The staggering greed of US golfers has been laid bare

Patrick Cantlay without a cap
During the 2023 Ryder Cup Patrick Cantlay did not wear his team cap, allegedly in protest at not being paid for his appearance - Jamie Squire/Getty Images

The magic trick in the Ryder Cup’s marketing is that you believe it means more.

You trust that all the Americans’ excesses – the high-fiving, the chest-bumping, the endless references to Phil Mickelson’s practice-round wagers and team-room table tennis – are the product of some deeply-held conviction that this is an event unlike any other.

How quickly the illusion is shattered. As if it is not bleak enough that Patrick Cantlay, a man barely a household name in his own lounge, reputedly refuses to wear a USA cap in protest at this being the one week in 104 in which he is not paid, the PGA of America is now poised to indulge its members’ selfishness by handing them $400,000 (£315,000) each to turn up.

At a stroke, an occasion supposed to be a signal honour of a player’s life is recast as an unseemly cash-grab. Even worse is the fact that nobody seems surprised.

Calling modern golfers greedy is now about as reductive as labelling Formula One drivers fast, with 2½ years of unlimited Saudi largesse fuelling a level of entitlement to make their forebears shudder.

Sir Nick Faldo has explained how at all 11 of his Ryder Cups, he was motivated by glory, not financial reward. But the generation he surveys now are a different breed. In the same way supermodel Linda Evangelista once famously said she “wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000”, those called up to Team USA require 40 times that just to drag themselves to the course.

As a measure of how obscene their demands are, it is worth drawing a parallel with Olympic athletes. Lord Coe sparked a firestorm this year when, as president of World Athletics, he decided that gold medallists in track and field each received $50,000 (£39,000) at the Paris Games.

The move sparked an instant backlash, with even Andy Anson, chief executive of the British Olympic Association, describing the move as inappropriate. But it was at least partially defensible: the sportsmen and women remunerated were, after all, the outstanding performers in a truly global sport, many of them dedicating years of modestly paid toil to superhuman feats.

With Cantlay and his ilk, the same rationale hardly applies. They spend all year, every year drowning in money, with “signature events” such as the RBC Heritage in South Carolina – not exactly the Olympic Games in terms of global profile – offering more than $700,000 (£550,000) for a share of fifth place. Even this pales, of course, alongside the bounties on offer with LIV, where Jon Rahm can earn a bonus of more than £14 million for winning a series of tournaments watched by precious few outside Greg Norman’s living room. The Ryder Cup was supposed to be the one week where this cult of individualism could be forgotten.

The soul of a great game is being hollowed out

Sadly, golf is now a world where personal enrichment trumps any collective triumph. You search for reassurance in the words of Rory McIlroy, who says he would pay for the privilege of being on a European Ryder Cup team. But even he is not averse to celebrating money for its own sake: when he won his second FedEx Cup in 2019, and with it a £12 million prize, he rubbed his fingers together in a “Bunsen burner, nice little earner” gesture. In fairness, though, he is perhaps the least financially motivated of his peer group, acknowledging this year that he was “sick of all the money talk in golf”.

The latest recompense for his Ryder Cup opponents is the most grotesque look yet. It is hardly as if they lack vast earning opportunities immediately before and after next year’s event at Bethpage. The match falls neatly between the Tour Championship in Atlanta, with its £20 million first prize for whoever tops the FedEx Cup standings, and a period of the season stuffed with lucrative exhibitions. It is a time of year when, as Ernie Els used to put it “you’ve got the wheelbarrow out – you want to cash in a little bit.”

Today, it seems too much to ask that the Americans can even put their wheelbarrows away for a week. Some of the more honourable figures of yesteryear saw this moment coming: in 1999, when US players’ demands for a share of Ryder Cup profits previously surfaced, Tom Lehman said he feared they would end up decried as “greedy, wimpy, whiny brats”. Give that man the gold for clairvoyance.

For that is exactly what his successors are: a group of out-of-touch jocks whose selfishness is matched only by their venality. The average corporate bro descending on Bethpage Black in 10 months’ time will look like Mother Teresa next to those he is cheering to win. Piece by piece, the soul of a great game is being hollowed out by a few golfers’ craven conviction that too much is never enough.