The Golf Digest 50

Money, sings Cyndi Lauper, changes everything. Money, the Beatles insist, is what they want. And money, as we are told in the musical "Cabaret," makes the world go round. Maybe Cyndi, the Fab Four and Sally Bowles should have taken up golf. The ka-ching of the cash register hit its highest note yet in 2007, as the minimum needed to qualify for the fifth annual Golf Digest 50 all-encompassing money list topped $4 million for the first time and Tiger Woods earned more than $22 million in prize money and approached $100 million in off-course earnings.

Several remarkable occurrences affected the financial landscape of professional golf last year:

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The PGA Tour poured more than $30 million into the game via the FedEx Cup, and by moving the Tour Championship to September, it freed big-name players to make autumn a windfall of appearance fees by competing -- for a price -- in Japan, Korea, Malaysia and China.

"I'm very thankful that Barclays has made it possible for me to come to play the Barclays Singapore Open," said Phil Mickelson, cleverly mentioning the sponsor's name twice in one sentence, a barely veiled reference to the seven-figure appearance fee he got for a rare -- for him -- trip to Asia.

"How can I say it?" Ernie Els adds. "At the end of the year you've got the wheelbarrow out." As one multiple major-championship winner once said: "The best place to finish in an overseas event is second. You get a good check, justify your appearance fee and don't have to go back to defend."

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An unprecedented seven players in one year -- four women and three men -- experienced the lucrative joy of winning a first major championship. For the men, winning a major triggers performance bonuses and drives up appearance fees that can mean several million dollars immediately and much more when new endorsement deals are signed.

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The financial benefit, like the endorsement deals, is less for the women but is still hundreds of thousands immediately and more later. A first-time male major winner's earnings "will generally double and, depending on the circumstances, could easily go up by a multiple of 10," says IMG's Guy Kinnings, whose London office handles British Open champion Padraig Harrington. "The global impact of a major victory provides the ability to get to territories that perhaps you wouldn't have gotten to before and invitations to tournaments at the end of the season."

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Tiger surpassed the $100-million mark in career winnings and topped $750 million in overall career earnings. Tiger remains not only the dominant player in the game and the premier cash cow in all of sports, but he has also pulled his colleagues into prosperity. It's good to be king in golf, but it's not bad to be a prince or princess, either. Just 20 years ago, Curtis Strange became the first golfer to win $1 million in a season. In 2007, 158 players passed that milestone: 99 on the PGA Tour, 15 on the Champions Tour, seven LPGA Tour players and 37 from assorted tours. In 1996, the year Woods turned pro, nine players won $1 million on the PGA Tour, Tom Lehman leading at almost $1.8 million and No. 125 pulling in nearly $170,000.

My how Tiger has changed things. This year, Woods won almost $23 million when you include tour and overseas winnings and the $10 million FedEx Cup bonus. No. 125 banked more than $785,000. The Tiger money, which started with the massive TV deal the tour negotiated in May 1997 -- a month after Woods' 12-stroke romp in the Masters got a record 14.1 TV rating -- kicked in during the 1999 season and has resulted in a 510-percent increase in No. 1 money since 1996 and a 368-percent boost in No. 125 money. And that's not including FedEx Cup bonuses.

The women's game also has been enriched. In 1988, the leading money-winner on the LPGA Tour earned more than $350,000. This year Lorena Ochoa topped the list with $4,364,994. Prize money grew from $26.5 million in 1996 to more than $54 million in 2007.

In the five years of the Golf Digest 50, the No. 50 position has moved from $2,733,950 to $4,249,676. Woods made $99.8 million off the golf course in 2007 and totaled more than $122 million for the year -- blowing past the $100-million barrier for the first time. His earnings and endorsement-money total of $769,440,709 puts him on pace to become the first $1 billion athlete (see chart).

In Major League Baseball, where the average salary was $2,699,292 in 2006, the opportunities for added value are nowhere near what they are in golf. Only players of a Derek Jeter status get national endorsement deals, and the winner's share for the World Series in 2007 was $308,236 -- about what Jim Furyk got for finishing 11th in FedEx Cup points. And baseball players don't get paid to design ballparks the way golfers do to design courses. The course-construction boom in Asia has been very lucrative for players.