Pga Tour Goes All-exempt

Nowadays, if you finish inside the PGA Tour’s top-125 moneywinners list, you can play just about as often as you like for the next 12 months. Win a (regular) tournament and you are exempt for the next two years. Before 1983 and the introduction of the All Exempt Tour, however, only the top 60 enjoyed that status. Back then, every Monday a qualifying tournament made up the rest of the field. It was a brutal existence, in contrast to what many feel is the cosseted life exempt players enjoy today. Not many pros took a week off. If you kept qualifying – or making the cut – you kept playing. “You learned how to qualify, not how to play,” says Gary Mccord, former tour player. “It was insanity.”