The world`s best-compensated athlete is so over the hill, he`ll soon get into movies at half price.
The May 21 Sports Illustrated proves that youth isn`t always served, as it tallies the top-ranking athletes in 1989 endorsements and appearance fees. The list is an intriguing aside in a profile of Chicago native Mark McCormack (”The Most Powerful Man in Sports”), founder of Cleveland`s International Management Group, the big cheese in sports management.
Sorry, Michael Jordan, the leader of the pack is a McCormack client who hasn`t won much of anything for 16 years: golfer Arnold Palmer.
The charismatic Palmer, 60, viewed as a key to golf`s 1960s emergence as a popular, much-televised sport, totaled less than $3 million in career earnings on the regular tour (he now plays a seniors tour for those 50 and older). But last year he earned $12.5 million in endorsements and appearance fees.
McCormack`s company, which represents 12 of the top 27 earners (and takes about a 25 percent cut), helped create a Palmer colossus. It includes two aviation agencies, golf-management and golf-course-design firms, and six auto dealerships with $900 million in annual sales.
”And how does (McCormack) leverage work to Palmer`s benefit?” writer E.M. Swift asks. A simple example: In 1988 Hertz not only paid Palmer $400,000 for being a company spokesman but also bought more than 60,000 cars from his dealerships.
The most widely licensed name in Japan? It`s Palmer, not Ralph Lauren or Miss Piggy. ”It graces things ranging from tearooms to car deodorizers.”
Trailing Palmer in the 1989 endorsement-appearance fee derby were golfer Greg Norman ($10 million), tennis player Boris Becker ($8 million), golf`s Jack Nicklaus, tennis player Steffi Graf ($6 million) and, in a mere sixth place, basketball icon Jordan ($6 million).
Notice anything, baseball and football fans? Of the top 27, 10 are golfers and nine play tennis. There`s just one footballer (Joe Montana, $2.25 million) and not one baseball player.
The May 18 issue of Catholic Commonweal tough-mindedly inspects allegations of financial and sexual wrongdoing against New York Rev. Bruce Ritter, who quit as boss of the biggest shelter program for runaway and homeless kids. An editorial chides the church for giving its shepherd
”unchecked dominion over an $88 million pasture,” and two former officials find the agency ”dangerously out of touch” with its aims and afflicted by ”the street culture of casual manipulation, deceit, unchecked self-aggrandizement, and scorn for conventional standards of behavior” that was its context for being.
May 28 Business Week includes a depressing reminder: The government could have solved the savings and loan problem, by shutting insolvent thrifts and paying off depositors, for $20 billion in 1985. That figure would now be $155 billion. Add interest and administrative costs, and a conservative estimate of total taxpayer cost is $325 billion. . . . June Changing Times asks balanced budgeters Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) how they handle their personal finances, but a Rudman aide called back to say ”he couldn`t get his boss to focus on the subject.”
June Good Housekeeping unveils a health poll of 2,512 women that indicates 25 percent of women who think bad habits or family history place them at risk for coronary/circulatory disease, breast cancer or osteoporosis
”do absolutely nothing to better their chances of staying well.”
. . . May 28 Time is a bit overwrought on emergency room care (”Until the emergency room is made safe for emergencies, no one will be safe”) but its cover story does a good job outlining understaffing and lack of financing afflicting medicine`s front lines.
John Updike turns design historian as he analyzes the ”elemental clarity of spirit” in the thrifty wooden houses of Ipswich, Mass., which has more 17th Century homes than any town in the land, in May Architectural Digest. . . . May Harrowsmith Country Life suggests that botany, as well as the priesthood, entails an act of faith as it profiles John Fiala, a Roman Catholic priest and an internationally recognized breeder of the, count `em, 23 species of lilacs.
And May 31 New York Review of Books includes John Fairbank, America`s seminal China scholar, writing that Mao Tse-tung was a gifted leader who began with high ideals but ”became a monstrous tyrant whose place in history is with Hitler and Stalin.”
