When I read earlier this week that Green Bay Packers junior quarterback Jordan Love had signed a four-year, $220 million contract extension, I was at least a little surprised. If Love were to injure his knee or Achilles tendon tomorrow and never play again, he would still be guaranteed a solid $155 million.

Love’s theme is “generational wealth” for the Love family for at least the next four generations. Love carried the board for three years so far while waiting out Aaron Rodgers, and then had a successful 2023 campaign that saw him lead the Packers into the playoffs and swept the Cowboys in the wild card round. Nice job if you can pull it off.

While the money in professional golf isn’t all that glamorous and certainly isn’t guaranteed, it is quite extensive. With the FedEx Cup playoffs on the horizon, the eventual winner of these three tournament series could boost their bankroll by $25 million. Scottie Scheffler currently leads the PGA Tour in earnings, amassing $28,148,691, meaning he could earn well over $50 million come Labor Day. And Scheffler is making big bucks for his endorsement efforts. Yep, that’s a generational fortune for the Scheffler family in golf.

Johnny Pott was a regular on the PGA Tour from 1956 to 1976. An American who won an individual NCAA championship at LSU, Pott won five times on tour and played on three winning Ryder Cup teams. His best season was 1961, when he finished sixth on the money list with $33,268 in his bankroll. Gary Player topped the money list that year with $61,540, while Arnold Palmer was a close second with $61,091. If you look at old-time pictures of golfers like Palmer and Player, you’ll see that there were no endorsement ads on their golf shirts. The only real “deal” in those days was that Amana Refrigerators paid the pros $50 a week to wear an Amana hat and a $50 bonus for television time during a tournament broadcast. It was still a time when many top pros held down secure club jobs.

Over the next decade, golf gained popularity thanks to television revenues and a motley crew of top-tier professionals led by Palmer, Player, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Billy Casper, Julius Boros and others. The money in golf was exponential. Bob Lunn won twice in 1968, finishing 11th on the money list with just over $100,000. When I caddied for him two years later at the 1970 Western Open, his golf bag said Dunlop Maxfli. He was one of the first 15 pros to win six times on the PGA Tour, but he had no sponsorship deal.

Scheffler’s caddy, Ted Scott, is set to earn about 10% of Scottie’s earnings this year. And it’s a generational fortune for a caddy. Of course, there were no professional caddies in the 1960s. There was no money to make a living as a traveling looper. Instead, the pros used caddies from the local club. At the 1970 Western Open, we were teenagers with real jobs trying to finish high school. There were no caddie numbers in those days. Instead, when we got to the first tee, a tournament official gave the three of us different colored T-shirts that said Western Golf Association-1899. If you bought a program back in the day, you could look up Bob Lunn and see that his caddie was wearing a brown T-shirt. That’s how you knew which golfer was in his matchup. By the way, I still have one of his WGA T-shirts hanging in my closet.

Nowadays, pros go to the practice range for the weekly tournament and grab a bag of shag balls, whether they prefer Titleist or Taylor Made of Callaway. They get the exact brand, whether it’s ProV1 or ProV1x. In those formative years on tour, pros carried a shag bag that was more like a bowling bag. Lunn had a Maxfli bag full of balls from previous rounds of golf.

We’d go to the range, hit balls, then I’d run to the driving range to get his balls, first 60 yards, then 100 yards, then 125 yards, and so on. The problem was, I was one of 50 or 60 kids at a time picking up my golfer’s practice balls. I remember being particularly nervous on Friday morning when Dave Hill was hitting golf balls next to Lunn. The problem was, when I was 100 yards out, Hill had tied his single irons right over my head. Everybody lived through that week, but I don’t know how they lived through it. I guess you could say that Beverly Country Club was very safety-conscious because they had a shelf full of baseball bat helmets that said White Sox or Cubs. We were South Side Chicago kids, and nobody bought a Cubs helmet, even though it was the heyday of Erne Banks, Ron Santo, Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins.

Time flies, and so does money. Taylor Swift makes more money than Elvis Presley or the Beatles could ever dream of, so it makes sense that Jordan Love is in a better financial position than Bart Starr. Still, I will always remember having lunch with Johnny Pott at Perry’s Deli one summer afternoon. “You know, John, I can’t get over how much money these kids make these days,” he said. And neither can most of us.