Quote:
Originally Posted by Rococo
When I was in my early 20s, a friend of mine from high school told me that he was going to spend some time trying to make the PGA tour. When I asked him why that was his plan, he said, "thousands of people get paid a lot of money to play a game. Why shouldn't I be one of them?"
This guy was just an OK athlete. He was not a competitive golfer in high school. He didn't play golf in college. He had just been playing a lot recently and had gotten down to a 10 handicap or whatever.
Needless to say, my friend did not end up playing on the PGA tour.
it's actually really interesting because this is very common and a major reason why so many golfers are from wealthy families is because for every tiger who just storms onto the pga tour directly out of college
take jim furyk - one of the best golfers of his generation
all american 2x in college
he went pro in 1992
his big break was in 1993 winning a lower tier tour which got him a pga card for 1994
in 1994 he was just good enough to hold onto his card, in 1995 he won his first event and by 1996 he was an established golfer who was invited to play in all the majors
he only has 17 tour wins, the largest margin he ever won was 3 strokes with the majority of his victories coming in single stroke margins or playoff victories
so it wasn't just show up and crush, even someone considered by many to be one of the best golfers of his generation, a guy who was once the #2 ranked golfer after tiger still had a lot of variance go his way in his career
and he got out of the lower level tours pretty quickly - many established pga tour pros spend years languishing in the lower level tours where they actually lose money because the cost of travel, healthcare, coaching, etc all comes out of their own pocket and their winnings are very low - many people on the lower level tours live out of rvs
when robert garrigus was first coming up and spending time in a platoon between the lower tours and the occasional pga play, he lived with multiple roomates who were strangers he found through linkedin in order to save on housing
right now it's easier than ever - with liv pulling about half of the top 100 golfers in the world out of the pga tour - that created a vacuum where a lot of lower tier guys were able to quickly jump up - many would have needed to wait a few years or probably never made it all
yet despite the massive talent dilution, there hasn't been a super noticeable difference in skill because the guys in the tour below were also quite good and about the same level or just a slight notch below that of their pga superiors
so for a lot of golfers it's not so much talent as "how badly do you want this and how long are you willing to lose money each year chasing that dream and hoping in 3-4 years you'll finally earn your PGA card"
i was friends with an irish guy who for 4 years went heavily into debt chasing his dream in the lower euro tier leagues, he was just a slight hitch away from being as good as the people above him that he continued the grind with the "what if i can improve by one more stroke" mentality and went deep into debt and he was finally forced out not because he had given up, but because he was no longer able to continue living off his credit cards
i met him because he pivoted to coaching and the place where the money for that was in china where he was coaching children of wealthy chinese
it definitely felt like a ponzi scheme because i'd see him at the bar and go talk to him and he'd tell me how he's flying to australia tomorrow to pay a guy 10k for putting lessions and i'm like "wtf why" and he'll be like "this guy coached tiger and now i can tell my clients i've been coached by the guy who coached tiger and if i learn even one thing from this guy that's worth way more than 10k to me"
