Rainmaker is the new book by Hughes Norton, former agent to Tiger Woods and Greg Norman
There was a time when Hughes Norton would have featured high up on our list of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Golf. He was a real-life Jerry Maguire, a man once described as the ‘most powerfully hated agent in golf’.
For the better part of three decades, Norton managed the lives and affairs of the best golfers on the planet. Seve Ballesteros (temporarily), David Duval, Tom Watson, Hal Sutton, Lanny Wadkins, Peter Jacobsen and Curtis Strange were all on his books at IMG. There were several more besides, though
it was his relationships with Greg Norman and Tiger Woods that dominate the pages of an engrossing new book about the cut-throat world of sports management.
In Rainmaker, co-written with former Golf magazine editor George Peper, Norton takes readers behind the scenes at IMG and provides a colorful and critical account of the negotiations and betrayals that led to his meteoric rise and abrupt downfall.
The book opens with Norton’s greatest success story: the day he officially joined Team Tiger in August 1996 and orchestrated a $60 million deal (before bonuses) for Tiger to endorse Titleist and Nike over the next five years.
“Never has a sports agent in any sport, not just golf, set up his client at the beginning of his or her professional career as successfully as I did,” he says now.
“Here’s this kid, who hasn’t even hit a ball as a professional, and he has $60 million guaranteed over the next five years, which is like $100 million or more in today’s money. Even if he had missed every cut in his first year, all that was guaranteed.
And there was more to come. Twenty-five million dollars from Amex for five years, $4.6 million per year for three years from a Japanese beverage maker, another $250,000 from Wheaties to be the face of their cereal… Norton set Tiger up for life, only to then be cast aside two years later. He recalls the exact moment, on September 26, 1998, when an “emotionless Tiger stood zombie-like” at the front door of Isleworth clubhouse and told him he was fired, then walked away. He hasn’t heard from him since.
“The worst part honestly was that there was no explanation,” Norton tells TG. “It’s just so bizarre the way Tiger severs relationships with people in his life, whether it’s caddies or girlfriends or managers. I would love to sit down with Tiger today and say, ‘Flashback 25 years, what was the reason? You never gave me any indication that something was wrong or that you weren’t happy’. That leads into my feelings of betrayal because it was very tough to swallow.”
The loss of Tiger cost Norton his job at IMG just 60 days later, when his mentor and boss Mark McCormick handed him a termination contract over breakfast. He was paid just under $9 million ($16.5 million in today’s money) not to work, nor say anything to the world about his former employee for the next 10 years. But his exile from public life lasted far longer.
It wasn’t until three years ago that he says he finally became relevant again. The civil war between LIV and the PGA Tour inevitably sparked interest in his relationship with two of its main protagonists, which is how his memoir came to be.
“We got lucky in that sense because I don’t think our publishers were that keen on yet another golf book,” explains Norton. “But then all of a sudden our pitch was, ‘Who knows these two protagonists better than Hughes Norton who represented them both?’ That’s what got the deal done.”
Norton describes how he first met Tiger when he was 13 and had posters of Norman and Jack Nicklaus on his bedroom wall. He put his father, Earl, on IMG’s payroll as a junior talent scout and was also responsible for bringing Butch Harmon on board as Tiger’s swing coach. “I spent seven years cultivating a relationship, working with his dad and Tiger. If you talk about a delayed pay-off, it’s probably the longest of all time.”
Norton helped launch Tiger’s celebrity and made a lot of people very rich, including himself. In the first year of their agreement, IMG pocketed $4 million in fees and received 1,545 requests for a piece of Tiger’s time. “We were in the business of pissing off people,” admits Norton. “We had to say no so many times. He would get up at six in the morning just to avoid the crowds to play practice rounds. It was just chaos and the attention really bothered him.
“Fame was something that was uncomfortable for Tiger. It really was. It was an intrusi