Recently I was enjoying listening to Colin Cowherd from ESPN chatting on the radio. His topic was Tiger Woods and the ongoing struggles he has had to regain top form. The news had just come out that Tiger was not going to play in the US Open. As Colin riffed about Tiger, he began to dig deeper into something that is not really as much an issue for Tiger, but more a concern for the nation.
Colin expressed the reality that Tiger has very little incentive to push through the pain to regain top form. Of course, most golf fans know that Tiger is chasing the record of Championship victories of Jack Nicklaus. Jack won 18 major championships from 1962 to 1986. Tiger won his first major in 1997 and has a total of 14, with his last coming at the 2008 US Open, which he won in gritty fashion working through a major leg injury. Most people know, though, that subsequently, in 2009, major family marriage issues exploded and Tiger has, well, really not been the Tiger Woods that we came to know over that 11 year period.
Colin, though, noted an amazing fact (amazing to me, at least). In 2010, Tiger’s earnings for the year were $85 million dollars. Eighty-Five Million. Let that sink in. That’s over seven million dollars a month. And, he didn’t even play.
Now, I’ve checked to make sure Colin was on the money, and Sports Illustrated has a different figure, at $62 million. And, Tiger did play in 2010 and won $2 million, but the point is just as stark. The man made $60 million dollars, $5 million dollars a month, just with endorsements. Cowherd went on then to point out that Arnold Palmer’s top year was $35,000. That was also a bit of an understatement since his top year was six figures. Over the 28 years of his major PGA career, Palmer averaged $76,000, though the early years and the latter years were much lower.
So what, you may ask. $76,000 in 1975 was still a very high income, and you would be right. But, where Cowherd was correct was the idea that not only did Woods income that came from NOT playing was so high as to impact his desire to return, but the amount of money far exceeds the average person.
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2009, the median (the middle salary figure of all US households, which is typically lower than the “mean” or what we often consider the average—i.e., all salaries added up and divided by total number of entries)—the median salary in 2009 was $49,777. Woods income in endorsements was 1,205 times higher than the average dude. Palmer, by contrast, won $206,000 in 1967. The median income in the US then was $7,974. Palmer was twenty-five times more than the basic family income.
Do you see it? Wondering what is really wrong with our country, there it is. While you may really care if Woods gets back to form or not, the real focus on inquiry should be on this growing split of wealth in the country. This is not the first time we’ve seen this crisis.
In the 1890s, people began to notice a similar trend—a growing maldistribution of wealth. The concern over money in that period is what led to new political parties like the Populist Party, and reformers like Jacob Riis and Jane Addams. Though in the following years, the “Progressive Movement” came to support a variety of ideas hoping to change the country, World War I interrupted those attempts.
The USA came out of the war as the lone success, financially superior to all of the other nations around the world. The Roaring Twenties then masked the issue of a continued divide of wealth: a superior upper class which controlled a huge amount of the nation’s wealth (approximately 5% of the country controlled over 40% of all wealth). By 1929, this division contributed to the worst Depression in our national experience.
The idea of Woods having 1,205 times more income than the median American family underscores how close we are to a similar nightmare.