The runway at the former Royal Air Force base at Leuchars, northwest of St. Andrews, is full of private jets at this time of year. Almost all of them belong to the businessmen who have taken the week off to respond to the invitation of one of them, South African Johann Rupert, the second richest man in his country thanks to his performance as chairman of the Richemond group, which shelters among other luxury brands Cartier, Panerai and Montblanc.
For 40 years, even before one of his properties served as a venue for talks between De Klerk and Mandela to bring peace to his country, Rupert has hosted a major golf tournament every year. Until 2000 it was a kind of World Cup for countries. Since then it has become a tournament with a double classification. The regular one as a tournament to ‘stroke play’, sum of strokes, and another in which the professional together with an amateur form a team during the four days. It is rotated through the courses of St. Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns and on Sunday those who make the cut play the final round at the home of golf.
There is no such concentration of power in a sporting activity. The list of fans, spiced up with sports stars who bring the spotlight to each edition, such as Van Basten or Lineker in that first edition in 2001, or Canadian ice hockey legend Wayne Gretsky, surfer Kelly Slater and local tennis player Andy Murray now, looks like the Forbes list. Also Hollywood stars such as Bill Murray, Michael Douglas – accompanied in Scotland by Catherine Zeta Jones – and Matthew Goode, and musicians such as singer Ronan Keating, Mike Rutherford (Genesis) or Bon Jovi drummer Tico Torres, complete the mosaic.
The unique list of golfers in Fife County should be headed by Yasir Al Rumayyan. He chairs the Saudi Arabian Public Fund, the company that runs LIV Golf. He also chairs Aramco, the oil company whose market value is $155 billion, the third largest company in the world after Apple and Microsoft, which it surpasses when oil goes crazy.
There’s Allen Zhang, the creator of WeChat, the Chinese competitor to WhatsApp; Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo; Michael Bloomberg, the communications magnate and former mayor of New York; Hansjorg Wyss, 90, a Swiss philanthropist for climate causes – he has donated more than $1 billion in his lifetime – and co-owner of Chelsea, and also Pawan Munjal, the chief executive of Hero MotoCorp, an Indian company that makes six million motorcycles a year, five times more than are assembled in Europe.
Their biographies would make for a treatise. Englishman Mark Madden runs Novak Djokovic’s business; Michael Lund, the owner of Pandora, the world’s largest volume low-cost jewellery company, believes that in sport “there is a lot of honesty. You don’t succeed if you’re not willing to work hard”. Drew Fleming is the president of the Breeder’s Cup, the most important horse racing meeting in the United States, and boasts two holes-in-one in his life. Neal ElAtrache is an eminent orthopaedic surgeon in sport, head of medical services for the Dodgers and Rams in Los Angeles and has operated on Tom Brady among others.
Ernesto Bertarelli, who became a 4-handicap, was the Swiss billionaire who managed with Alinghi to alter the world order by winning the America’s Cup, which he defended in Valencia in 2007; Abudallah Al Naboodah is the president of the Phoenix Capital fund that bought the Dubai basketball team and Giuseppe Ciucci, an Italian who made his fortune in oil and wine in South Africa, acquired at auction in London the so-called democracy flag with the signatures of Mandela, De Klerk and Thebo Mbeki, vice president with the great African leader, for 17,200 euros in 2010 to return it to the government of the country.
Money and its great hobby are mixed in 18 holes over three days. As selfless as Gerry McManus, the brother of J.P., owner of one of the most famous stables in the world, an enthusiastic car collector who among his fleet sports a Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta that belonged to Eric Clapton, another who uses golf as relaxation therapy.
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