Michael Douglas — actor, golfer, producer, writer — has a new memoir out, called “One Helluva Ride.” In it he reveals that he and his wife, the actor Catherine Zeta-Jones, play golf every afternoon. Douglas is way into it. He’s played a bunch at Pebble Beach and in the AT&T pro-am, and he has surely never stood on 18, considered how much ocean to bite off and uttered the three-word sentence he made famous: “Greed is good.” The immortal line is delivered by Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street,” with his slicked-back hair, late-Reagan suspenders and superior manner. Nice suits, too — if you like that kind of suit.
Greed is not good. That’s the stand we take in this bureau and maybe you do in yours — hard to say. As a matter of golf-course decision-making, greed’s a killer. In matters of personal and public finance, in matters of career and social aspiration, greed will take you out. Maybe I should add the all-you-can-eat Marriott buffet to this list. Too much is too much there, too. Greed really will take you out of the mix, sooner or later. Greed is insatiable.
Jon Rahm, the great and bearded Spanish golfer living a big American life in suburban Phoenix, is finding that out now. My fealty is to the PGA Tour, my fealty is to the PGA Tour, my fealty is to the PGA Tour. That was his lovely catchphrase, until it was not. For some meager and proffered sum from LIV Golf and its Saudi backers — $300 million or $400 million or whatever — he decided that his fealty was not to the PGA Tour.
Among the people I casually polled, there were two broad responses.
1. He had to go LIV, for that kind of money?
You’d then hear somebody prattle on about “generational wealth,” “dynastic wealth,” “real money.”
2. How disgusting.
You’d then hear this trenchant and sensible question: “When is enough enough?” Rahm already had made $50 million just in PGA Tour earnings over the course of seven seasons. As a U.S. Open winner and a Ryder Cup star, his earning capacity was vast. Or is vast kind of judgy?
There’s something slippery about greed, when trying to figure out what people think about it. There are Wall Street gods who took Gekko’s greed-is-good phrase and turned it into a mantra, even while dissing it in their MSNBC appearances. It’s hard to get to the truth. Like a pollster asking about how you are likely to vote, you might say one thing because it’s convenient with your kids standing right there, and you might do something else behind a voting-booth curtain.
So now there’s confusion about Jon Rahm’s golfing future. He’s likely on the phone every day with lawyers (plural) and agents (ditto). I could not care. I don’t see how LIV Golf did anything to improve professional tournament golf, not at all. And I say that with admiration for Greg Norman. Norman had a dream about creating a world tour that was in the incubator for 30 years. He pursued his dream.
LIV failed as most grand ambitions fail — its problems were in the details, the funding, the format, the inability to work within golf’s ecosystem, the player selection process. (We want you, we don’t want you.) The reason so many of us are drawn to professional golf is because it’s the ultimate meritocracy. Shoot the scores, get the prizes, and nobody cares what prep school your grandfather got thrown out of on his way to Princeton. Scottie Scheffler had it right from the beginning: LIV exists because guys said yes, not because Greg Norman called. You didn’t have to say yes. He didn’t.
Phil, of course, did. (Phil. One-name fame.) Others followed. They went for the money, the petro dollars. Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, took a leave from work, in the name of mental health, the pressure was so great. Last week, he and his pro partner, Niklas Nørgaard, finished a shot out of first on the pro-am side of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, played on Carnoustie, Kingsbarns and the Old Course (two rounds). Must be nice.
Golf’s roots are Scottish, Calvinist, modest, flinty — selfless, really. The point of the rulebook is to make sure all players are treated equally under the law. The first and second generation of American golfers got this in spades. I recently read this for the first time, a coda to Jack Grout’s last will and testament. Jack Grout, if you don’t know the name, was Jack Nicklaus’s lifelong golf instructor and, along with Bobby Jones, a sort of mentor. Grout logged many rounds with Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan. These are the final words of his will; the modesty and selflessness of them might bowl you over:
Having heretofore disposed of all my worldly goods, I have just one final bequest I should like to make. If there is any time at all in the life of a man when he should make an extra effort to be truthful, and at the same time sincere, I think it must be while he is preparing his Last Will and Testament. What I have to say in the next few words comes straight from my heart.
Over the course of the past 30 years or so, from time to time I have read in various books and magazines about the contributions I have made to the career of Jack Nicklaus. Since this may be my last opportunity to do so, I thought maybe it would be well to set the record straight.
In all honesty, I don’t think I ever hurt Jack’s golf game in any way. To put it another way, if he had not come under my tutelage in the early 1950s I don’t see how he could have turned out much better than he did. From the outset of our relationship I recognized that the thunder in his stroke and the courage in his heart were gifts that clearly had been bestowed upon him; and that there was very little I could do to take them away from him.
I do not mean to suggest that I made no contribution whatsoever to his game. For one thing, I worked him hard (and he seemed to enjoy every minute of it). I made him stand away from the ball with his arms fully extended, and I insisted that he swing hard. Within a few months you could hear the swish of his clubhead all over the practice range when he took one of his legendary cuts at the ball. I made sure that his posture was correct; I fitted him correctly with equipment; from time to time I would check his grip, or maybe the rhythm of his swing. I always tried to encourage him; and in the early days of his development I made a special effort to explain to him and interpret for him how extraordinary I thought his talents were, and for that matter still are.
If I made any other worthwhile contributions, which I can’t think of now, or if I made any of which I may be unaware, I am grateful that I had the opportunity to do so. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Jack Nicklaus is the finest golfer ever to swing a club in the entire history of the game. It has been a distinct honor and great pleasure for me to have played some part in his career. And that brings me to my final bequest.
To you, Jack Nicklaus, I give my thanks.
If you really have the gratitude gene, then you know: Greed’s no good.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.
