Most of you know that professional golfer Tiger Woods was the first athlete in history to make more than 1 billion dollars through his athletic endeavors. It didn’t hurt that most tournaments he won were worth in the area of a million bucks and it got greater with each major championship.
In fact, the suggestion is winning a Masters title at Augusta, while worth more than a million in prize money, is worth many millions more in endorsements. Tiger has won the Masters four times and claimed PGA titles on 10 other occasions.
Having said that 1 billion dollars is an awful lot of money and not easily attainable even if you are Tiger Woods.
Today you will learn how it can happen that he earns money without playing. Watching a recent PGA event with a sporting goods salesman I stumbled on a most interesting subject. On that day Tiger was wearing an orange golf shirt, one that I had not seen before. The salesman told me that that shirt was new to the Tiger collection and now that he had put it on public display it would be available for sale. But get this. If a person in Hoboken, New Jersey took a liking to that shirt and wanted one like it he could order it from his pro shop as of that day. But it would take one year for delivery.
The next step in the process would be the fan’s golf pro would order the shirt from a distributor of Tiger products and the pro would have to pay $70 for the shirt up front. Then of course he would add his profit margin to the deal. Bottom line no matter what he sells that shirt to the fan for the $70 goes to Tiger and his company or companies.
The salesman said that even with all of Tiger’s difficulties off the course over the last few years he is still the most popular golfer in the world and a year from the day Tiger introduced his orange shirt courses the world over will see players in the same piece of apparel. He suggested selling one million of the shirts around the world would not be out of the question.
And that, boys and girls, is how you can become the richest athlete in the world and sport’s first billionaire.
But in writing about Tiger’s wealth I remember something that was sent to me years ago regarding one of the greatest basketball players in history, Michael Jordan. It took me awhile to find it but got a wee bit lucky and these are apparently true numbers. Apparently when he retired it was with $40 million tucked away which means, or meant at that time he makes $178,000 a day, working or not.
Someone then took it further and said that also means while sleeping seven hours a night he makes $52,000, going to a movie might cost him $12 but while watching he will earn $18,000, and if he decides to boil a five minute egg he’ll make more than $600.
There’s more, though. He would make $3700 while watching one episode of The Big Bang Theory and if he paid $200 for a round of golf his bank account would bulge by nearly $34,000 while he played. The researchers took it further to determine that if you were given one penny for every $10 he made you could live on a nice salary of $65,000 a year.
This is the cruncher, though, on Jordan’s wealth. This year, he’ll make more than twice as much as all United States past presidents for all their terms combined.
What I’m saying is athletes simply make too much money for doing what you and I would do for nothing if we had the talent.
Still, the athlete can’t be blamed but you can point a finger at the owner who lets it happen. I’ve said my piece and feel better already.
Anyway I was an athlete at one time, unpaid by the way, but since I broke a hip a couple of years back exercise always seems to be on the back burner. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that hit home. It read: “I didn’t make it to the gym today. That’s five years in a row.” Now that is hilarious.
Today’s joke is more of a question. If lawyers can be disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed and drycleaners depressed?
