Every pro golfer has to build his personal brand in two directions at once.
The first is aspirational. He’s won X, Y and Z tournaments. Nobody drives/putts/closes like he does. And he uses Acme clubs, clearly the most essential clubs available to the public since the Stone Age.
That’s easy. Every pro in every sport can do that.
The second direction is defensive, which is specific to golf and harder.
You want to make a movie villain villainous before he says anything? Show him practising his putting. Golf has a bunch of knee-jerk negative connotations – rich, entitled, old, out of touch.
That’s why golfers are always so desperate to sell you on their regular-guy status, even when you know they fly private. This is why wives and children must always be gathered at the 18th green, why the frivolity is so forced at the Ryder Cup and explains the tendency of men who were raised in northern California to talk like Arkansas smallholders.
It’s on everyone to keep up this act. When one golfer falls down on the job, everyone else feels it, too.
No one in recent memory has done the tribe more of an injury than Phil Mickelson with his comments on human rights, dark money and which is more important.
Mickelson told a journalist that the Saudi government is an unsavoury business partner, but that leveraging it against the PGA Tour was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
As stupid-things-athletes-say go, this is nowhere close to the top of the list. Is anyone surprised that someone like Mickelson would think this way?
That’s the problem.
People assume golfers are like this because golfers probably are like that. Because most people are like that – morally principled, as long as those principles don’t get too far in the way of their interests.
Golfers work overtime to convince people otherwise. In one unguarded moment, Mickelson undid a lot of expensive PR work.
That it happened isn’t surprising either. Little good ever comes of talking to journalists. That lesson is apparently impossible to teach famous people, as they keep doing it.
Least surprising of all was Mickelson’s inevitable apology. It was stuck somewhere between legal boilerplate, family values bumpf and self-pity. All very par for the course no golfer ever wants to play.
That was a month ago. On Monday, it was confirmed that for the first time in almost 30 years, Mickelson will miss the coming Masters.
Now that’s surprising.
After doing the stupid thing, Mickelson did the expected thing. He admitted he’d done it (although never quite admitting fault) and said sorry. Sort of. Close enough to resemble real contrition.
Then he went away for a few weeks and let the news cycle dilute the outrage.
That formula has been working like a charm for a long, long time. Unless there’s video of whatever you did wrong, that formula hardly ever fails.
Clearly, it hasn’t worked in this instance. If it had, Mickelson would be out there at Augusta looking to high-five some winsome child in the gallery after making an impossible approach shot. Anything to make him seem aspirational and approachable again.
It suggests we may be in a small, transformative moment wherein people have stopped trusting the formula.
The transformation of the professional athlete from admired celebrity to one-man/woman superbrand roughly coincides with an extended period of steady economic growth and unusual political stability in the Western world – the 1990s to around now.
When everyone was doing pretty well for themselves, it didn’t seem ridiculous that a guy who swings a stick for a living might make 100 or 200 times the median wage.
To a certain way of thinking, it flattered all of us. When society wanted to see how far we’d come, we just had to look at what a centrefielder cost 50 years ago and what one costs now. That’s progress.
But the good times never go on forever. That’s why they call them “good times” instead of just “times.”
Eventually, attitudes will shift the way attitudes always do – slowly and then all of a sudden.
Right now, if not exactly ending, the good times are certainly ebbing. Inflation’s running wild, climate scientists are telling us to smoke ‘em if we got ‘em and world war is no longer just a useful plot device. People are angry, unsettled and dividing into increasingly intransigent political camps. The centre is holding, but the gyre is widening.
If you’re feeling less than hopeful about the state of things, a common way to dull that pain is finding someone to blame for it.
With that in mind, there is no fatter Western target than the celebrity industrial complex. Athletes are especially vulnerable because we know exactly how much they make.
A few years ago, it was: “Woo hoo, we got money to burn. Bring on the luxury boxes.: Some day soon, it might be: “The money’s all burnt. Anyone know the address of someone who’s still got some?”
In that environment, popping off about how you want to lever a quasi-enemy of the state to add a zero to your paycheque is going to have more serious consequences than a couple of bank sponsorships.
We’re not there yet. But aside from a few savants, when has anyone ever seen the deluge coming? The only thing for certain is that it shows up eventually.
Maybe golf is sensing preshocks slightly ahead of everyone else in the sports world. Maybe that’s why Mickelson either isn’t welcome or doesn’t feel welcome at golf’s premier event.
Or maybe the good times aren’t ending for sports or anyone else. Maybe this is just a temporary dip before another, even better series of good times.
For the first time in a long while, it seems smart to prepare as if things are headed the other way.
Cathal Kelly