How Low Can You Go?

Before anyone asks, there are some things I would never do for money. This is one of them.

From the March issue of Golf Magazine:


Team Frank:

Billionaire drink baron Sidney Frank loves golf so much, he pays others to play for him.

Like many golf lovers, he rises daily at dawn, stumbles out of bed and treks to the course. But Sidney Frank, 85, doesn't bring his clubs. Once a 6-handicap, the liquor magnate and former owner of Grey Goose vodka confesses that he quit "when my wife started outdriving me." Yet six days a week he holds court in his cart, eating organic plums and directing his squad of three-to-five hired golf guns, who each earn more than $100,000 annually to play for Frank's amusement. It's good to be a billionaire.

Frank founded his real-life fantasy team in 1994 at Rancho Santa Fe Farms Golf Club near San Diego, one of his eight private clubs. "Sidney came down the stairs and asked if there were any young pros interested in traveling the world and playing golf," says Rick Zeiller, 32, a marketing VP at Sidney Frank Importing and, at the time, an assistant pro at the club. "I raised my hand. Before I knew it, I'd quit school, broke up with my girlfriend and was playing every day."

Nice work if you can get it, though sleeping in isn't an option. During warmer months, they meet daily before first light in Westchester County, New York, at Frank's Spanish ranch home. After breakfast they take his black, bulletproof Maybach to, say, Trump National or, come winter, a club in the San Diego area. The group plays serious golf while their commander coaches, referees and calls the play-by-play. Like any good boss, he rewards good performance, and is always ready to peel bills from a large wad of cash: $100 for eagles, $500 for the day's low score, $1,000 for a course record.

Before joining Frank's team, his guys were club pros, college coaches or hopefuls scraping by in golf’s minor leagues. "As a teaching pro, I rarely got to play," says Jeff Fujimoto, 31, who came aboard in 2003. "I went from playing once or twice a week to playing every day."

In addition to salaries and bonuses, the man who last year sold Grey Goose for $2 billion spends thousands to cover his pros' entry fees and travel costs for tournaments or qualifying schools and has scouts scouring the country for promising amateurs. "He'd love to see us make the PGA Tour," says Travis Williams, 32, a Frank protege playing on the Grey Goose Gateway Tour this year. If we play well, any one of us can do it." When not chasing their Tour dreams, they're hopping a chartered 727 to Barbados or the Bahamas. "We like to look around and say, 'Where's a good place to play?' " Frank says.

He's just along for the ride, but it's the next best thing to swinging. And if some consider it an odd way to spend one's fortune, so be it. "No one in my family objects," Frank says. "Why would they? I've made them all rich."


(Shudder)

You can just feel the purgatory of this existence oozing from every smug sentence, can't you? And how about that “before I knew it I’d quit school and split with my girlfriend.”? What profundity. What a sense of responsibility.

Golf at its best is a way of making the wait for death seem longer than it really is. Didn’t John Peel say that whenever he heard that a friend of his had taken up golf, he mentally crossed them off his list of the living?

I mean, I enjoy a bit of humiliation as much as the next man, providing the next man is a high court judge, but what could be lower than a life like this?