Your Morning Golf Jolt

It's Wednesday, the absolute middle of the work week...hooray...

So Tiger tees off today at 1pm Eastern against Brendan Jones in the Accenture WGC. It's a match play tournament and Tiger has won this event three times before. He has said in the past he plays every round of a match play like it's Sunday...and Tiger don't lose on Sundays.

ESPN.com has a fantasy game called Streak For The Cash, where if you correctly pick 27 pick'em game outcomes correctly, you win a million dollars. Sometimes the pick is simply who will win a game, sometimes its an over/under, sometimes you are forced to decide if the higher total will be Kobe Bryant's points in his game versus Sacramento, or Dwight Howard's rebounds, blocks and assists in his game versus Chicago. It's a lot harder than you would think.

Today one of the pick options is not whether Tiger will win his match, but if he'll win on holes 10-15, or 16+ or a loss. It would seem the confidence factor here is quite high.

During yesterday's practice round, Tiger missed just one fairway on the front nine. That shot he did misfire on was followed by him turning to the crowd of about 200 media following his every step and yelled, 'no pictures in my backswing!!'...to put things in perspective.

I got Tiger winning 6 and 5 (that's six holes up on his opponent with five to play. Match play means you play head to head on a hole-by-hole basis against one opponent in a bracketed tournament. That's versus traditional stroke play of four rounds versus the field for those of you not familiar with golf jargon).


Speaking of golf, Greg Norman has come out and publicly stated that golfers need to take a pay cut. He claims the purses are still too high and in these tough times, golfers should give up a portion of their potential winnings.

I couldn't disagree more. With the exception of the top 20 or 30 guys on tour, most professional golfers are not multi-millionaire jet-setters. The majority of every tournament is filled with guys playing week to week, paycheck to paycheck.

Golf, like tennis, is not a team sport with guaranteed - or even non-guaranteed - contracts. In golf, you don't make money unless you show up, play and play well. Yes, the average purse for PGA tournaments last year was $5.8 million, but most players don't see a whiff of that money.

According to stats from 2008, 262 PGA members played in tournaments last year.
While many are sponsored and have clubs and sometimes clothing payed for, not all are. Each member is a private organization unto themselves, meaning the PGA is not responsible for travel to and from events (which often times cross the country week by week), accommodation during the week or any other expenses that may be incurred related to their playing.

Of those 262 members, 157 of them made less than $1,000,000 in 2008, 109 made less than $500,000, 63 made less than $200,000, 40 made less than $100,000. Now I'm not saying that one hundred grand isn't a nice living to make, but when you factor in all the extra expenses, that amount dwindles very quickly. And a guy like Travis Perkins, who played in 23 tournaments last year and made just over $36,000 certainly doesn't have a big cushy Nike contract to fall back on.

I'm just saying that when people think of golf winnings, they often only think about the huge shares that the top five or 10 will take home and forget that the bottom 15 or 20 guys will only take a few thousand dollars and those who miss the cut get absolutely nothing.

Don't feel bad for golfers. There's still tons of potential money out there to be made and anyone has a shot at getting it on any given week. Unlike sports such as basketball, baseball, hockey and football, in golf you truly are rewarded based on the effort you put out and the performance you exhibit. If you're good enough, the money will be there.

But on the other hand, calling for a reduction in purses doesn't hurt the guys like Tiger Woods ($82 million career earning, endorsements not included), Vijay Singh ($60 million), or Phil Mickelson ($51 million), it hurts guys you don't know of and will never see on TV. It hurts people just hoping they can afford their next mortgage payment or diaper bill or flight ticket to next week's tournament.

In that sense Mr Norman, I must respectfully disagree.


Quick shot:

I know that was a pretty long post so I'll try to keep this short.
Today brings the announcement that Stephen Page has left the Barenaked Ladies to pursue solo projects. Page has had a pretty rough year after being arrested on drug charges last July that were eventually dropped pending him staying trouble free for six months.
That being said, BNL is and was one of my favourite bands and puts on one of the greatest live performances of any act I've seen (I think I've seen them live four or five times). It'll be weird seeing them tour now without their guitarist and lead singer, but I wish him and the rest of the band all the best.