Page 91 - SHARP Summer 2024

“The list of agent requirements is so long. You don’t get to the top level of any enterprise — but especially not sports — unless you are egocentric, you are self-centred, you are selfish. You have to be, because it’s so excruciatingly difficult and time-consuming that you don’t have time for the niceties of life, or to be a normal person.” Greg Norman, the 1980s titan of golf known for his gargantuan ego, was a case in point. “Part of my job, every once in a while, when Greg was pontificating about this or that, was to say: ‘Greg, let me tell you something. You’re completely full of shit.’”
The courage and the candour to tell the world’s biggest stars when they might be wrong — in a sea of yes-men and hangers-on — was often Norton’s greatest asset. Woods, for the most part, appreciated the directness and clarity with which Norton honed his image. It was Norton’s idea, for example, to streamline the Nike endorsement deal down to just a small tick on his chest and a tick on his cap — the now-iconic, confident minimalism that seemed so neatly to mimic Woods’s own calm and clean game; a simplicity that stood in stark contrast to some players, whose agents plastered them in logos as if they were monster truck drivers. This didn’t stop Phil Knight, the enigmatic founder of Nike, attempting to bypass Norton at “the 11th hour” and cut him out of the deal in order to save the player and the brand a few percentage points in commission. “Earl Woods, to his everlasting credit, said no,” says Norton. “But it was a blockbuster attempted betrayal.”
(Knight, he says, is “a very elusive little character. He had these odd traits. He ran a shoe company and you couldn’t go into his office
without taking your shoes off. It was very bizarre.”)
This shared history made Norton’s eventual sacking, when it did come, all the more painful. I ask him whether he feels, more than a quarter of a century on, like he understands the decision any better. “To this day, all that matters to Tiger is golf. Practising and working and competing and winning championships. And the money, quite extraordinarily, was not only secondary to that, it was an intrusion into his life. You had to go do photo sessions. You had to make commercials. You had to talk to writers. He hated all that.” Norton kept the player’s endorsement hours manageably low, but even so, Woods seemed to find that part of the job a huge irritant. “And so, in looking back, I really probably over-delivered at a time in his life when he just wasn’t ready for it. But again, I’m speculating here.” Woods and Norton have not exchanged a single word since that day in 1998. “I had started working with this guy when he was 12 years old,” he says. “And thinking about it now, I had set Tiger up financially for life. But he would never tell me what happened. And interestingly enough, everyone that he’s broken off with — whether it’s his caddies, whether it’s his swing coaches — it’s just a case of: when you’re done, you’re done. And you’re out of his life, and he
never explains why, and he’s just gone.”
“You’re human,” Norton says. “You try to be this badass agent,
but at the end of the day, you can’t help but feel empty and sort of just want an explanation. So now to revisit it all these years later, I really felt energized by it. It was extraordinary. It was almost like a part of me coming alive again after all these years.”
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