Gary McCord explains the player ‘uprising’ that transformed the PGA Tour

As the PGA Tour prepares to enact massive changes in the coming years, including a reduction in the number of fully exempt players, Gary McCord, a former Tour professional and television analyst, remembers a long-ago time when the Tour happened in the opposite direction. direction.

In the 1980s, the Tour dramatically increased the number of fully exempt players eligible for tournament play, and McCord wasn’t just there to experience it, he was the man who initiated the transformation.

In the latest episode of Kostis & McCord: Off Their Rockers, McCord revealed the complicated story of how, as a little-known pro, he became the face of sea change in professional golf.

The story begins in the early 1980s, when current rules allowed 60 fully exempt players who automatically qualified for all Tour events. Special exemptions would make up much of the rest of the field. This meant that all regular pros outside the top 60 were forced to qualify for tournaments each week on Monday, with around 40 players fighting for 15 spots.

It was a system that offered little security to anyone outside of the Tour’s most successful professionals. At the Doral Tour event in 1983, McCord had completed his qualifying round when problems with the existing bye system began to crystallize.

“I was at the Doral qualifier, we’re sitting there and they’re putting up the scores, and I’m looking, and I start looking at the names that are there,” McCord began.

In those names, McCord saw many proven Tour winners, identifying Miller Barber, owner of 11 PGA Tour victories, and Don January, 10-time winner, as two examples.

“I started adding them up, and there were 54 tournament wins by guys who qualified for Doral on Monday. And I said to myself, “This is a horrible system. “, explained McCord. “You literally have a group of guys, I mean 200 guys, traveling every week with nowhere to go except to try to get into this field. And I don’t make a cent. What do we do? Why not expand this thing?

McCord then recounted how he looked up the NFL roster at the time and discovered there were 1,078 players.

“I made the top 60 my sophomore year, 1975, and made $58,000 – I had to spend 100 of that to get the 58,” McCord continued. “We weren’t going anywhere as a sport.”

With that, McCord decided things needed to change, so he returned home and took four weeks off. During this period, he delved into all the various exemptions used by the Tour to create a field of 144 players.

From his research, he determined that the Tour and its players would be much better off increasing the number of fully exempt spots each year. So what? He decided that the first group of people to run it were players not in the top 60 who were required to qualify each week.

“I want to do this as a union uprising,” McCord joked. “I want to address the guys who are going to be kicked out of the Tour, and if they like it, then talk about it en masse.”

So McCord went to an opposite-field Tour event in Tallahassee and called a meeting in the banquet hall of the Holiday Inn where many players were staying, putting up posters around the area to try to convince the players to come. He had hoped that 30 players would participate, but that was far from the target. More than a hundred pros showed up.

He stood up in front of a large crowd and sold his idea.

“Guys, look, I think we need a change, an expansion, to give everyone a chance to plan their lives and try to make a living in the ’80s,” McCord explained. “Here’s the deal. We have 105 guys. If 50 or more people say “yes,” I’ll go to the Tour and say “hey, I have this program here that we think should be looked at for the PGA Tour to run underneath.”

He ended up convincing 80 players to support his plan. “More than the majority, much more.” Two weeks after executing his plan on the PGA Tour channel, then-commissioner Dean Beaman called and asked McCord to meet with him at the PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra, Florida.

Once there, McCord delivered his speech to Beaman, before sitting down and expecting to receive punishment, if not a suspension, for his player’s “uprising.” Instead, he was surprised to find that the commissioner was already on the same page.

“(Beaman) said, ‘We need a change, and you’re the one who can do it,'” McCord said.

Beaman then opened a safe and presented McCord with a massive change to the Tour that they were already considering. In short, this involved splitting the Tour into a domestic league and an American league, having a draft to fill each league, and then running separate 15-event seasons for each league. The following year, players changed leagues so that each player visited a particular tournament every two years.

The commissioner then asked McCord to come to an upcoming board meeting and present both the National-American League idea and his own fully exempt tour plan to board members, including luminaries like Jack Nicklaus.

When he did, a major problem arose with the dual league concept, brought up by Lanny Wadkins. If a player competed in a Tour event in his hometown, he would have to skip it every two years. This caused the plan to fail.

Instead, they all voted and approved McCord’s concept of a Tour featuring 125 fully exempt players, a huge increase from the existing system of 60 fully exempt players.

To hear McCord’s full story from the horse’s mouth, watch the video at the top of the page. You can watch the entire episode of Kostis & McCord: Off Their Rockers on YouTube here.

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