Monday, November 27, 2006

Tween bling

Golf's $20,000,000 girl

Ahhh, 3 subjects that would catch any guy's attention: golf, a dollar sign followed buy a lot of zeros, and a girl.
But to have all three? A veritable tri-fecta? A cornicopic combination? A three-fer?

Well, if you read the November issue of Golf Digest: "What people in golf make", you will see that this is not hyperbole. She, in fact, has a bag tag.

Her name is Michelle Wie.

Yes, the same Wie that I've sided and chided over the past year, as have countless others.
She has put herself first on the front lines of cannon-fodder-prone media-types whom have directly or indirectly created such a hype for her, that she rivals Tiger Woods as the most important person in golf for our era.
She has the perfect recipe for a girl that has never seen a home ec room: challenge the status-quo, mix in a generous helping of media, and top it all off with advertisers want to be the candles on the cake.


And she thanks you...um...all the way to the bank.

What we all need to realize, is that it doesn't matter what we think about her decisions. Last I checked, my bank account has not had any deposits in it from the things-I-think-about-Wie-department....

...but hers has. Let's count it up:

$19.5 million: endorsements and appearances.
Just under $1 million in prize money...so far in 2006.

That is $20 million in one-year's wages...and she is only 17!

Did you know that you'd have to save $3,000/month for 37 years at a 9% rate of return (with 3% inflation) just to end up with half of we she just made this year?!

So the next time I "challenge" her decisions, I'm going to remember one thing:

Compound interest.


Thanks for reading. Keep it in the short-grass,

JFB

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow, great blog. i live on oahu and i'm embarrassed of being on the same island as mw. as you pointed out what the mainstream media and even the local media don't have the backbone to point out is that it's all about the money. sure she's a laughing stock, but all the way to the bank. question is whether she has integrity. she'll have to live with that. at this point all those who embrace her should think about their own unworthy child with a chance to cheat the mega corps to gain a windfall before everyone catches on. mw is not a golfing phenom, she's a cash poser. thank you very much. a few years from now, we'll revisit the one hit wonder. but mw couldn't even achieve that.

Anonymous said...

Tiger changed the landscape for young golfers, marketing execs don't want to miss the next phenomenon.