Allow Gary McCord to remind us of his small but critical role that he played in shaping the PGA Tour as we've known it for more than four decades.
Last month, Gary McCord was packing up a few odds and ends at his summer home in Colorado when he stumbled across an old, leather-bound briefcase and sat down to rummaged through it. What he discovered was a treasure trove of documents from what felt like a lifetime ago but never has seemed more relevant.
“God damned if I haven't got the binder with all of the information I had when I pitched the All-Exempt Tour in 1981, everything,” McCord told Golfweek in a recent phone interview. “I started looking at it and I'm going, ‘Holy crap, I did a lot of work.’ I spent about seven weeks on it.”
The Tour's resolution of McCord’s bold idea to increase the number of exempt players led to 125 players becoming exempt beginning in 1983, a concept he jokes that he wished he copyrighted because nearly every major golf tour adopted some version of the practice. But next month the PGA Tour’s top 125 will be no more, reduced to the top 100 earning cards for the 2026 season. It’s one of the most significant changes since the existential threat of LIV Golf forced the Tour to challenge and update its business model. Before the top 125 exempt status gets lowered and it becomes that much harder to play in golf’s big leagues, it's worth remembering how we got here. Allow McCord to remind us of his small but critical role that he played in shaping the Tour as we've known it for more than four decades.
To properly do so, let's track back more than 50 years ago when McCord turned professional and finished second behind Ben Crenshaw at the Tour’s 1973 Q-School. All it earned him at the time was the privilege to enter Monday qualifying. McCord’s first such attempt happened to be at the 1974 L.A. Open in January. He was assigned to Los Serranos Country Club, where 180 hopefuls battled for one spot; a separate field of 180 tried for the other available spot at Hillcrest Country Club. “Your picture was on a milk carton if you didn’t shoot 65,” McCord said as only he can of the difficult odds just to get a start on Tour.
For McCord and so many others like him, this was a way of life. At the time, the top 60 from last year’s money standings were exempt from qualifying each week. So were any top 25 finishers in the particular tournament being contested from the previous year, and anyone who made the cut at the most recent tournament. For everyone else, Monday awaited. McCord made the top-60 only once in nine seasons between 1973 and 1982. He was a perennial rabbit, a term established players used to describe non-exempt players who jumped from event to event hoping to earn a spot that week via a Monday qualifier.
McCord pointed to a Monday in Miami at the 1981 Doral Open when he began to entertain the possibilities of a better way. Warming up on the range beside him were multi-time winners Miller Barber, Don January and Frank Beard. The result that day was another failed Monday for McCord. When he got home, he counted the collective wins achieved by the Monday qualifier field, and the number surpassed 50. Over the course of the next month, he poured over stats from the last few years and made an important discovery: In 1980, 69 percent of the Tour – comprising 93 exempt and 210 non-exempt player – qualified through Monday events. Even more revealing: Based on his estimated annual minimum earnings needed to break-even after expenses, McCord calculated 76 percent of Tour competitors couldn’t make ends meet. He resolved that the number of exempt players should increase from 60 to a figure closer to 144, the typical size of a full-field event. He took the idea to Joe Porter, a former Tour pro who had been the first non-exempt player elected to the policy board (in 1977). Porter was intrigued and asked McCord how he was going to sell it to the players. McCord wasn’t the first to realize that the life of a non-exempt player was a gypsy experience at best. Those who failed had to hang around until the next qualifying round. They would find a course near the next tournament and scare up a game playing each other for what little money they had. Meanwhile, they incurred the same travel and living expenses as the exempt players. The life of a rabbit meant continuously chasing the proverbial carrot, but the very players who could least afford such financial tolls were the ones most burdened by the system in place. “It was an ever-evolving trip down the toilet was what it was,” McCord said.
When he stepped down as the Tour’s first commissioner in February 1974, Joe Dey listed the defeat of his qualifying changes as one of his greatest regrets. “Monday qualifying is not the best means. It is not commensurate to the Tour operation,” he told Golf World after he announced his retirement. “It is bush.”
Deane Beman, a former player, succeeded Dey and had played in the system and realized its shortcomings were too long to list. But the same issue — lack of player support — that derailed Dey’s effort six years earlier had stalled the creation of Beman’s attempt at an All-Exempt Tour, too.
“You’re never going to get the turkey to vote in favor of Thanksgiving,” is how Monday qualifying veteran Mike Donald put it in "Deane Beman: Golf's Driving Force, a book detailing the Tour's many successes under Beman's 20-year tenure. “Guys didn’t want to be demoted.”
McCord remembered how players Phil Rodgers and Fred Marti had proposed a similar plan during Dey’s tenure as commissioner and handed it off to Dey to generate the requisite support. That didn’t work. Neither did Bob Murphy’s effort with Beman a few years earlier. McCord decided no one could champion his plan and rally the troops better than he could. “I wanted it to be like a labor union uprising,” McCord said. “I didn't want to present it from the top down. I want to present it from the bottom up.”
He pitched it to his guys, “the Monday’s Children,” at a second-tier event, the 1981 Tallahassee Open held in mid-April. Since most of the players were staying at the Holiday Inn that week, McCord asked the hotel’s general manager if he could use its conference center as meeting space. He then posted flyers at the course and in the hotel lobby and told anyone he ran into – from players sitting by the pool to those practicing on the putting green – that he had a new way to play the Tour.
“When you call a meeting on the PGA Tour, you might get 10 guys to show up — and that's if there's a free bar in there or something,” McCord said.
His hook? Find out how you can plan your schedule in advance. Word spread. Over 100 players showed up. [McCord recalled the number as 105.] He told them if a majority raised their hand in support of his plan, he would bring the initiative to Beman.
“And everybody went, ‘OK,’ so I presented it and they're asking all sorts of questions, really good questions, I remember. I don't know how long I was up there but when I’d answered the final question, I said, ‘Show of hands,’ and I'm thinking I got like 80 percent in favor,” recalled McCord.
Next, he shared the idea with Mike Crosthwaite, the Tour’s director of player-sponsor relations. Three days later, McCord received a phone call requesting his presence in Ponte Vedra Beach to meet with Beman, who was troubled by the inequality the existing system created. Sixty players could arrange their lives. The rest of the field couldn’t plan their schedule, earn outside income by playing pro-ams or corporate outings on Monday and Tuesday, and didn’t even know when they were going to get home to see their wife and kids. Monday qualifiers viewed a tournament with a different perspective. First they had to qualify on Monday. Then they concentrated on making the cut on Friday (and earning exempt status next week). Finally, they played the weekend to make money and earn a top-25 finish (and an invite back next year). Beman listened to McCord’s plan with great interest and realized it aligned with his own beliefs. He had failed to sell it to the players, but he could see that’s where McCord excelled.
“Gary was a bright guy. I was delighted to transfer the initiative to him so this revolutionary concept we believed in would come from the players rather than from us at headquarters,” Beman said. “It was ideal. We did not discourage the notion that this was coming from the players. It was a strategic decision on my part.”
He invited McCord to make a pitch in front of the full board in Houston on April 29, 1981, a day McCord later told Golf World would go down in history. “It won’t be like Oct. 12, 1492, and Christopher Columbus,” he said, “but it should be significant.”
McCord’s plan wasn’t the only one that the board heard ahead of the Houston Open. Before he left Beman’s office that day in Ponte Vedra Beach, McCord sat and read an idea that the Tour had hatched under the code name “Project Gemini.” McCord still had the documents in his briefcase all these years later.
“Project Gemini sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, doesn't it?” he said.
At the board meeting in Houston, McCord listened as a member of the Tour staff presented the case for Project Gemini, or the name tentatively meant to be shared with the public: the split tour. Given that top players tended to compete in approximately half the events anyway, the idea was to divide the Tour’s existing 44 events into two leagues much like an American and National leagues in baseball and allow the sponsors to draft from 220 players. Each league would compete for $7.2 million with each event offering a purse of $400,000. The four majors, Tournament of Champions, Players Championship, and World Series of Golf would be the equivalent of all-star games featuring the best players from both leagues. The season would conclude with the World Series of Golf in September, giving the players a fall hiatus to compete overseas until the new season kicked off the next year. This led to a heated discussion. The end result: the split tour failed its first test and Project Gemini ended up in the dustbin of history, though perhaps it was just ahead of its time.
“While most liked the idea of a defined season, no one, especially the leading players, would relinquish their right to pick and choose when and where they play,” Beman said in Deane Beman: Golf’s Driving Force. “We could never get over that hurdle.”
McCord presented next. He suggested raising the number of exempt players to 170 based on the previous year’s official money list. Monday qualifying would be eliminated. At the end of the year, the bottom 26 would be dropped and the top 26 at Q-School would be promoted. The concept struck a chord.
The board formed a committee consisting of players Jim Colbert, Tom Kite, Hale Irwin, the PGA’s Mickey Powell, and board chairman Del deWindt. When the committee settled on increasing the number of exemptions to 90, McCord said he couldn’t sell it. That hope dashed, they pushed for 100. Beman thought this was the right number. McCord countered with 135. Support from the marginal players was the key to the All-Exempt Tour’s approval. With the memory of previous failed proposals still fresh in their minds, Beman and the board compromised at 125.
The board recommended increasing the number of exempt players to that figure, in part, because the original study was based on a field of 144. Increasing the field size to 156 created 12 additional spots. The field staff chimed in that they preferred limiting fields to less than 156 players due to slow play. All these years later, the main impetus for reducing the number of exempt players to 100 — at least publicly — is to reduce the field size to 120 and 132 at most Tour events, with a few exceptions, so that cuts can be made more regularly on Friday and lessen the logjam that leads to rounds exceeding 5 hours. Also part of reduced field size? The death of Monday Qualifying four spots at several tournaments and reductions at others. Back in 1982, Tour player director Ed Sneed shot down this concept, arguing that they should eliminate slow play rather than playing opportunities. McCord never expected the number would stay at 125 forever. He just asked that the Tour give the new system five years to let it work itself out.
“I said, ‘It's real simple. The guy coming in better be better than the guy kicked out of the PGA Tour because of his number,’” McCord recalled.
The All-Exempt Tour passed by a vote of 7-2 with Powell abstaining and the other two PGA of America members on the board voting in opposition because of their concern that access for club professionals would be reduced.
Fourteen would-be rabbits, including 11 of them who had won tournaments, enjoyed their finest campaign in the inaugural year of the new format in 1983. Not everyone found immediate success. Without the pressure pushing him to make the top 60, McCord failed to make even the top 125, finishing No. 131 on the 1982 Tour money list. He missed by less than $1,500. But McCord hardly was upset.
“The worst thing in the world would be if I created (the system) and then got to be one of the entitled,” he said. “I remember sitting there at TPC Sawgrass after I got my card back (at Q-School) and saying, ‘It works.’ No one could cry favoritism.”
Over the years as the new system gained acceptance, McCord earned the reputation as the father of the All-Exempt Tour. Said Beman: “Gary deserves a lot of credit for convincing the guys that it was a better idea.”
How does the father of the All-Exempt Tour feel about his baby getting a facelift some 40-odd years later?
“It was exactly the right thing to do at this point,” McCord said. “Now, it's competition. When I did it, it was not competition. We were playing for peanuts and it was stupid. It was nothing to do with competition from a neighboring tour, a worldwide tour that is buying a bunch of guys and contracting them so the LIV players show up every week and play in all 14 events. We're going to try to match that with these elevated events or whatever they're calling them now (signature events) and try to offset their star power with our star power. My question is why do we need to genuflect to LIV? They have absolutely no one watching them on TV.”
Yesterday's rabbits are now called mules but the fight to earn a card continues in earnest at four more FedEx Cup Fall events and the competitors all have McCord to thank for developing a system that lives on even if the magic number of cards up for grabs has been cut from 125 to 100.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Gary McCord weighs in on the reduction to 100 PGA Tour cards for 2026
Category: General Sports
