@Sheamus

Yesterday, Tiger Woods picked up a cheque for $10 million for coming second in the PGA Tour Championship.

Phil Mickelson won the season-ending golf tournament with a final round 65. "Let me see if I get this straight,” asked Phil, “I shot 65 and he shot 70 and gets a check for $10m?”

I should probably expand on this by adding that Mickelson was joking, and that the $10 million that Woods received was for placing first overall in the season-long FedEx Cup.

Still, ten million is ten million. The top athletes earn obscene amounts of money. As do movie stars. And musicians – I for one did not shed a tear when the credit crunch dug into Paul McCartney’s estimated $700 million fortune.

$700 million! Nobody needs that kind of money nor, more importantly, deserves it. Not even an icon like McCartney. The music of The Beatles may have changed the world, but McCartney undid an awful lot of that with Wings.

Here’s my point: during hard times, people like to point fingers, and they like to point them at bankers. It’s certainly true that the bonuses that the investment banks have been handing out to their staff are excessive and, certainly when the banks themselves have been bailed out, insulting. And I certainly do not have a problem with Gordon Brown’s plans to introduce legislation to control these payments. (Bankers aside, nor I imagine does anybody else.)

So why, then, is nobody cracking down on the prize money given to athletes like Tiger Woods? Or the huge salaries commanded by Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and many others in the movie business? Why are The Beatles allowed to rake in a load more money that they don’t need with a video game?

In many respects, the entertainment and sports industries are as self-regulating as any other. If you have a series of movie flops, you’re unlikely to be given $25m for your next film. If you miss the cut five weeks in a row, you’re probably not going to picking up that $10m Tour Championship bonus.

But the differences between the remuneration potential for the stars in sports and entertainment and those in the world of finance are considerable. If you have a very bad year trading commodities, you can actually lose everything you have. Not just your job – everything.

Tom Cruise hasn’t had a major hit since Mission Impossible III in 2006. His last film, Valkyrie, made about $200m worldwide, but was budgeted at $90m, and Cruise himself received $20m in advance, and 20 per cent of the backend. A huge amount for what many perceived to be an underperformer, both commercially and critically.

Tiger Woods has had a good year – his 68.84 scoring average is amongst his very-best – but by his high standards it’s actually been disappointing. He hasn’t picked up one of golf’s major tournaments since the 2008 US Open. Woods played just 17 events in 2009, winning six, and that was enough for him to earn over $10m in prize money, plus the $10m bonus he picked up yesterday.

Of course, for both Cruise and Woods, these earnings from their ‘real’ jobs are simply the icing on the cake. The real money is in endorsements. And this is where the superstars have an opportunity to keep earning vast sums of money, even when their films and TV shows are flopping and they’re three-putting every green.

While it’s certainly true that if they never perform again ultimately their advertising opportunities will dry up, do you really think it’s going to happen for Tiger Woods and Tom Cruise anytime soon? Woods is arguably the world’s greatest living brand, and is tipped to pass one billion dollars in overall earnings in 2010. Cruise, even with wave after wave of questionable publicity and a lack of (Cruise-like) success at the box office isn’t going away anytime soon, nor are his immense salary demands.

In the real world, and that includes bankers as much as it does you and I, a couple of years of massive underperformance means you’re not only out of a job, but likely massively out of pocket, too. There are no endorsement opportunities. There is no senior tour, or lucrative after-dinner speaker circuit. It’s game over.

I’m not defending bankers. Far from it – if you lose a lot of money, certainly if it’s client money, then you should not only be held financially responsible (i.e., with no bonus payment), you should probably be fired, too.

What I don’t like is that it’s all very much one rule for one. Sure, penalise and legislate the banks and the bankers, but let’s do something about the obscene payments in the sports and entertainment industries, too.

And then pass that saving on to the rest of us, with a huge reduction in ticket, DVD, CD and merchandise prices. Because if the stars are earning a lot less, then so should the studios, labels and clubs, too.