Things you find while looking up other things . . .
This article on
tipping is the most interesting article I came across while doing my research for the U.S. Open:
Link: http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-tours-news/2014-09/phil-mickelson-tipping
Excerpts:
Like most things on the PGA Tour not involving golf, tipping has become its own little world. It starts on the Web.com Tour, filled mostly with golfers straight out of college. So the tour assumes a kind of coaching role, preparing players for life in The Show.
After getting tipping pointers during orientation, players get text messages and memos throughout the season, reminding them to tip as they go. At the start of every week, when players check in for tournaments, Web.com Tour staff members collect $20 from each player to give to the locker-room workers on Sunday.
"We're just trying to educate guys," says Jim Duncan, vice president of Rules, Competitions and Administration on the tour. "The Web.com Tour generally doesn't have the kind of resources that make clubs jump up and down because of the money we help them make, but we try to do right by them, and I keep hearing stories about how the staff looks forward to having us back each year." . . .
Like the Web.com Tour, (on the PGA Tour) players are briefed at the start of the season about what's expected in the tipping department--mainly, in the words of Andy Pazder, the executive vice president and chief of operations, "to conduct themselves in a professional manner that's come to be expected of professional golfers."
At the start of each week, tournament officials give locker-room attendants a list of every player in the field. The tour's official tournament regulations stipulate that players are required to tip locker-room attendants a minimum of $50 for the week. In a 156-player field, that comes to at least $7,800 divided among the handful of attendants clubs usually employ.
If players forget--perhaps after a bad round or when they're in a hurry?attendants are encouraged to notify the tour, which will follow up with the specific players and deliver the missing tip. If a player doesn't pay the minimum gratuity, the tour reserves the right to take disciplinary action, but this is never an issue.
"Tournament weeks, it's kind of like the Super Bowl to [locker-room attendants]," Pazder says. "It's grueling and tiring. It's a lot of work, and guys don't get much sleep, but it's also very rewarding." . . .
There's a famous story of a 20-year-old Tiger Woods taking his trophy and preparing to go home after his first PGA Tour victory, in Las Vegas in 1996. Butch Harmon, his coach at the time, stepped in and emptied his pockets to cover for his student. . . .
"On the whole, the guys are good to us," says a locker-room attendant at one popular PGA Tour event. In front of him as he spoke was a gleaming pair of white shoes that he was methodically shining. "It tends to be the foreign or young guys who are a little tight. Like it's a cultural or generational thing."
Tom Weiskopf would also incriminate a few of the older guys. "It's just pathetic," he told Golf Digest's Guy Yocom in 2000. "There are guys you see at the end of the day taking the plastic bag you're supposed to put your golf shoes in and filling it up with beer or soft drinks to take it back to their room or out to their buddies....
GL
