Page 90 - SHARP Summer 2024

UP AND DOWN
THE RISE, FALL, AND RISE OF HUGHES NORTON, GOLF’S ORIGINAL SUPERAGENT
By Joseph Bullmore Illustrations by Claudine Derksen
I N THE SUMMER OF 1998, THE MAGAZINE GOLF WORLD RAN
a cover that featured a photo of Tiger Woods, his father Earl, and a man named Hughes Norton. The line below their faces read: “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” It was hyperbolic, but only slightly. Here were the hallowed figures sent from the heavens to save golf as we knew it, the cover story seemed to say. And there, on equal footing with the Woodses in that new Holy Trinity, was Hughes Norton — a mythical, magical, almost otherworldly entity in sporting circles at the time; the superagent who minted more than $120 million in endorsement deals for the most exciting golfer in history.
Just two months later, Norton was cast out of the kingdom. Not so much Holy Ghost as left for dead. After years of working at the heart of Tiger Woods’s famously tight entourage, Norton was called up by the player one morning in late September 1998. “He just said ‘I want to make a change,’” Norton recalls now, chatting to me from his home in Cleveland, Ohio. “He said: Yep, it’s over.’”
Norton was completely blindsided. “And I said, ‘Well, Tiger, let me come down to Florida. Let’s talk about this.’” Woods told him not to bother. No point. The decision had been made. “I was flabbergasted,” Norton said. “I flew down there anyway. He reluctantly came to meet
me. He was a zombie — his eyes were completely dead. He looked at me. He said: ‘I told you not to come down here. It’s over with.’ And he turned and walked away. And I’ve never heard a word since.”
The years leading up to that fateful day — and the fallout afterwards — are the subject of a new book that Norton has co-written with the golf writer George Peper. It’s called Rainmaker, and the title is instructive. In his long, storied career at IMG’s burgeoning golf division, Norton made it rain like no other. He oversaw a period of explosive wealth in golf, and became one of the most powerful people in sport. In 1997, when Woods sunk his final putt on the 18th to take home the Masters at the age of just 21, the first three people he embraced were his father, his mother, and Hughes Norton. I ask him what it was like to revisit those heady days — and the dramatic downfall that followed — in the process of putting the book together.
“It was cathartic for me,” he says now. “I think that’s the best description, because there was a lot of bad stuff at the end. I’d done a job for Tiger Woods that even today people say is the most unbelievable starting foundation that an agent has ever produced for any professional athlete,” he says. “But it’s not that I needed redemption so much. It’s just that there was an empty feeling with how it all ended.”
Norton sees the book as an all-access invitation into golf’s first big bang era — a period whose mores and mindsets vibrate though the game today, not least in the current controversy surrounding LIV Golf and the injection of sovereign wealth into the sport. But it’s also, he hopes, a glimpse into the day-to-day life of high-flying agents — “the everyday blocking and tackling” — and a job defined, in the popular consciousness, by larger-than-life characters like Jerry Maguire (“Show me the money!”) or the brash, furious Ari Gold in Entourage. The reality of the role, he says, is far more subtle and nuanced than these caricatures — as much psychologist, gatekeeper, and mentor as deal-maker or money-spinner.
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