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Gary McCord had just finished a round of golf at Whisper Rock Golf Club one afternoon last week with his buddies Bob Tway and Jamie Sadlowski and is laughing at himself for winning just one skin.
“I won one, Jamie won two and Bob won the rest, poor bastard,” McCord says with a cackle.
For a guy whose convention-bending television career had been abruptly cancelled in an unexpected phone call from his boss at CBS Sports just days earlier, McCord doesn’t sound like a man embittered by his unexpected firing.
A young 71, McCord wasn’t ready to quit. Neither was his CBS colleague Peter Kostis, who also was let go, but their bosses had other ideas. The news stung because after 34 years, McCord would have preferred to go out on his terms.
But that’s life or business or both.
The funny thing about McCord is this: What he’s best known for – his biting wit, the verbal song and dance he did with Ben Wright and David Feherty through the years, his keen sense of the moment, his intelligence and, of course, his moustache – almost makes you forget that he's the guy who changed the PGA Tour.
“I’ve told people the last thing I want is any pity,” McCord says over the phone as he leaves the golf course. “I’ve had 34 years of doing nothing but sitting up in a treehouse watching the best players in the world, i.e. Tiger every week, got paid an extraordinary amount of money, I live in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Vail, Colo., so there will be no crying for me.
“It’s been storybook. If you asked anybody how could you have a better life for the last 34 years, you tell me. I get free everything. I get free golf. I get free this. I get free that. I get free drinks at the bar. You tell me some other job that would be better than what I did for 34 years. I don’t think you can come up with it.
“It’s not a eulogy. It’s a celebration that I fooled ’em all for 34 years.”
Ask McCord what he’s most proud of in a career that began with one PGA Tour start in 1973 and included two Champions tour victories in 1999 and he says his mind flashes to the brainstorm he had in the early 1980s. He’s the guy who envisioned and essentially brought to life the all-exempt PGA Tour that exists today.
When McCord started his professional career, there were only 60 fully exempt players on the PGA Tour. Having a tour card didn’t guarantee playing spots, so everyone else had to qualify on Mondays if they hadn’t made the cut the week before or landed a sponsor exemption. Before the event at Doral one year, McCord counted players with a total of 56 PGA Tour victories in the Monday qualifier. There had to be a better way and McCord created it.
Because he’s Gary McCord, there’s naturally a story that goes with it so here it is:
“I get my (tour) card. Man … I show up to the L.A. Open and I say, ‘Yes, I’m Gary McCord, where is everybody qualifying?’ They said, ‘Mr. McCord, you’re at Los Serranos tomorrow at 1:15.’ … ‘That’s like 40 miles inland from L.A. Isn’t there one closer?’ ‘We have two,’ she said, ‘There are 180 (players) at each one.’ ‘What?’
“ ‘This is my first tournament to qualify for and there’s 360 guys? How many spots do we have?’ She said, ‘There’s one spot at each.’ So I go to Los Serranos and I get there about 11:30 and look at the leaderboard and some guy in the morning shot 63. I remember I shot even par on the front and I went home.
“Wait a minute, how hard is this?”
After enough years of slamming trunks, sharing rooms and hoping to play well on Mondays, McCord found himself at home with some time off and a stack of Golf World magazines. He did some research and concocted a plan in six weeks that would allow 125 players to be fully exempt on tour, not 60. It was radical but it was better than the old way.
“It wasn’t a way to make a living. I just tried to open up a way for more guys to make a living. It’s socialistic if you look at it, you could call it that,” McCord says.
It came to life in a banquet room at a Holiday Inn in Tallahassee, Fla. (“They were nice enough to give me the room for free,” McCord remembers), where McCord pitched the plan to his brethren. The support convinced him to take the idea to the tour.
The tour had its own idea – create two tours like the American and National leagues in baseball. When McCord presented his idea to a meeting of players and officials in Houston, he was onto something.
“He was the one who stood up,” says Curtis Strange, who attended the meeting. “When I think about the 125 on tour, I think of Gary McCord.”
When the 1983 PGA Tour season began, the new all-exempt tour was in place.
“It changed the sport and the philosophy,” McCord says. “We were scared to death to screw up because one hole we might not play in another tournament for eight or nine weeks. You just keep missing qualifiers.
“If you go out there you were so conservative, just trying to make the cut so, please, God, I don’t have to do that again. That repetitive psychosis gets to guys to where they can’t really let go, just let it eat. You get more guys exempt who know they are going to play the next week, that starts to turn that psychosis into a very positive thing. Let’s hit the gas and put in the nitro and let’s go.”
Chances are most of the players on the PGA Tour today don’t realize McCord is the guy who built the foundation for their lucrative careers. He can’t take credit for the purses – the 1983 tour season had a total of $22 million in prize money and this season has $376 million in purses – but he is rightfully proud of the vision he brought to life.
“That was pretty significant when I look back at it now. You look at literally the entire world is playing under that kind of format. I can’t believe I didn’t copyright the damn thing. I’m a total idiot,” McCord says.
As for his television career, McCord stumbled into it by accident. He was at the Memorial Tournament in 1986 as a member of the PGA Tour policy board (he hadn’t qualified for the tournament). He asked legendary CBS producer Frank Chirkinian if he could sit in the truck one day to see how things work.
The next thing McCord knew he was in a booth with a headset on alongside Verne Lundquist. McCord sat through 10 minutes of a Friday rehearsal before technical issues forced a premature end to the practice run.
On Sunday of the tournament, McCord was alongside Lundquist again when Chirkinian called his name.
“I’m on 16, the par-3, at Memorial and there was a big hill, no lake. The green is rock hard and somebody hit it halfway up the hill in jungle grass. Verne goes ‘What’s he got?’ I said, ‘Well, everybody out there who’s a golfer, why don’t you grab a wedge and take a ball and go chip on your driveway and start hollering for it to stop. That’s what he’s got,’ ” McCord recalls.
“Verne looked at me and gave me a thumbs up. When we got done, he said, ‘Frank wants to talk to you.’ I go into his office and he says, ‘What are you doing next week?’ I said, ‘I’m going to play Kemper.’ He goes, ‘Oh perfect. You’ll miss the cut. When you do, come on up.’ That was it.”
McCord worked for $500 a show for a time then signed a contract with CBS Sports in 1989.
Now it’s over. McCord said he intends to sit back for a couple of years and do nothing. With all that’s happening with new media and the arrival of legalized gambling in golf, there may be opportunities for him but he’s in no hurry to start anything new.
It’s golf season again in the desert, his buddies are back and there are blue skies ahead. It’s been a great ride and it’s not over.
“Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic,” McCord says when asked to describe his life. “For a guy who didn’t do squat on the tour, who had to try to figure out what next Monday is going to be just to stay out there and to get on the senior tour and win a couple and get a job with CBS and it’s pretty cushy for the rest of your life, yeah, it’s turned out fantastic.”
It’s sundown in Scottsdale but it’s not sunset for Gary McCord.
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