At the Ryder Cup opening ceremony, in the the Land of the Fee, Luke Donald beat his chest about the purity of his team’s motives. In his captain’s speech, he said his team were fuelled by “pride” and “legacy”, virtue signalling with a wagging finger. Money was beneath them, it seemed.
There was no trace of irony in Donald’s remarks. Sitting behind him were two players who had sold their souls to the Saudis – Jon Rahm for hundreds of millions, Tyrrell Hatton for tens of millions. At least they didn’t come cheap. Dotted around them were players conversant in the language of appearance fees all over the world.
In professional golf, there is no moral high ground. Down the stage from Donald were 12 American players and their captain, sitting cosily on a $200,000 (€229,000) stipend for turning up at golf’s rag week, looking blankly at the Europeans on their high horses. All of them play the same game. They know that.
Donald was asked in a press conference before the event if the captain should be paid, even if his players weren’t. With a smile, he gave the only possible answer.
For Ryder Cup captains, there are well established spin-offs. If they cannot make at least $2 million from guest appearances and their interactions with the corporate world, they need to change their agent.
That is not to question Donald’s motives. The honour comes first.
Golf has a long and tangled relationship with appearance fees. In professional sport, money circulates in a myriad of ways and in golf, there have always been tournaments that gasped for glamour. It was available at a price.
In Ryder Cup week, Seve Ballesteros is venerated as the patron saint of the European team, but in his pomp, Seve was one of the crown princes of appearance fees. In 1981, he didn’t play in the Ryder Cup because of a bitter dispute with the European Tournament Players Division, who had selectively clamped down on the practice.
Ballesteros felt victimised. At the time, he would have been the only European player who could command big appearance fees, but while he was denied an extra wedge, there were no restrictions on tournament organisers courting the biggest American stars to come and play.
Ballesteros left the tour that season and refused to play events in Britain unless they paid for the privilege of his company. One consequence was that he didn’t earn enough qualifying points to claim one of the 10 automatic places on the Ryder Cup team and, given his damaged relationship with the tour’s leadership, he wasn’t offered a wildcard pick.
Ultimately, the European Tour came up with a convenient fudge, just as the PGA Tour did. Appearance fees would be prohibited but “promotional fees” were allowed, which meant that tournament sponsors could stump up whatever was required to entice A-list players.
The Irish Open was one of Ballesteros’s favourite clients. When he won the event three times in the mid-1980s, in front of enormous crowds at Portmarnock and Royal Dublin, the sponsors always felt they got bang for their buck.
In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the Irish Open was never afraid to cast its net wide. It was common to have at least one high-profile American in the field: Tom Watson, Ben Crenshaw, Hubert Green and a host of others. Greg Norman played in the Irish Open when he was one of the hottest golfers on the planet.
This policy, though, reached a nadir of sorts with John Daly at Druids Glen in 1999. Daly hadn’t taken a drink for two years, but his personal life was a mess and his golf game was dangerously unstable. In his previous 31 events, he had missed the cut or walked off 18 times.
A couple of weeks before coming to Ireland, he made the cut at the US Open but finished last, signing for an 83 in his final round. That score included an 11 where he was guilty of hitting a moving ball.
Murphy’s, the stout brand, were the tournament sponsor and Daly appeared on the billboards next to a catchline of “One good round deserves another”. Using a recovering alcoholic in this way was widely regarded as tasteless at best, but Daly didn’t complain. He needed the money.
His monthly alimony payments were $40,000 and his reported appearance fee worked out at more than $155,000, which was about half of the winner’s cheque. For further context into the size of that fee, Daly’s total earnings from prize money that season were a little over $200,000.
In the event, he produced a typically eccentric performance. Having scrambled to survive the cut, he posted an 81 on Saturday, the worst score in round three. On the final day, he shot 74 in a breakneck two hours and 15 minutes.
Did the sponsors get value for money? He was in the news, he drew the largest galleries for most of the week, he was the face of their event for months in advance.
What changed over time was the sheer scale of the payments. When Tiger Woods turned up at a European Tour event in Germany 25 years ago, he was reportedly paid $1 million, which was widely regarded as the first seven-figure appearance fee in golf. Lee Westwood, who won the tournament, received a winner’s cheque smaller than Woods’ appearance fee.
“Look what he’s brought to this tournament,” Paul McGinley said at the time. “There are more spectators, there’s more media interest, more prize money, more world ranking points. Everyone benefits. I think he’s worth every penny.”
The numbers continued to spiral upwards. When Justin Rose played at the Indonesian Open in 2018, he was reportedly paid $1.5 million, twice the total prize fund for the tournament. A year later, Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson were both paid $1.5 million to appear at the Saudi International.
Between now and the end of the year, some of the world’s biggest stars will appear at events in Asia, Australia and South Africa, not in a spirit of adventure but because somebody is paying them handsomely to turn up.
This is the game golf plays. It was petty and venal for the American players to demand money to play in the Ryder Cup, but at least they were being true to themselves. Professional sport is awash with greed.
And the Europeans? In golf, there is no moral high ground.
