FedEx Cup is cut-throat

By Neville Leck Last updated: 7th September 2009

A handful of the golfs biggest stars earn as much from their sponsorships as some of the best athletes in the other high profile sports earn as a wage.

Tiger Woods, who is reputed to pull in something between $80 and $100 million dollars in advertising revenue in a single year, is one of them, Phil Mickelson ($40 to $50 million) another.

But in general your regular Tour player has, week after week, to earn his money by making sure he wins or finishes high up in what ever tournament he is playing in.

Miss the cut and he misses a pay day - in stark contrast to many other highly paid professionals who command a fortune in weekly wages, regardless of whether they play, sit on the bench or even stay in bed with a twisted ankle or a bout of flu.

And if anything illustrates this cut-throat aspect of the golf, it's the FedExc Cup play-offs which started off last week with the PGA Tour's 125 highest-paid golfers of the season playing in The Barclays for a total purse of 7.5 million and a first prize of $1.35 mil.

Here 25 missed a cut that saw just 100 golfers go through to next week's Deutsche Bank Championship where once more the total purse is $7.5m and the first prize slightly a tad lower (why?) at $1.26m.

Thirty players fall out of the race here and just 70 will head on to the BMW Championship where the purse and first prize remain unchanged,

Another 40 players will get the chop after that and only 30, who by this time will have banked a fair bit of cash merely by keeping themselves in the race, will go through to the big climax - the Players Championship.

The prize fund and first prize once more remain as they were for the previous two tournaments, but the big incentive here is that the player who has accumulated the most FedEx points at the end of the Players, both from the qualifying contest leading up to the play-offs and in the actual play-off events themselves, will win the $10 million Dollar bonanza.

And this even if he doesn't win the Players as was the case last year when Vijay Singh ran off with the big money.

So who were the unlucky 25 to miss out on playing this week? And, indeed, which players by dint of good fortune or good play, was able to go through when nobody expected it.

Lets start with the good news...

Heath Slocum was 124th on the FedEx standings when he teed off at Liberty National last week, but he not only improved his position dramatically, to third place, he actually won The Barclays with big guns Tiger Woods, the FedEx leader, Padraig Harrington and Ernie Els breathing down his neck.

By the way, their joint second places hosted Els from 47th to 11th and Harrington, a two-time major winner last year, but a long, slow starter this one, from 66th to 14th and put them both into contention..

The Bad news?

Among some of the stars who fell by the wayside are former World Top tenners Adam Scott and KJ Choi, Open winners Ben Curtis, Mark Cacalcavecchia, and Tom Hamilton and Ryder Cup players Chris DiMarco, Steve Flesch and Chris Riley, who only last week was a strong contender to win the Wyndham Championship.

That's six of the 25 who missed the cut.

The other 19 were George McNeil, Matt Bettencourt, Michaekl Allen, Robert Garrigus, Arron Baddeley, James Driscol, Jeff Quinney, Tim Herron, Bill Lunde, Alex Cejka, Harrison Frazer, Vaughan Taylor, Chris Stroud, David Mathis, Joe Ogilvie, Roland Thatcher and Jeff Maggert.

The big question now - who will the next 30 be?

Neville Leck