If you're looking for one small positive outcome from the splintering of professional golf caused by the renegade LIV Golf league, may I offer "Rainmaker," the story of Superagent Hughes Norton and the Money Grab Explosion of Golf from Tiger to LIV to Beyond (Atria Books/$28.99).
Twenty-five years ago, Norton was a big deal in the golf world, some might say huge. Another golf publication dubbed him “the most powerfully hated agent in sports.” But after being fired by Tiger Woods and soon thereafter by his employer, the sports management behemoth IMG, Norton was paid handsomely not to work, nor compete against his own company and definitely not to spill the beans on how the sausage was made. And so by the time that deal had expired, he was old news and a mostly forgotten figure in the game. But he still had an incredible story to tell and a wealth of knowledge on the explosion of professional golf.
The response to a podcast he did two years ago sparked renewed interest in the idea of writing his memoir. Book publishers, however, only want slam dunks. That's why he says it took the PGA Tour-LIV controversy to get this book made. All of a sudden, the two protagonists in the drama -- Tiger Woods defending the Tour and the importance of a player's legacy and Greg Norman taking all the slings and arrows as the frontman for the Saudi-funded renegade league -- had both been clients of Norton's and each fired him in their own distasteful way.
"Who knew these guys better than their agent for all those years?" Norton says. "That got it done."
Hey, whatever it takes because this is one of the best golf books I've read in a long time. Norton takes us inside the world of being a golf agent to the stars -- in addition to Tiger and Shark, he at one time managed Hall of Famers Tom Watson, Curtis Strange, Raymond Floyd, Mark O'Meara, Nancy Lopez and the list goes on. He's a real-life Bob Sugar of "Jerry Maguire" fame and he gives what reads like an authentic account of his life, the highs and lows, both a colorful and critical account as much of himself as the business he was in. Much of the credit, I'm sure, goes to his co-author George Peper, a legend in his side of the business (full disclosure: he’s commissioned me to write stories for him at Links over the years) who certainly hasn't lost anything off his fastball.
Peper frames the narrative structure of the book well and gets Norton to share his meteoric rise and abrupt fall, warts and all. Anyone I talked to who has read the book, however, has skipped straight to the chapter on Tiger, which starts on page 157. I'll refrain from any spoilers but this book had me starting the next chapter well after my bedtime. I couldn't put it down.
Norton spoke to Golfweek about his book and his famous clients, especially Tiger and Norman, and he didn't hold back. Here's a condensed and slightly edited version of that conversation.
Golfweek: What was it like to be 'the most powerfully hated agent in golf?'
Hughes Norton: It was no fun. I had a conversation with Scott Boras once about this. It was right after the Golf World article came out (declaring him the most powerfully hated agent). I said, ‘Scott, how do you deal with this?’ And of course, he’s, you know, stratospheres of success above whatever I did. The way he put it was he said, ‘If you’re super-successful in this business, 95 percent of the stuff written about you will be negative.’ He said, ‘You have to ignore it. You have to keep on keeping on as best you can and don’t take it personally.’ The anonymity of the quotes was just bullshit. If somebody says that either have the guts to be quoted, or you don’t print it, it seems to me.
GWK: Name the one thing you could have done differently when representing Tiger that would have given you the best chance of retaining him as a client for his career long-term?
HN: I racked my brain at the time, and then kind of tried to let it go and then rack my brain again 25 years later on that one. I’m the first to be self-critical and realize where I’ve made mistakes and, acknowledge and admit to them. But as I think about it, I provided a way for Earl to travel around the country, with expenses paid for all those years, which really helped at the time financially for them. I set him up with generational wealth on Day One that nobody could even believe and that had never been achieved before. I shielded him as best I could from all that gale force of celebrity as we describe it when he came out, the Tigermania, and I also tried and succeeded in minimizing the obligations that he had to live up to when you get paid $60 million by companies like Nike and Titleist. In fact, at the time, I had access, of course, through IMG of looking at contracts for people, even like Palmer, who were being paid less money and similar product categories and doing more in terms of photoshoots, sales appearances. So that was minimized. As I go down this checklist and all the boxes, I honestly thought I did a great job.
I really think what it came down to, and we talked about it a little in the book, is the generational difference. I really dealt with Earl. I was 30 years older than this kid. The relationship was with Earl and that’s what I thought would save me in the end. You know, when Tiger first told me, ‘You’re gone,’ I talked to Earl, but I think at that point in time, Earl, being as smart as he was, and Tida said, ‘You know what, this is Tiger’s first major decision. He’s 20 years old, he’s moved out of the house. He’s across the country on the East Coast. We’re not going to interfere.’ Again, this is all speculation. People have said to me in interviews like this, what do you wish could have happened? I’d say ‘Tiger, you know, just level with me, I’m a big boy. You never gave me a reason, what the f – – k?’ I thought I did pretty much — decent doesn’t describe the job I did — and never got that. And of course, I never got it from Mark when I got fired. So you can imagine I’m kind of in shellshock for a while because you think you’re doing what you were hired to do for both and they both said sayonara. But nobody ever said life is fair.
GWK: You mention in the book some of the agents you competed against such as Vinny Giles. Who did you hold in high regard?
HN: Dead silence. (Laughs). We started out with this guy Ed Barner that jumped in when Mark took his eye off the ball in the early ’70s. Most of them never panned out, but he signed Grier Jones, Jerry Heard, Jim Simons, J.C. Snead, Johnny Miller. I mean, he was rolling, and screwed it all up somehow. He’s a weird guy. And then, you know, Vinnie came along, and he was a real threat. He was soft-spoken and he’d say, ‘Me and Vernon run this little, kind of thing. We’ll look after you, you’ll never hear from [Mark] McCormack.’ You know, it’s a legit sales pitch and that’s what we fought a lot of time. ‘They’ve got 50 million clients, how are you going to ever get anybody’s attention there?’ So he was tough.
And then Rocky Hambric came along, you know, still in business. And he was good. You can’t represent everybody. McCormack broke the mold when he did at the beginning but he had no competitors. Like everything else in life, the pendulum shifts. There weren’t any agents around in those days and God help us today with every sport and the agents run the asylum now. I saw a stat the other day, I think they’re are 1,400 players in the NFL. How many registered NFL agents do you think there are? Two thousand.
There’s one and a half guys for every player. It’s a madhouse and golf now, I wouldn’t recognize it. There are seven or eight agencies each with two or three guys out surrounding their players on the range along with the nutritionist, the swing coach, the putting coach, the physical therapist, the data analytics guy.
There’s a circle now. This started in tennis and it’s one of my pet peeves. It bothered me when tennis kids all started saying ‘I want to thank my team.’ Golfers are now doing that! Stop it. Right?
GWK: How phony are sports agents?
HN: Oh, gosh, it’s like, I mean, there’s so many differences, right?
Our problem was, I talked about in the book, there was no Agent 101. There was no culture and you just kind of go out there and wing it, make it up as you go along. I was lucky because I got some time with McCormack, the little bit that he was around where I was, and I observed him. If you’re a salesman, which is what we were, you want to live up to what you promised, or as Mark said, do what you said you were going to do and then over-deliver. All we do is generate the opportunities, but I’m not answering your question. Are sports agents as reviled as life insurance agents, or congressmen? What’s the bottom of the list? A proctologist.
That was a funny thing. I’ll digress on this, I learned quickly you get on an airplane, and somebody sits next to you and you exchanged pleasantries, and the person would say, What do you do? And two or three times when I said sports agent, it was over, whatever I was going to work on for the next hour. So a friend of mine said, ‘Look, Hughes, you got two choices, here’s the way to handle that. What I do a lot of times is immediately say, ‘I’m a life insurance agent,’ which shuts them up. But he said a better one is to say I’m a proctologist.
GWK: Do you have an example where you or another agent lied to people for the sake of the client?
HN: You know, I don’t know if this qualifies. In the first eight months with Tiger and the Tigermania stuff, I think we had 1,500 media requests and we just got in that practice of pissing the world off and pissed everybody off. Were there times when maybe Tiger could have easily just walked with (a reporter) from the ninth green? Two problems: one you wouldn’t get maybe enough out of it and might not be too pleased, and two, Tiger would never agree to it. His whole thing with everybody was f – – k ’em. Tiger, you got to do this Nike thing, ‘F – – k you.’ Tiger, stop goofing around. You gotta do this? ‘I’m not doing it.’
It gets into that whole thing I talked about in the book, all this outside stuff and generational wealth on Day One, it was an intrusion into his life. As much as Greg [Norman] loved all the adulation and the fame and fortune and the Ferraris in the garage and that whole lifestyle of private jets, Tiger was completely the opposite. He said, ‘Hughes, that's paper money.’ What, $60 million? He said, ‘That $270,000 I got for winning the tournament in Vegas? That’s what counts to me.’ You know, you’ve got to really adapt. I’ve been working with this guy for 11 years that couldn’t get enough of the fame and fortune, so I’m not really answering your question. I guess when somebody can’t do something, I always tried to just say ‘Look, I’m sorry, my hands are tied here,’ but I guess you make up little stuff as you go along. The problem with that road is once you cross that line, you can start lying about other stuff, which I tried not to do.
GWK: Which firing hurt more: Norman in that Australian hotel room or Tiger firing you emotionlessly at his front door?
HN: Tiger's, for sure. Because we had enormous success with Greg. Greg was sort of as much as I was shocked, for sure, because we did such a job for him and when you have a personal friendship, too, that made me feel bad. But I sort of respect or understand, let’s put it that way, what Greg did. Tiger's was just absolutely meaningless and out of the blue, no warning, lightning bolt. As I said, at the top, to this day, I’ve never gotten any sort of, what’s the right word? Resolution.
Your dream as an agent is to have a star. This was beyond anything imaginable. This was a generational talent, when he starts out winning a Masters that way and thinking to myself, ‘OK, I’m 50 years old, I’m not going to do this forever. But the next 10 years, or whatever, will be phenomenal.’ It’s what you live for. It’s what you learned, that’s what my 25 years of experience and learning from Mark was all about, and not to be.
GWK: What's an example of during your time with Norman that best foreshadowed his future being a disrupter?
HN: He was always angry at the people that crossed him, as he defined it, whether it was somebody at a company that he was affiliated with doing something he didn’t like. He sort of just cut them off in his mind. It was always somebody else’s fault and I’m going to get back at this person. The grudge thing surely played a part in his willingness to step up and be the face of the Saudi intrusion into golf.
GWK: Do you consider him to be a savvy businessman or did he just get lucky with Cobra and Reebok?
HN: Well, he was a risk taker enough, as I mentioned in the book, to bet on the Cobra thing against my advice. And guess what? He was right and I was wrong and he made a fortune from it. [A $2 million investment grew to $44 million when Acushnet bought Cobra five years later.] I think that then made him think ‘I’m a business tycoon or I can be a business magnate.’ There was a famous episode, which I got this second-hand from Greg. Kerry Packer, the Australian media tycoon, who was the Jack Welch of Australia or Bill Gates/Steve Jobs of his time. So, Norman's in Packer's office one day sitting across from him and Greg’s going on and on about ‘I can invest in this’ and I’m thinking, ‘why don’t I do this and all this business stuff.’ And Packer is very direct and kicked his feet up on his desk and looked at him and said, ‘Norman, If you want to be a businessman, you've got to wear a suit.’
Which was his way of saying, ‘You stay on the golf course. You’re doing fine there. Don’t be coming in my world.’ I think Cobra may have given him an enhanced or unrealistic sense of his own business acumen, if you will, and a lot of other stuff he got into like the course design sort of stalled and fizzled. You don’t even see Reebok anymore. That’s a brand that was so powerful.
GWK: Given what you said and did with Greg Norman's marital infidelities. How do you think you would have handled Tiger situation?
HN: Well, I just tell him to be really careful with that stuff. I don’t think they handled it well public relations-wise at all. Not that I was some genius at public relations. But that stuff is bad news because it reformulates the public’s image of you. You’ve got one shot at your image and Tiger's was so cool. Now people are saying, all the stuff this guy’s done and he never grew up? Weird stuff and all these girlfriends. The driving thing still blows my mind. It’s 7:15 in the morning in L.A., right? He’s going 87 in a 45 mile-an-hour zone and in a courtesy car, he already has a record of being a terrible driver with all this other stuff he’s done. If you have hundreds of millions of dollars, wouldn't you have a driver take you? No, he’s driving, he falls asleep, or he’s overmedicated or whatever. I mean, can you imagine if a young mom with kids was coming the other way, and he killed everybody? And that easily could have happened. And the media is so forgiving. They continue to call it his accident. An accident? He did it. I can never get my arms around how all that stuff happens to him.
GWK: What's your strongest memory from the time you arranged for Tiger to play with Norman when he was 14-15 years old at Old Marsh?
HN: It’s been such a topic of interest I wish I’d recorded each of their conversations. Greg had a week off and Tiger was in Florida or going there for a junior tournament. I said to both Tiger and Earl, ‘Hey, when do you want to play nine holes or play a round with Greg? I’m sure that might be of interest to you.’ He was whatever he was, 17. He said, ‘Oh, for sure.’ And I called Greg and they played nine holes. A day went by and I didn’t hear from either one. I thought maybe this didn’t go so well. I called Greg and said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘Eh.’ Greg’s perspective, of course, is ‘I’m No. 1. This is another can't miss, right?’ And how many can’t misses have we seen come down the pike? You can just imagine. He said, ‘He can hit it a long way, pretty fast through the ball.’ That was it. And then I called Tiger and said, ‘Wow, what was it like? Was it cool playing with the No. 1 player in the world?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I kept up with him tee to green and he did have some pretty cool shots around the green, some short-game stuff. I like watching him do that.’ So, it was an interesting take and I think because of their respective egos even at Tiger’s young age, Tiger wanted nothing more than to think I can compete with this guy. You know, I just played nine holes with him and Greg to think I can kick the shit out of this kid. It was a foreshadowing of how they never became friends.
GWK: Why do you think none of Mark Steinberg's clients went to LIV?
HN: Tiger undoubtedly is such a force. That’s my guess, is to say look, I don’t want to be associated with anybody who goes there. That’s all I can figure. You know, Steinberg loves every dollar, clearly. I don’t think Tiger would've fired Steinberg if one of his clients made a decision to go but at the same time I don’t think Tiger wanted Steinberg actively helping Justin Rose to go there.
GWK: Steinberg fired his one client, Thomas Pieters, who did go to LIV.
HN: Yeah, I saw that. And did you hear how he did it? In classic Tiger fashion, classic. By email or text. He didn’t personally talk to him. Although in fairness at least Tiger looked at me grudgingly at Isleworth and said get lost.
GWK: When you look back at your life of being a rainmaker are you proud of that or sad that you are as you write 'an agent of the wretched excess that pervades the game today?'
HN: Mostly proud of it. You know, because I was hired to do something to make things better for my clients’ careers, and not just generate income but you know, manage them intelligently and have them do the right thing which you don’t always know, you can make lots of mistakes. But I felt like I really did that as well as anybody in the world and was proud of it. And you know, the lack of resolution at the end was tough, for sure. And that’s what was great about this book. A lot of it was cathartic for me to get it out after all these years, I had pretty much dismissed it and learned to live with, you know, the bad endings and stuff. But I got very energized in this process. I thought it would be more painful, but it’s really clarified in my mind some stuff, and I’m glad I did it. You know, it’s such a three-part story of an agent’s behind-the-scenes stuff, the pro tour development, and then the third thread is the growth of sports management.
