The Real Deal: How Greg Norman built his brand—and taught a generation of tour pros to do the same

I’ve spent more than three decades inside the business of sports, and trust me, the scoreboard rarely tells the whole story. Behind what happens on Sunday are deals being made, bets being taken, egos being managed, money changing hands and plenty of decisions that look a hell of a lot smarter in hindsight. That’s the part of sports I’ve always found fascinating, and it’s why I started The Real Deal podcast.

Every episode I sit down with the people who actually run the business of golf and get them talking about the game behind the game. This one was personal. I've known Greg Norman a long time, and when we decided to build an episode around the biggest shift in sports right now—athletes going from endorsing brands to owning brands—there was really only one place to start. With the guy who was doing it before most of them were born.

Look at the roll call today. The Jordan brand does more than $7 billion a year. Roger Federer left Nike and took equity in On Running instead of a check, and that company carries a market value north of $12 billion. Tiger Woods has earned an estimated $1.8 billion in his career, and roughly 90 percent of it came off the course. Bryson DeChambeau has more than 10 million followers, did more than 250 million YouTube views last year, and he's out buying companies.

Every one of them is running plays Greg Norman drew up more than 30 years ago.

Think about that.

Greg's term for the old way things worked is particularly memorable for me. He said that for the early part of his career he was treated as a pass-through entity. A rented program. The performance on the course was his, and the money it printed for everybody standing around him was theirs. Sign the PGA Tour agreement every January and you hand over your own IP, and if you don't like it, well, where else are you going to play?

Most guys cash the check and never think about it again; Greg refused to let it go.

So, he did the thing almost no athlete did back then. He decided to own his career instead of rent it. Now, I've got skin in this one. My first job out of college was at Reebok, in sales, working for Paul Fireman, the same Paul Fireman who took Greg under his wing and pulled the veil off the whole business for him. Paul taught him what a logo actually is—something that lasts in perpetuity, long after you're gone. Greg still quotes him saying, “You'll be worth more dead than alive.” That’s a hell of a pep talk from your business mentor. That's also not how a golfer operates. That's an owner talking. I got a chance to see up close how Greg purposefully managed his own brand, logo and positioning. Remember the whole “Attack Life” campaign? That’s all him.

He'd learned the flip side, too. He watched Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus build great brands that were still tied to a management company, and he figured out early that management builds equity in its management structure and fees, not in you. So in the early 1990s, he just didn't re-sign, and he went and built his own thing. Former GE CEO Jack Welch, who Greg played a lot of golf with in his heyday, told him once to always find something the masses want. The Greg Norman Collection with its iconic Great White Shark logo was exactly that, and it rode Reebok's distribution straight into the market.

The second takeaway is the one I love most, and the one I lived closest to, because I would later run Cobra Puma Golf myself. Tom Crow, an old friend and a former Australian Amateur champion, had a little club company. Greg signed on as an endorser, and then they came to him with the magic word. Would he invest? He did his homework and took 12 percent. The money he put in was barely more than his annual endorsement fee. He was effectively buying a piece of the company with the company's own money.

Then he did the thing a pure endorser would never bother to do. He told them to earmark his investment for R&D. He'd watched Callaway's Big Bertha selling like hotcakes and he knew where the technology was headed. Out came the oversized King Cobra irons, built to help women and older players get the ball in the air. It was game on.

Acushnet eventually bought Cobra for more than $700 million. Greg's super-sized slice of that started life as an endorsement fee. He put in roughly $1.8 million and walked away with north of $40 million. I’m not a mathematician, but that seems like a smart deal.

Want the difference between owning and renting in one story? That's it.

The last piece is the one that gets Greg fired up, and it runs straight through everything from his own contracts to LIV. The value is in the competition, and you have to fight to get it recognized.

When Greg was on top, his brand and media partners built him contracts where he got paid by the second—literally by how many seconds his logo was on your screen. So, every time Frank Chirkinian of CBS Sports waved him up to the 18th tower with Pat Summerall and Ken Venturi to do an interview, Greg was all in, and was cashing in. I bought that kind of television for a living as a marketer. Watching a player turn airtime into a line item? That's a guy who understood the business better than the people selling it to him—and an incredibly prescient predictor of what would come later in the form of today’s creator economy.

Greg was essentially measuring impressions, engagement and followers before Instagram was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. And to be clear, if somebody was paying me by the second to sit next to Jim Nantz today, I’d be taking my sweet-ass time answering, too.

The same instinct drove LIV. Strip away the noise and Greg's pitch hadn't really changed since his 1993 World Tour idea. Give the players ownership instead of making them pass-through entities. It's part of why Bryson can monetize himself the way he does now, because LIV handed him back his IP. Greg told me he'd have gone global faster and harder if he could run it again, and poked the bear a little less along the way. But he'll also point out that close to $8 billion in private equity has come into golf since 2021, and that the PGA Tour he was fighting is in a better place for it. When he went to Capitol Hill, his line to the senators was that the backbone of America was built on competition. He never got invited back.

My take? Winning creates opportunity. Vision creates lasting value. Greg won plenty: 91 times around the world, including two Open Championships. He was No. 1 for 331 weeks, or more than than six years. But the winning was never the point. It was the foundation, and everything else got built on top of it.

You don’t have to agree with everything Greg Norman has said or done to recognize that he has repeatedly seen changes coming before most people did. And every athlete-owner cashing an equity check today is living in a house the Shark framed out 30 years ago.

That's The Real Deal.