There are a lot of exciting things happening in the golf world lately. The PGA Tour is getting ready to go to East Lake for the FedEX Cup and Tour Championship, the LIV and PGA Tour stuff is hard to make sense of, mostly because I really don’t think that we are getting the full story on what is going on. Plus Billy Walters and Phil Mickelson simply can’t control themselves since Walters wrote his book.
Phil was always one of my favorite players especially after he won the PGA Championship at 50 years old at Kiawah. I hope you did what I did and placed a little wager on Phil at 303-1 odds.
I didn’t get a chance to read Mr. Walter’s book, “Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk”, co-authored by Armen Keteyian. However, I’ve heard that Billy claims that Phil has placed over $1 billion… with a B, I think that is 9 zeros and he says he doesn’t know anyone that has bet more individually than Phil.
Unbelievable betting tales are no stranger to golf. Don’t forget about the rumors that Eli Callaway bailed out John Daly when he owed over 600 million dollars from betting. It is just hard to fathom that kind of money, maybe it’s just inflated for the shock value, who knows.
According to a search on google, Phil has career earnings of over 800M and currently has a net worth right now of 300M, I guess he has put some of that in play. 300M at just 2 percent interest is 6M a year. It is hard to believe that someone would put that much money in play, but I guess at some point it starts to feel like Monopoly money for those who have so much wealth.
Phil is quite the character, at one of the 84 Lumber events I was working during football season I witnessed a fan yell to Phil and asked him who he liked that weekend. Phil stopped, turned and yelled out all of his bets and what the spread was for each game.
I enjoy almost everything when it comes to golf. But, I simply do not have a lot to say about the PGA Tour/LIV deal in the news a lot lately, mainly because I don’t really care. How LIV got from being a hated entity by the PGA Tour, Headquarters and the Players, to going into business together is mind blowing. What happened By Tom Beeler Tom Beeler is a Certified Class “A” PGA Professional and is the Head Golf Professional at Youghiogheny CC in his hometown of Elizabeth, PA. He is a Member of the PGA of America and the Tri-State PGA, in 2019, Mr. Beeler was named the 2019 PGA Professional of the Year. Tom is also a Certified Rules Official, if you have a Rules of Golf question for him, you may email him at tjbgolfent@pga.com. to Greg Norman? Now it seems that possibly part of the agreement was to push him out of the equation. Only time will tell but at this point, I don’t think many fans care.
One of the most exciting things to happen with golf this year was the players heading to East Lake, what an incredible place and it has the history to go along with it. This is the place where the legendary Bobby Jones learned to play and is the oldest Club in the city of Atlanta.
Since 2005, East Lake has been the home of the Tour Championship and two years before the FedEX Cup. The grand opening of this 18-hole course and the Clubhouse took place on July 4, 1908. Young Bobby Jones and his father were there and Donald Ross was later hired to redesign the golf course in 1913. As they say, the rest is history. I enjoy the history of golf and hopefully you do as well. As always, hit them straight and I hope to run into many of you while doing what we enjoy the best. Playing the game we all love.
