In 1989, Ray Floyd expressed hope that the PGA Tour might shave 25 spots from its annual all-exempt structure that it had instituted seven years earlier. Floyd argued that the all-exempt tour, in which the top 125 money winners retained their tour cards for the next season, had facilitated mediocrity. Too many players could make a decent living without distinguishing themselves on weekly leaderboards and seemed satisfied by that.

More than 30 years later, Kevin Kisner, who next year moves into the booth as lead golf analyst for NBC Sports, inadvertently validated Floyd’s position at the 2021 Sony Open in Hawaii. When the short-hitting Georgian was asked why he would show up at events where he felt he couldn’t win, he responded, “Because they give away a lot of money for 20th place.”

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“They’re trying to figure a way to cut back to maybe 100 players, but I don’t know even if that will accomplish much,” Floyd said in ’89. “I don’t see them eliminating it because that’s admitting a mistake and not many have the courage to do that.”

Thirty-five years later, it wasn’t courage but a feeling of necessity—brought on by competition from the LIV Golf League—that prompted the PGA Tour Policy Board to vote for a reduction of the all-exempt number to 100 for the 2025 season. The board also opted to trim field sizes in most events to ensure that rounds finish the same day they started, something that was happening far too infrequently.

“Think about the reason any business cuts back, and it’s because they want to make it stronger. Go back to the basics. If your business model is trying to fight another business model that’s trying to take over and has more money, what do you do? You don’t expand. You start firing all the fat and get really lean and mean.”

The above observation was offered by Gary McCord, the former CBS Sports broadcaster and tour player who happens to be the man who conceived the idea for the all-exempt tour in 1981.

Owner of a sharp wit and an active mind, McCord was idling away the hours between rounds at that year’s Doral-Eastern Open in Miami (won, coincidentally, by Floyd) looking over the qualifying list. At the time, 60 players were exempt, and the rest of the field was filled out by “rabbits,” players who traveled to each tour stop to Monday qualify.

Deane Beman poses with Players Championship winner Raymond Floyd in 1981.

PGA TOUR Archive

“I’m seeing names like Miller Barber and Don January, and I start adding it up and there were like 54 tournament wins among guys who had to qualify,” McCord recalled. “And I’m thinking, god, all these other sports salaries are going nuts … football, baseball, and we have like 68 percent of the tour who can’t make any money because they’re qualifiers. I just thought that was stupid.”

McCord did more research and then took his idea for an expanded exempt plan to Joe Porter, a player director on the tour’s policy board. He then met with Mike Crosswaithe, the tour’s player relations executive. By then, McCord had spoken to enough of his peers that he sought to make a formal pitch to the board. Crosswaithe reported back to commissioner Deane Beman. A week later, McCord’s phone rang.

“It’s Deane. I’m thinking, ‘Oh sh–. I got too deep. He’s not happy.’ And he calls me into to his office for a meeting,” McCord said. “I’m ready to get read the riot act, and he said to me, ‘I want you to look at this. I want to shake things up, and you’re the guy who can get this done.’”

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Beman’s plan, in a nutshell, was to split the tour in two, with tournament sponsors “drafting” players. One set of players would play a set of events and the other would play another set, and the two contingents would come together for six tournaments. The following year, the two sides would flip schedules. Beman asked McCord to present his all-exempt idea and Beman’s plan at a players’ meeting in Houston.

“I’m just a qualifier, and I’m going to go in front of Jack and Arnold and Lee [Trevino] and sell this? I’m scared sh–less,” McCord said.

Gary McCord, shown in the 2001 U.S. Senior Open, was the first to present the PGA Tour with the idea of an all-exempt membership.

Ezra Shaw

“If you take other sports, they have different leagues and they come together, but a question was whether the depth of fields was strong enough in golf to be able to make that successful,” Beman said in a recent phone interview. “It was actually called the ‘Split Tour,’ where we’d have events played simultaneously and then we had the majors and a few other events where everyone played. But it would have allowed for a season to be finished before the NFL started.

“Certainly, it was something that was on the drawing board. We were looking at all kinds of ways to make golf a better spectator sport.”

McCord went to Houston and made the pitch for the two ideas on April 29, 1981. The players were much less enthusiastic about the split tour concept. In fact, it was rejected on the spot.

“I think it was Lanny [Wadkins] who eventually got it shot down,” McCord said. “He basically called bullsh– on playing the Dallas event every other year. He raised his hand and said, ‘If I want to play in my hometown event every year, I’m going to play in it.’ A few other guys put a spike in it. But the thing was, it was flexible. We could do anything we wanted with it, and it reminds me of LIV and the PGA Tour today—two different tours playing different events and guys have picked sides. A lot of similarities.”

Interestingly, January brought his own proposal to the meeting: a more exclusive “super tour” of events with elevated purses in the neighborhood of $400,000. How times change. And yet don’t.

Eventually, McCord’s idea carried the day in a vote in September with the top 125 money earners in 1982 eligible for exemption in ’83, while another 25 players would be granted conditional status. McCord said he initially proposed an all-exempt system with 130 cards, though at one point there was talk of as many as 170 exempt players, while Beman countered with 110. (Footnote: McCord’s 130 cutoff proved self-fulfilling; that’s exactly where he finished on the ’82 money list.)

How they settled on 125 isn’t quite clear.

Tom Watson, arguably the top player in the game, was among a handful of tour members who thought 125 was too many. He figured that anyone who finished north of 90 in earnings should have to return to Q-School. “The all-exempt idea isn’t a bad one. It’s the numbers involved,” he explained then, also worried that mediocrity would reign.

“I don’t know that 125 was some magic number,” Beman said. “It was a number we came up with in negotiations. At the time it was a huge transition. Overwhelmingly, players were adamant about ending the qualifying system. We were trying to figure out what would be the best way to provide a full exemption for more players so that the tour would be more competitive. And at the same time, trying to figure a way for new people to get on so that it wasn’t a total roadblock.”

Trimming the all-exempt number never was going to fly in 1989. But Beman, who made way for Tim Finchem in 1994, sees the merits in doing it now. The 100 full exemptions available for 2025 lands squarely between the suggested 110 by Beman and 90 by Watson.

“I understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it,” Beman said. “There’s clearly a problem with slow play, and cutting the field back helps make the product better. Smaller fields then necessitate that you can’t have the same size pool of players as before. It’ll be more competitive. It makes the tour more elite.

“You know, back then [in 1983], it was about creating more opportunities, giving guys a more predictable schedule that they could plan on and make a living. But this is what is needed now. You always have to evolve.”

McCord gets it, too. The amount of prize money in golf and the way fans access the sport calls for a reckoning on his brainchild.

“With tour [television] ratings down, what, 20 percent, they want to make sure there are compelling players to watch. It’s all about the value of guys that are playing right now,” he said. “You look at the most interesting figure in pro golf, and it’s Bryson [DeChambeau], and he plays on LIV. You’ve got YouTube guys taking over that younger fans are watching—and that includes things Bryson is doing—and it takes an hour. It’s more personal than watching a golf tournament. The presentation is what matters. That’s where the tour is now.”

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com