EXCLUSIVE: “Tiger was unbelievably self-centered, there was a total lack of empathy

There was a time when Hughes Norton would have featured high up on our list of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Golf. He was a real-life Jerry Maguire, a man once described as the ‘most powerfully hated agent in golf’.

For the better part of three decades, Norton managed the lives and affairs of the best golfers on the planet. Seve Ballesteros (temporarily), David Duval, Tom Watson, Hal Sutton, Lanny Wadkins, Peter Jacobsen, Curtis Strange, and LPGA great Nancy Lopez were all on his books at IMG. The list goes on, though it was his relationships with Greg Norman and Tiger Woods that dominate the pages of an engrossing new book about the cut-throat world of sports management.

In Rainmaker, co-written with former Golf magazine editor George Peper, Norton takes readers behind the scenes at IMG and provides a colorful and critical account of the negotiations and betrayals that led to his meteoric rise and abrupt downfall.

The book opens with Norton’s greatest success story: the day he officially joined Team Tiger in August 1996 and orchestrated a $60 million deal (before bonuses) for Tiger to endorse Titleist and Nike over the next five years.

“Never has a sports agent in any sport, not just golf, set up his client at the beginning of his or her professional career as successfully as I did,” he says now.

Here’s this kid, who hasn’t even hit a ball as a professional, and he has $60 million guaranteed over the next five years, which is like $100 million or more in today’s money. Even if he had missed every cut in his first year, all that was guaranteed.