The staggering greed of American golfers is reflected in the Ryder Cup payment plan

As a measure of how obscene their demands are, it is worth drawing a parallel with Olympic athletes. Lord Coe caused a firestorm this year when, as president of World Athletics, he decided that athletics gold medalists would receive $50,000 (£39,000) each at the Paris Games.

The move sparked an immediate backlash, with even Andy Anson, CEO of the British Olympic Association, describing the move as inappropriate. But it was at least partially defensible: after all, the athletes who were paid to do so were the outstanding performers in a truly global sport, many of whom devoted years of modestly paid labor to superhuman feats.

The same reasoning hardly applies to Cantlay and his ilk. They spend all year round, drowning in cash every year, with ‘signature events’ such as the RBC Heritage in South Carolina – hardly the Olympics in terms of global profile – raising more than $700,000 (£550,000) in part from fifth place. Of course, even this pales next to the bounties offered by LIV, with Jon Rahm able to earn a bonus of over £14 million for winning a series of tournaments watched by few outside Greg Norman’s living room. The Ryder Cup would be the only week in which this cult of individualism could be forgotten.

The soul of a great game is being eroded

Unfortunately, golf is now a world where personal enrichment trumps any collective triumph. You look for reassurance in the words of Rory McIlroy, who says he would pay for the privilege of being part of a European Ryder Cup team. But even he isn’t 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 gesture of ‘Bunsen burner, nice little earner ‘. But to be fair, he may be the least financially motivated of his peers, and he acknowledged this year that he was “tired of the money talk in golf.”

The latest reward for his Ryder Cup opponents is the most grotesque look yet. They certainly don’t lack huge earning opportunities just before and after next year’s event at Bethpage. The competition falls squarely between the Tour Championship in Atlanta, with a £20 million first prize for whoever tops the FedEx Cup standings, and a period of the season filled with lucrative exhibitions. It’s a time of year when, as Ernie Els used to put it, “you’ve got the wheelbarrow outside – you want to make some money.”

Nowadays it seems too much to ask that Americans can even park their wheelbarrows for a week. Some of the more honorable figures of yesteryear saw this moment coming: In 1999, when demands from American players for a share of Ryder Cup winnings surfaced earlier, Tom Lehman said he feared they would eventually be labeled as “greedy, weak, whiny brats”. . Give that man the gold for clairvoyance.

Because that’s exactly what his successors are: a group of outrageous jocks whose selfishness is matched only by their venality. The average business partner who descends on Bethpage Black in ten months will look like Mother Teresa next to those he wants to win. Little by little, the soul of a great game is being eroded by a few golfers’ cowardly belief that too much is never enough.