm saying he’d lost some faith in leadership, and that was part of what led to his departure to LIV, Monahan was both curt and dismissive, refusing to even say Rahm’s name.
“I’m focused on every single member of the PGA Tour,” Monahan said. “I’m focused on The PLAYERS Championship this week. I’m focused on the great season that we have ahead, and we have made tremendous progress with the SSG agreement that we have, putting ourselves in a position to invest back in our Tour, invest back in our fans, and I’m going to focus on the things that I control and we are as an organization and we are as a leadership team and we are as a board, so that’s when I’m focused on.”
When Schupak tried to follow up, asking for clarification, Monahan was noticeably annoyed.
“I just answered your question about what my focus is,” he said.
It was the most tense moment of the morning and left the most pressing question unanswered: What is stopping other players from joining LIV? It’s certainly not their confidence in the commissioner.
“As a leader of an organization, I will want a person like that to take some ownership and say, hey, we made a couple of mistakes, but this is how we’re going to rectify it, instead of kind of sweeping it under the rug, which I felt like has been done to a certain degree,” said Viktor Hovland. “So I don’t mind people making mistakes. We all make mistakes. But I think when you make a mistake you got to own up to it and say, hey, we’re trying to do better here, and this is how we’re going to do it.”
The players aren’t helpless bystanders here. They share blame for some of this mess, in part because they can’t form a unified front. Many of the top players want to cap fields around 100 (or less) and force those on the outside to scratch and claw their way into the upper class. And then there are additional factions within those two tiers, like the players who would be willing to let LIV stars like Rahm and Brooks Koepka play in Tour events without suspensions or financial penalties — the idea being that it’s what’s best for the overall product — and those who are furious over the idea.
Scottie Scheffler, typically a measured voice who rarely gets animated, gave a thoughtful but pointed answer Tuesday when asked how he felt about fans getting frustrated that the game can’t be unified.
“I think we’re trying to do our best to create the best product for the fans, but we can’t control whether or not guys want to leave,” said Scheffler. “If guys want to go take the money and leave, then that’s their decision. I’m not going to sit here and tell guys not to take hundreds of millions of dollars. If that’s what they think is best for their life, then go do it. I’m not going to sit here and force guys to stay on our Tour. But at the end of the day, this is where I want to be, and we’re continuing to grow what we’re doing, and what they’re doing is not really a concern to me.
“If the fans are upset, then look at the guys that left. We had a Tour, we were all together, and the people that left are no longer here. At the end of the day, that’s where the splintering comes from.”
It’s hard to talk about Monahan’s job performance without acknowledging the tangled web of relationships that exist at the corporate level of the PGA Tour.
SSG, the new investor in PGA Tour Enterprises, is fronted by The Fenway Sports Group. Monahan was an executive vice president at The Fenway Sports Group before he was named commissioner of the PGA Tour in 2017. (He’d also worked at the Tour in various capacities, including as the executive director of The Players Championship.) He was recommended for the job by Seth Waugh, who was at the time the CEO of Deutsche Bank, but is now the CEO of the PGA of America. He went to Trinity College with Sam Kennedy, the CEO of The Fenway Sports Group and president of the Boston Red Sox. The PGA Tour’s vice president ranks are also rife with various Fenway Sports Group alums.
Without seeking player input, Monahan worked with Jimmy Dunne and Ed Herlihy to negotiate a framework agreement with Yasir Al-Rumayyan and the PIF, and Dunne and Herlihy, in addition to being PGA Tour Policy Board members, are two extremely influential members at Augusta National. Some players have been starting to wonder: What are Dunne’s and Herlihy’s motivations in all this?
Even if every decision made during the past year was done in the best interests of the PGA Tour membership, it’s hard not to wonder about the conflicts of interest, and what role they play.
I used to think Phil Mickelson was a kook for implying a web of conspiracies ran the PGA Tour, but when you think about that list of entanglements, or you see PGA Tour policy board members like Peter Malnati, Webb Simpson and Adam Scott nab sponsor invites to signature events, it’s hard not to ask the question: Is this appropriate?
The SSG/Fenway proposal was, according to several sources, one of a dozen proposals the PGA Tour Policy board considered, and the players on the advisory board reached an initial consensus that the Tour move forward in a partnership with the consortium Friends of Golf, backed by billionaires Henry Kravitz and George Roberts. But in the end, multiple players splintered off and supported the SSG proposal instead. The proposal Monahan backed ultimately won out, which left a bitter taste in the mouths of some players.
Most of the membership, one player told me, feels like Monahan “continues to fail upward.”
Near the end of Monahan’s press conference, he pivoted away from a question about whether he felt signature events were working and went on the offensive, listing off a series of changes the Tour has made that he wanted to be recognized as accomplishments — moving The Players Championship to March; negotiating with Netflix to have PGA Tour players participate in Full Swing; making gambling a normal, sanctioned part of the sport; forming an alliance with the DP World Tour; transitioning the business to a for-profit entity; creating the signature events series and dramatically increasing purse sizes. And he’s right, those moves do feel significant.
But it’s also true that many of them were done with a whiff of desperation, not in the spirit of innovation. After years of making virtually no changes, the PGA Tour began to scramble once it became clear the status quo wasn’t sustainable.
Is Monahan good at his job? The easy answer is no. Fans are frustrated with the product, ratings are down, sponsors feel squeezed, and the future of the Tour is unclear. But it also depends on who you ask. Some players feel like he’s doing his best in a difficult situation. Monahan shared a story about an encounter with British Open winner Brian Harman earlier that day that made him proud.
“I’m walking in the parking lot today,” Monahan said, “and Brian Harman pulls up in his truck and says he needs to speak to me, and we walk up towards the clubhouse and he says, ‘You know I meant to reach out to you last week,’ he said. ‘These Signature Events are awesome. Everything about the competition and the infrastructure and putting us in the position where we can play at the highest level, it’s just, I feel a great sense of accomplishment when I’m at these events.’ ”
Patrick Cantlay took a far more measured approach when asked if Monahan still has the board’s full support.
“I think it’s very important that we’re all rowing in the same direction, and right now he’s definitely our leader, and so it’s important that we’re all doing our best,” Cantlay said.
The player directors may have wanted different leadership. All signs, public and private, indicate that they did. But they couldn’t outmaneuver him, and now they have to find a way to work with him. Monahan’s one unquestionable strength — cultivating relationships with other powerful people — means he’s going to be in charge for the foreseeable future. If this mess is going to get cleaned up, he’s ultimately going to be the guy who has to do it.
“I am the right person to lead us forward,” Monahan said. “I know that. I believe that in my heart, and I’m determined to do exactly that.”
Judging by how the past two years have gone, it’s difficult to feel optimistic.
*****
More evidence that the professional game is broken and the fans are the victims because the players are being well taken care of in too many ways to count. And lest we forget, Monahan got a raise through it all…and a Big One!
The first book I remember my father reading was Situation Golf by Arnold Palmer. The first golf tournament I remember watching was the 1972 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach won by Jack Nicklaus. In the way only sporting heroes speak to you, I’ve been rooting for pro golf my whole life, so take this as a lover’s lament, not the grieving of a cynic: Pro golf is broken, and I’m worried about how it can be put back together.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the inquiry because it follows a familiar pattern. Bret Stephens in The New York Times wrote that “brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government.” Why shouldn’t pro golf be broken?
We thought the PGA Tour was invincible until it wasn’t. We watched every other industry undergo disruption while pro golf only upticked continuously. Tournament prize money increased year after year despite recessions, wars, scandals, pandemics and all forms of economic turbulence.
Ever since World War II, pro golf built its foundation on five principles: (1) The top players like Arnie and Jack always put the game above themselves. (2) Golfers are accountable to their performance—nothing’s guaranteed. (3) The pro tours are kept in check and balance by the four independent governing bodies controlling the major championships and acting in the best interests of the game. (4) Pro golf is underpinned by charity; that’s why hundreds of volunteers show up every week to help run the tournaments. (5) The game’s leaders—not always, but generally—have used the time-honored Masters strategy of leaving money on the table in exchange for control and sustainability.
It began to break down when suspect morals and unlimited resources tested the first two principles. Some top players saw themselves as victims of income disparity and thought they were not only entitled to the growing prize money, but it wasn’t enough. Defections and betrayal followed.
The PGA Tour and the LIV Golf League fell into what historians have called Thucydides Trap. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” wrote the Ancient Greek general Thucydides. When a newcomer threatens authority, war is only averted with deft statecraft. Curiously given the short-game touch of its stars, the PGA Tour doesn’t do deft.
That’s how we got to where we are. Our immutable conscience will always cause us to struggle with the resolution of pro golf’s circumstance, but as Tiger Woods taught us, “It is what it is.” Power and money will be consolidated. Private equity and the Saudis will bring change and a new world order. The question remains, can all this brokenness get fixed?
It’s undeniable that we have a messy, uneconomical system. Two organizations based in New Jersey and Scotland make the rules; neither is a pro tour. Maybe the most influential governing body is a private golf club in Georgia. If pro golf were starting over, we would have one governance structure, one back office and the best golfers playing against each other more often. But I don’t think the PGA Tour’s new money realizes you can’t get from here to there.
When a newcomer threatens authority, war is only averted with deft statecraft. Curiously given the short-game touch of its stars, the PGA Tour doesn’t do deft.
If PGA Tour Enterprises is a for-profit venture, will the players and the investors continue to care about charity and the communities that have always supported pro golf? It’s telling that none of the investors are members of Augusta National, meaning part of the golf establishment. The bet is that they’re smarter than everybody who has run pro golf all these years, and that will be painful to see play out.
I was walking a tour course the other day when a billboard flashed the advertisement that “Konica Minolta is the official multifunction printer of the PGA Tour.” They’ve sold not only the silverware, but the spoons separate from the knives and forks. I said this to an insider, and he replied, “Hell, we’ve even sold the butter knives.” It’s hard to imagine two things: that the players aren’t already making enough money and that there’s a lot more money still to be extracted from media and sponsors.
Market forces determine what something’s worth, but an outside influence like the Saudi Public Investment Fund seems to have artificially inflated tour pros’ value, and they now think they’re worth that much. Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but we’ll see a reckoning in a couple of years.
There are two schools of thought: Some pros think they’re being exploited by the major championships, which return only 10 to 20 percent of revenue to the pros. The reality is that the majors probably could afford to pay back $30 million in purses (rather than the current $20 million) but nowhere near the 50-percent return the pros or new investors think they deserve. The other school of thought was expressed by a young major champion who said privately: “You gotta be kidding! I’d pay to play in a major; they don’t have to pay me. Win one and it’s life changing—you’ve made your career.” I’d hate to see the U.S. Open or Open Championship go the way of the AIG Women’s Open with title sponsors, but it may be necessary for the governing bodies to continue to service the world game with handicapping, agronomy and amateur competition.
The PGA of America faces a different challenge. With the DP (European) Tour and the PGA Tour under one roof, the players might implicitly boycott the Ryder Cup unless the PGA of America turns over control. Commissioner Jay Monahan’s a nice guy, but he has a fiduciary responsibility to call PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh and say, “Sorry, pal, but you’re going to sell us the Ryder Cup, and here’s what we’re going to pay.” Flush with private-equity cash, would it be a surprise if the PGA Tour also bought the PGA Championship? Maybe the club pros still get to wear their red plaid jackets and march in the TV parade, but have we seen the last of these majors played under PGA of America ownership?
What else will the PGA Tour buy? Besides giving $1 billion in equity to the players who remained loyal to the tour, they’ll probably start buying up the rights to tournaments. Only a handful of the current 40-plus PGA Tour events are owned by the PGA Tour, and none of the majors. If the tour owns the event and the arenas, there may be more profit. Gambling is uncharted territory, but investors believe owning golf betting will pay off. Media rights fees are another matter. Pay TV is under stress as revenue has declined seven percent annually with the shift from cable to streaming. Live sports may be the lifeblood of media, but the deep dark secret is: Pro golf’s a minor sport that doesn’t draw the audiences or drive the subscriptions of the NFL, NBA, college football, the Olympics or Premier League. Will big new media still value little old golf? (Full disclosure: Golf Digest’s owner, Warner Bros. Discovery, might be one of those bidders.)
All the question marks are about pro golf, not the game we play. If the brokenness gets fixed, it’ll be because recreational golf is incredibly healthy.
But all the question marks are about pro golf, not the game we play. If the brokenness gets fixed, it’ll be because the PGA Tour is only the tip of the iceberg. Recreational golf is the 99 percent below the surface, and it’s incredibly healthy. All the leading indicators of participation are showing sustainable growth. It’s more diverse; the business is stronger; golf-course construction has started to reverse its decades of decline, and new variations on the old game are attracting kids and women at record levels. What COVID started, remote work and a strengthening U.S. economy ensures. Just look at the latest study released by the National Golf Foundation:
• Rounds played are up 20 percent since the start of the pandemic (2019), an all-time record at 531 million.
• More than 90 percent of golfers expect to play as much or more in 2024.
• “Green-grass” participation hit 26.6 million last year—the biggest single-year jump since the Tiger Slam (2001).
• On-course participation growth since Covid shows increases in play by youth (up 40 percent), people of color (up 27 percent) and women (up 25 percent).
• Sixty percent of the growth since 2019 has been female participation.
• Latent demand among non-golfers’ interest in taking up the game has hit a record 22.4 million.
• Alternative forms of the game like Topgolf are up 130 percent, driving a record number of total golfers to 45 million, and people with this off-course experience are five to six times more interested in playing on-course golf, portending even better news for the game’s future.
• Here’s the one I like best: Stanford University analysis of vehicle and phone GPS data suggests the increase in rounds played has been powered by Monday-Thursday play. Don’t tell your boss, but early-week tee times are fueling the boom.
The view here then is that the amateurs will help bail out the pros. The new tour can expect years of disruption, but the five original principles that guided the professional game since WWII will prevail. I think it was Churchill who said, “You can always count on golfers to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
*****
Here is the best line from this great piece by Jerry Tarde:
It began to break down when suspect morals and unlimited resources tested the first two principles. Some top players saw themselves as victims of income disparity and thought they were not only entitled to the growing prize money, but it wasn’t enough. Defections and betrayal followed.
Here’s my shortened version:
“What’s best for the game” was replaced by “What’s best for me.”
Selfishness and greed, a central feature of the human condition, had won again.
Excerpted from A Beautiful Ache: The Surprising Joys of Attending The Masters in Unsettled Times, by Chris Jones of Golf Digest
Some people will tell you that the single best thing about Augusta National is the pimento cheese sandwich, still sold wrapped in green plastic for $1.50. Those people are lying to you, and you should never trust them. The pimento cheese sandwich isn’t even the best sandwich on the grounds. That would be the Georgia peach ice cream sandwich. Heaven’s dessert.
No, the single best thing about Augusta National is the enforced absence of cellphones. It is a glorious directive, made greater for how fanatically it’s enforced. A patron wearing his ballcap backward will be asked to turn it around, sir, please and thank you. A patron who pulls out a cellphone will never be seen again.
*****
The Masters: Embracing tradition, celebrating history, building legacies, and a throwback to a simpler, more respectful time in the game.
I am so discouraged by what is happening in the game in so many ways, and this is yet another example. Here are a few more…
LIV Golf League and the damage it has done to the game on several levels:
The Great Philosophical Divide in the Game
Tournament golf redefined as a party rather than a competition
Two separate tours featuring elite players
Money as the measure of greatness
The circus atmosphere at their events, complete with blaring music
54-hole, limited field, shotgun start professional events as their standard
Entitlement to riches instead of earned value through hard work and golfing excellence
The intrusion of Saudi blood money and the Saudi culture into the game, with the very real possibility of the Saudis sitting at the head of the table of the PGA Tour
The spectacular greed demonstrated at the highest levels of the professional game, including players, the Tour, networks, advertisers, sponsors, etc.
The “new golfer” and his demand that the game bend to his will rather than embracing the game’s roots
The horrible broadcast quality of televised golf (The Masters is the standard)
Maximizing commercial revenue, as opposed to the actual broadcast, as the end game for broadcasters, ignoring the consumer entirely in their quest for increased revenue
Golf management companies and their impersonal attitude toward their customers, and their maniacal focus on net revenue
The equipment manufacturers and their unjustifiable defense of making the game “easier” rather than embracing the essential challenge of the game
The ungodly distance the ball travels now, and the unerring “straightness” of the golf ball
Tour professionals whining over a small reduction in the overall distance standard for fear they might have to actually hit a mid-iron to a par 4 hole instead of a wedge to a par 5
The rampant cheating at all levels of the game, including improving one’s lie as mentioned above, anchoring, backstopping, and so much more to make the game as easy as possible
S-L-O-W Play on Tour, and when we amateurs play the game
A profound lack of etiquette by fellow golfers
The stunningly obscene behavior by fans at Tour events:
Drunken parties
Fistfights
Party holes
Morons yelling “GET IN THE HOLE!!”
And a general disregard for the competitors
And, finally, speaking of competitors, garbage like this…
(The last image is a 10-second video.)
They are Tour professionals, and with such behavior are setting the standard for the “new golfer” knuckleheads who are degrading the game beyond repair.
This is not “their” game. It belongs to all of us, especially those who came before us who made it the greatest game of all. A game for everyone, provided you respect the game for its great history and wonderful traditions.
Golf changed me as a person. But today, the people who play golf are doing the opposite. They are changing the game, and not for the better.
It is now, along with so many other areas of life lately, a metaphor for the decline in our society, and I don’t see a positive end result for either our culture or for the game.
I welcome your thoughts, even if they disagree with my observations and conclusions. They are nothing more than my personal opinions, but they represent the lament of someone who dearly loves this game for all that it has done for and to me.
Why Did LIV Give Up Their Quest for Ranking Points?
Greg Norman and his chorus of defectors from the PGA and DP World Tours haven’t stopped whining about the loss of Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) points since they defected from the tours and signed for millions of dollars with LIV Golf League; a tour that does not meet the criteria for receiving points. Instead of altering their format – the simplest and easiest strategy – they chose to complain, whine, and point fingers at OWGR and the major championships.
But suddenly, they reversed course and withdrew their application for OWGR ranking points.
Why Did They Give Up Their Quest for Ranking Points? Here’s a theory…
Clue #1 – Joaquin Niemann’s constant whining pays off and he gets special invitations from the Masters and PGA Championship after playing well in non-LIV events but still falling short of the OWGR Top 100.
Clue #2 – Norman submits a letter to his LIV players stating that he has withdrawn his OWGR application.
Club #3 – He leaks it to the media
Clue #4 – In this Sports Illustrated Golf piece, Alex Miceli wrote, “Near the end of Norman’s letter, he said that LIV continues to seek meaningful communication and relationships with each of the Majors to ensure that LIV golfers are adequately represented.”
Clue #5 – In this piece, the Irish Star announces that 20 of the top 21 LIV players have signed up to play in Asian Tour events in an attempt to secure ranking points, even though it is impossible for them to ever get enough ranking points to return to the Top 50 in the world.
So, What’s up? Simple…
Norman saw Niemann get the special invitation through solid performance outside of LIV, plus constant whining, and decided to employ a two-front “special invitation” strategy.
The first step of the strategy was to suggest to his LIV players to take the same route as Niemann and enter non-LIV events.
Then, armed with that information and with the precedent set by the Masters and PGA of America, go direct to the majors and request special invitations, larded up with plenty of whining and victimhood language thrown in for effect.
Armed with the successful Niemann strategy and the 20 LIV players playing in events on the Asian Tour, Norman is going directly to each of the majors and saying something like, “Look at our guys! They’re now playing nice in the sandbox by attempting to earn ranking points, but they’ll never get enough to return to their earlier rankings. Doesn’t the LIV Golf League deserve a special exemption category just like the OWGR Rankings? Make our Top 5 players exempt into your major.”
If that strategy fails, he will do the bidding of individual players, again using the Niemann strategy (i.e. divide and conquer) saying, “Well, how about Dustin Johnson (or any number of LIV players falling short)? Doesn’t he at least deserve a special invitation like Niemann?”
Greg Norman will never stop, and neither will PIF, until they are told categorically that they will never receive a special exemption category and that there will be no more special invitations for LIV players outside the OWGR Top 50 rankings.
LIV Golf League and the Saudi Arabian Investment Fund are a malevolent force in the game of golf, and are intent on “owning” the professional game, just as they are attempting to do in football (soccer) and other sports.
Golf Nuts, this is a Substack post by Gary Van Sickle about Superagent Hughes Norton’s upcoming blockbuster book. – HN
By Gary Van Sickle
In the upcoming book “Rainmaker,” the former IMG superagent to the likes of Tiger Woods and Greg Norman provides a riveting tell-all account of the game’s biggest players and deals
Believe it or not, Anthony Kim is not 2024’s Most Surprising Return From Exile. Not even close. Enter Hughes Norton, who has been on radio silence for 25 years. Surely you remember Norton, the man who put the “super” in superagent. Well, if you missed the 1980s and ‘90s, Norton worked for International Management Golf (IMG) and was the agent to golfing superstars such as Tiger Woods and Greg Norman. If there was a Golf Agents Hall of Fame, Norton and IMG founder Mark McCormack would be the most significant inductees.
About the surprise: Norton is back with a bang thanks to a new book, “Rainmaker,” co-written with former Golf magazine editor George Peper. It is a juicy, behind-the-curtains tell-all book about his life at the top of professional golf’s food chain. Be warned: Once you pick it up and start reading, Norton’s inside stories (from Greg Norman’s philandering to personally getting Earl Woods on IMG’s payroll while Tiger was an amateur to the surprising figure who may have initiated Norton’s eventual firing by Woods) make it impossible to put down.
Here’s Norton on Norman, for instance: “No client in my experience ever loved making money more than Greg. I sensed the dollars becoming Greg’s way to keep score particularly as his major championship performances kept falling short of expectations. Money validated him.” Norton scored a lot of such validation for his clients. The list of golfers he signed included Woods, Norman, Tom Watson (temporarily), Nancy Lopez, Curtis Strange, David Duval, Lanny Wadkins, Hal Sutton, Peter Jacobsen and Mark O’Meara. And that’s just for starters. Landing any one of those players would have been a career-maker for most agents. Norton landed all of them, which was why IMG upped his salary to $750,000 plus bonuses in 1997, he revealed in the book, a kingly sum then.
Golf’s two deals of the century were both landed by Norton on behalf of Woods. When Tiger turned pro and opted out of returning to Stanford University — even though he told everyone he was coming back up until the moment he wasn’t — he already had a stunning $40 million deal with Nike and a $20 million deal with Titleist that Norton had set up. Both deals included bonuses for winning majors, which Woods cashed in for many millions more. The figures in those deal were never-before-seen-in-golf-sized figures. Norton was a big player in golf.
Hence his nickname, “Huge,” which originally stemmed from Spaniard Seve Ballesteros’ pronunciation of his first name but later caught on among his co-workers and growing list of jealous enemies in IMG’s Cleveland-based office. So why is Norton finally breaking his long-held silence after all these years out of the business? He answers that on page one of his author’s note, explaining that there has never been a book about what it’s really like to be a sports agent and that movies such as “Jerry Maguire” and “Air” are Hollywood caricatures. “No book has captured the blocking and tackling behind the glitz and glamour of managing superstar athletes,” writes Norton, 75, who adds that he also wanted to help chronicle the legacy of sports’ most famous, “some would say infamous,” management firm, IMG.
Norton does a good job at letting us look inside his world. And he does it with enough honesty that we also see his faults, failures and embarrassing mistakes. “This is not a vanity book … nor is it an exercise in ‘woe is me’ self-pity,” Norton writes. “I’ve tried to keep the narrative real and balanced, have included things I’m proud to have accomplished but also things I’m not proud of.”
The big elephant in the book is why Norton was fired by Woods barely two years after closing the Nike and Titleist deals, and was later terminated by his mentor, McCormack (but with a $9 million buyout over 10 years that included a non-compete clause). Two things happened. One was a stunningly negative cover story in the now-defunct Golf World magazine about Hughes and how IMG wielded its power. Another was that O’Meara, whom Norton introduced to Tiger years earlier thinking he would be a good mentor for the burgeoning star (and he was), left IMG and then, Norton believes, persuaded Woods to leave, too. Woods rebuffed Norton’s request for an explanation of his sudden firing and sharply refused to discuss it. When Norton confronted O’Meara, “He denied it in a way that was not credible. Ten years later when I happened to see him again, the subject came up and he became extremely defensive in a way only a guilty man can. If that isn’t betrayal, I don’t know what is.”
Of course, money is how agents keep score so it was in character with the former superagent that he points out his $9 million in severance pay equates to $16.5 million today. It was a strange ending to the Woods-Norton pairing. Norton was the first agent to meet with Tiger and his parents when Woods was just 13, way before he appeared on the radar of other agents. Tiger was 5-feet-5-inches and weighed 100 pounds at their first meeting, Norton recalled. Upon visiting Woods’ bedroom, Norton was surprised to see no trophies. “He said, ‘By the time I hit 11, there were 113 of them and Mom made me give them all away. I don’t care.’”
Norton also heard the Earl Woods speech that Tiger’s father repeated many times for the media years later about how his son was going to change the world, not just the golf world. In an inspired moment, Norton got IMG to put Earl on a $25,000 retainer, plus expenses, as a junior golf talent scout after clearing it with the USGA, which approved the deal as long as no quid pro quo was involved. Later in the book, Norton recalled the best recognition he got from Tiger, who rarely commented on his help. “One day he said, ‘Hughesy, you and I make a great team. We’re both number one in the world at what we do.’”
Norton had breakups with the best. Norman was the game’s biggest gate attraction before Woods. Norton recalled how Norman began seeing a 22-year-old Australian model who lived in Hong Kong and asked to borrow Norton’s phone so he wouldn’t leave a phone bill paper trail. Norton regretted it because he was friends with Norman’s wife, Laura, and because Norman rang up thousands of dollars in phone charges “for which I would never be reimbursed,” Norton writes. It was the relationship with that same model that led to Norman’s high-profile marriage to tennis star Chris Evert later dissolving, too.
In 1993, Norman informed Norton and the head of IMG’s Australia office that he was leaving IMG. “Those words hit me like a cannonball,” Norton writes. “I was speechless. The guy who had been not only my number one client but my close friend for more than a decade — the guy for whom I’d produced $50 million of income — had just fired me.”
Norton noted in a later magazine interview that “even Joe Soap from down the street could have made me a lot of money” because he was “the hottest property in golf.” Now, Norton writes, Norman’s legacy is selling Wagyu beef and other vintners’ wines. Norton: “Norman saw himself as a brilliant businessman — still does, as evidenced by his LIV role — but there is little evidence to back that up.”
To highlight just how effective Norton was at his job, there is a look into the respective Rolex deals for Phil Mickelson and Woods. While Woods had Norton in his corner, Mickelson went with his college golf coach as his agent instead of IMG. “At the time, Phil’s Rolex deal was rumored to be $25,000 a year plus some free watches. Tiger got $200,000 his first year, plus another $645,000 in royalties from a Tiger Woods Signature Tudor watch, the first time Rolex paid a royalty to an athlete. Tiger’s only cost was one day per year of his time with Rolex.”
There’s plenty more in this book but the gist of it is, Norton has had more than two decades to reflect on his position in golf, a position at the top of the game, and how it affected his own life. His self-critical analysis makes it clear he isn’t making excuses for his choices, just trying to explain them as he saw them. And, yes, he has some regrets. “I absolutely loved my job,” he writes. “I was on top of the world, repping the hottest athletes on the planet and reveling in my role as rainmaker. My job had defined me. My workaholism had left me little time for introspection. I’d always thought of myself as humble, self-effacing, appreciative. But the evidence to the contrary was hard to deny … the realization that I had casual acquaintances but few friends, my inability to sustain a serious relationship … “The same monomaniacal focus that cost me my marriage had cost me my relationship with Tiger and ultimately my job at IMG.
I was bitter about betrayal by clients and colleagues but proud of what I had accomplished and at peace with it. In the years since, I have never said, ‘I wish I were back in the golf business.’ Not once.” “Rainmaker” will serve as his written legacy for Norton’s family and any other interested parties. In an epilogue, Norton examines where golf has gone since he departed — the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup, oversized purses and, of course, the rival LIV Golf group. He has a warning. “Professional golf, if it isn’t careful, may well be a victim of its own greed,” he writes. Like IMG and Norton, in some ways. Or even Anthony Kim, whose importance never approached that of this Rainmaker.
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