There is a small chance if you catch a cab in London that you will be ferried to your destination by Tom Wall, a keen golf fan.
What you probably won’t hear from Tom is a cabbie’s rant along the lines of: ”Did you see that Tiger winning the Open? Bloody marvellous. Tell you what, though, what about the rest of ’em? Useless. Nobody gave him a fight. England’s best finish, I was reading, was 11th and the guy’s still come home with a fortune!”
You wouldn’t hear Tom bending your ear like that because the player who tied 11th was Tom’s son, Anthony. His cheque, for £68 886,05, brought his earnings from 19 tournaments this season to £589 416,46. In 11 years on the tour he has earned £1 805 092,52. And good luck to him. It’s better than driving a cab.
But it is a lot of money for not winning much. Although he led at Hoylake briefly, he was never going to hunt down Tiger on Sunday. Subconsciously or not, Wall — and most of the stragglers — will have settled in for a quiet, tidy conclusion to their work, risking little and consolidating their places.
It’s the way golf is. It’s a great sport, but is primarily a vehicle to shift shirts, clubs and awful trousers. And the workers at the coalface are part of that, seriously well paid for being no better, mostly, than competent.
That is why what should have been a cracking finish to the Open was one of the least exciting things you could have wasted your time watching — something likely to happen again this Sunday when the United States PGA Championship enters its final round. Nobody — not a single one of them — felt obliged to risk leaving the comfort zone of their well-grooved game. And maybe that was the best strategy. Often it is the safe golf that wins. Not if you are trailing by six shots, though.
With few exceptions, the pack hang on to what they have rather than reaching for the main prize. They are accumulators of wealth more than ambitious trophy-gatherers. Look through the list of pros on the tour and you will see hundreds of them without a win.
Wall, for instance, is one of golf’s steady earners, comfortably off in his time as a pro without moving in the billion-dollar stratosphere of Woods, say, who has earned £36 744 119,85 over roughly the same period.
And that isn’t the half of it. Tiger endorses so many products it’s hard to keep track. Nike, who gave him $60-million before he had even teed off as a pro, are his biggest paymasters, but he gets more than loose change from American Express, Accenture, General Motors, Buick, Electronic Arts and Tag Heuer. Apologies to all concerned if I’ve missed one.
Golf Digest estimated recently that Tiger’s career earnings would pass $1-billion by 2010. And that is just for playing golf. He earns about six times that away from the course.
Nike and all the rest obviously reckon it’s worth hitching their products to Tiger’s star. So do the players. Prize money has rocketed in his era, trickling down to the most ordinary golfer. Everybody wins, and nobody complains. When Tiger won at St Andrew’s in 2000, first place was worth a miserly £500 000. Steve Pate, who tied for 20th, was handed £25 500. However did they get by?
What we need — and which golf and the sponsors will never contemplate — is a second cut at the end of the third day. That would cull the chaff a bit. But it would mean less air time on Sunday, and no way will TV put up with that.
Tiger might well prove to be the best golfer ever, but he is doing it against a backdrop of timidity. It is not Woods’s fault he’s brilliant, and the strange twist of fate is he was once the most daring player on the planet. But even geniuses have their price. And for that we have Nike and all the others to thank. — Â