‘Tiger, do you realise you’re now making four times what the No 1
player in the game, Greg Norman, earns on golf clubs and balls?’
His reaction was muted: ‘That’s not bad, right?’
To say it was unlike any golf commercial I had ever seen would be an understatement, and my first reaction wasn’t all positive. I had doubts about how the “courses I am not allowed to play” line would be received, but I figured Nike knew advertising. Beyond that, there was Earl’s painful history of discrimination – all those country clubs where he and Tiger had been made to feel unwelcome. With respect for that, I kept my thoughts to myself. When the screen went black there was dead silence in the room as we all tried to process what we had just viewed. Then Tiger said, “Can I see that again?” After the second showing it was, surprisingly, Harmon who spoke first: “That’s the best fuckin’ ad I’ve ever seen,” he said. There was nothing anyone could add to that. The
we earned for Tiger, 20 percent on income between $2.5 million and $5 million, and 25 percent on all income above $5 million. A second clause related to the term of the agreement. The base contract was for four years, from August 1996 to August 2000, but I had added incentives. If in any year IMG were to produce income for Tiger exceeding $16 million, the contract would be extended by two years to 2002; if we could produce more than $26 million, then the contract would extend another two years to 2004; and if we could produce
professional career of Tiger Woods was about to launch. Two days later in Milwaukee I knocked on the door of the hotel suite where Tiger and Earl were staying. It was time to make things official. In my briefcase I had the two contracts from Nike and Titleist, which, when Tiger signed them, instantly guaranteed him $60 million. Tiger signed them both without comment, indeed without reaction of any kind. Curiously, he had always seemed almost indifferent to the money. Granted, a 20-year-old just beginning as a professional would have little or no frame of reference for the enormity of these contracts, but even when I’d tried to put the Nike and Titleist agreements in context – “Tiger, do you realise you’re now making four times what the current No 1 player in the game, Greg Norman, earns on golf clubs and balls and more than double what Greg makes on shoes and clothes?!” – his reaction was muted: “That’s not bad, right?” The third contract he signed that evening was his representation agreement with IMG. It differed in significant ways from most of the contracts I had done, beginning with the commission structure. Working together with Tiger’s attorney, John Merchant, I had agreed to adjust our fees to a sliding scale similar to the royalties on a book contract: IMG would receive 15 percent of the first $2.5 million in annual merchandising income
SPECIAL AGENT Norton, at the Country Club of Cleveland in 2023, and the cover of his new book.
$38 million, it would go one more year to 2005, a total of 10 years. We would earn all six years of those extensions by the end of 1997. Editor’s Note: Hughes Norton would represent Woods until September 1998 when he was replaced by Mark Steinberg, another IMG agent. At the time Woods cited “overscheduling” as the reason for making the switch. Woods would generate $4 million in fees for IMG in just the first year of their agreement, which continued until 2011 when Woods followed Steinberg to Excel Sports Management. Norton would leave IMG in early 1999 with a $9-million severance package and a 10-year non-compete and non-disclosure agreement. Woods has earned more than $1.8 billion in endorsements and prize money in his 28-year professional career and joined Forbes’ annual list of billionaires for the first time in 2022.
Adapted from Hughes Norton’s Rainmaker (Atria Books, 2024)
50 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
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