Sky’s the limit for Horizon and McDowell

A TELEPHONE call at the end of last year from Graeme McDowell, at the time a promising if slightly under achieving professional, to Conor Ridge, managing director of Horizon Sports Management, drastically changed both men’s golfing world.

At the time, the two men were no more than nodding acquaintances but McDowell knew about Ridge’s company and how it could help propel his career forward at a time when he feared it was stagnating in the care of Chubby Chandler’s massive International Sports Management (ISM).

McDowell was just the kind of golfer Ridge needed to raise the image of his company, which, he admits, was struggling badly against giants of the business like ISM and the International Management Group (IMG). Up to then Horizon had been relying on largely unproven Irish golfers like David Higgins, Stephen Browne, Michael Hoey and Colm Moriarty to make an impression, but it wasn’t happening.

“I got the impression he was a little unsettled with ISM and wanted something new and different,” explains Ridge. “We weren’t particularly friendly. He knew who I was but that was about it. For me, Graeme was always an ISM player and one of Chubby’s guys. Anyway, I was thinking, why would he want to talk to me? I thought he was untouchable.

“But it was he who rang me and said he’d be interested in meeting with me and hearing what I thought about different things. He wanted a bit of advice as to what he should do with his career. It was after he had finished third in the Volvo Masters at Valderrama and we agreed to meet up. I couldn’t believe it. This was the break I was looking for.”

You only have to watch McDowell and Ridge to realise they were made for each other. They are roughly the same age, the golfer 29, the manager 32, and are extremely driven individuals. They will be sitting down at Oakland Hills this week with Chandler to discuss some deals that ISM put together for McDowell. The whole thing according to Ridge is “amicable, although I won’t pretend that they are exactly delighted he left and especially because of the way he has gone this year”.

Victory in the Ballantines Championship and the Scottish Open led to Graeme’s current automatic place on the European Ryder Cup standings and has played a huge part in the ongoing development of Horizon Sports. They now employ six people in a modern office in Dublin’s Leeson Street as opposed to a converted basement not so very long ago.

“The way the industry works, and it’s the same for all management companies, is that you take a percentage of what the player makes on the golf course and a percentage of what you make for them,” says Ridge.

“When Graeme arrived, he had two or three deals in place which ISM did for him. But I knew they were all expiring at the end of this year. So it was only in 2008 that they were being paid for those deals. And a year is nothing. His biggest deal now is with Callaway and we put that together.”

There was, of course, a lot of pressure on Horizon, especially if McDowell hadn’t performed under the new set-up. Ridge knew that only too well but this was the ideal opportunity for the company to prove itself.

“Now we have shot on to a totally different level because we have done a good job for Graeme,” he claims. “He has been very vocal about it and it’s not as if he’s being paid to make favourable comments about us. When he joined us, he was 120th in the world. Now he is 31st. He hadn’t won for three and a half years. Now he’s won twice and he’s almost in the Ryder Cup team.”

Ridge’s profile has soared since the arrival of McDowell and now players who didn’t know him at all are aware of who he is. He is confident some of these will also sign up with Horizon and says he has “a couple of guys on the radar — none of whom are Irish — that hopefully I will get to talk to at the end of the year. That’s the next step for us.

“There’s a new generation coming through in Europe and if we could pick up one or two of those alongside Graeme, then we’re getting a seat at the top table. IMG and ISM are still the big players but they’re actually so big that there are opportunities to get guys.”

Conor casts an envious eye towards the Stockholm-based company Sportyard, headed by Johan Eliot. They boast an impressive portfolio of clients including Robert Karlsson, Henrik Stenson, Niclas Fasth and Johan Edfors and really struck gold by signing German Martin Kaymar.

“That was a big coup,” he acknowledges. “Johan has a model I’m looking at. He’s where I want to be in a couple of years time. He’s like us in a way. He’s Scandinavian-orientated but is now spreading his wings.”

Conor Ridge spent the first 16 years of his life in his native Galway before the family moved to Dublin. He did a commerce degree in UCD and a Masters in marketing at the Smurfit Business School before moving to Australia. He worked there for more than two years with the Canon camera company, which is hugely involved in sports sponsorship, and picked up some invaluable experience It was much the same on his return to Ireland with Drury Sports Management; with Drury’s not too interested in the player management side, he decided to set up his own company a few years earlier than he had intended.

“I could never believe there wasn’t an Irish management company. If there had been a company in Ireland at the time that was experienced enough and capable of managing Pádraig Harrington and Paul McGinley when they turned pro, would they have gone with them? Of course they would. Definitely.

“I did it because there was an opportunity there that hadn’t been explored before.”

It was an uphill battle for most of the time and deals with Puma, whom he still represents in Ireland, and two or three others, were putting the bread on the table. By the end of 2005, Horizon had Stephen Browne, Michael Hoey and David Higgins on the European Tour and Colm Moriarty and Justin Kehoe and a few others on the Challenge Tour.

“So we went into 2006 with high hopes but the three lads lost their Tour cards and Colm lost his Challenge Tour card which was unthinkable for a guy of his talents,” Conor recalls.

“I’m not going to lie. At the end of 2006, I thought, ‘what are we doing here?’ The company was still Colin Morrissey and myself, two people operating out of a basement office.

“We needed to attract a few bigger players by the end of 2007 or otherwise we would have needed to make a call on things. I was pretty confident, though, because we had put so much time and work into it and we knew we were good at what we do. Then Graeme came along.”