As the PGA Tour prepares to enact massive changes in the coming years, including a reduction in the number of fully-exempt players, former Tour pro and TV analyst Gary McCord is reminded of a time in the distant past when the Tour went in the opposite direction.
Back in the 80s, the Tour greatly increased the amount of fully-exempt players eligible for tournaments, and McCord wasn’t just there to experience it, he was the man who instigated the transformation.
On the latest episode of Kostis & McCord: Off Their Rockers, McCord revealed the complicated tale of how as a little-known pro he became the face of a dramatic change in pro golf.
The story begins back in the early 1980s, when the existing rules allowed for 60 fully-exempt players who were automatically qualified for all Tour events. Special exemptions would make up much of the rest of the field. That meant that any regular pros outside the top 60 were forced to Monday qualify for tournaments each week, with 40 or so players battling for 15 spots.
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It was a system that provided little security to anyone outside of the most successful Tour pros. At the Doral Tour event in 1983, McCord had finished his qualifying round when the problems with the existing exemption system began to crystalize.
“I was at Doral qualifying, we’re sitting in there and they’re posting the scores, and I’m looking, and I’m starting to look at the names that are there,” McCord began.
In those names McCord saw plenty of proven Tour winners, identifying Miller Barber, owner of 11 PGA Tour wins, and 10-time winner Don January, as two examples.
“I started adding them up, and there were 54 tournament wins by guys who were qualifying on Monday for Doral. And I went, ‘This is an awful system.'” McCord explained. “You’ve got literally a bunch of guys, I mean 200 guys, traveling every week with nowhere to go, other than trying to get into this. And not making a penny. What are we doing? Why don’t we expand this thing?”
McCord then related how he looked up the roster of NFL players at the time, and found there were 1,078 players.
“I made the top 60 in my second year, 1975, and I made $58,000 — had to spend 100 to get the 58,” McCord continued. “We were just going nowhere as a sport.”
With that McCord decided things needed to change, so he headed home and took four weeks off. In that time, he did a deep-dive into all of the various exemptions used by the Tour to create 144-player fields.
From his research, he determined the Tour and its players would be much better off increasing the number of fully-exempt spots each year. So what next? He decided the first group of people he should run it by were the players outside the top 60 who were forced to qualify every week.
“I want to do this like a union uprising,” McCord joked. “I want to go to the guys that are going to get kicked off the Tour, and if they like it, then in mass bring it up.”
So McCord traveled to an opposite-field Tour event in Tallahassee and called a meeting at the banquet room of the Holiday Inn where many players were staying, putting up posters in the area to try and convince players to come. He’d hoped to get 30 players to participate, but he was way off. More than a hundred pros showed up.
He stood up in front of the large crowd and sold his idea.
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“Guys look I think we need a change, expansion, give everyone a chance to plan a living and try to make a living in the 80s,” McCord shared. “Here’s the deal. We’ve got 105 guys. If I get 50 or more saying ‘yea’, I will go to the Tour and say ‘hey, I’ve got this program here that we think should be looked at for the PGA Tour to operate underneath.'”
He ended up getting 80 players supporting his plan. “More than the majority, way more.” Two weeks after running his plan up the PGA Tour chain, then-commissioner Dean Beaman called him up and asked McCord to meet with him at PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra, Fla.
When he got there, McCord gave Beaman his spiel, before sitting back and expecting to receive a punishment, even a suspension, for his player “uprising.” Instead, he was surprised to find the commissioner was already on the same page.
“[Beaman] says, ‘We need a change, and you’re the guy who can do it,'” McCord shared.
Beaman then opened a safe and introduced McCord to a massive Tour change they were already considering. In short, it involved splitting the Tour into a National and American League, having a draft to fill each league, then holding separate 15-event seasons for each league. The next year, the players would swap leagues so each player would visit a particular tournament every two years.
The commissioner then asked McCord to go to an upcoming board meeting, and present both the National-American league idea and his own fully-exempt Tour plan to the board members, including luminaries like Jack Nicklaus.
When he did, one major issue arose with the duel-league concept, one brought up by Lanny Wadkins. If a player had a hometown Tour event, they’d have to skip it every other year. That tanked the plan.
Instead, they all voted and approved McCord’s concept of a Tour featuring 125 fully-exempt players, a huge increase from the existing 60 fully-exempt player system.
To hear McCord’s full story from the horse’s mouth, watch the video at the top of the page. You can watch to the entire episode of Kostis & McCord: Off Their Rockers on YouTube here.
