McCord: "Bottom line, they fired me"

There is a lot to digest in Dave Shedloski’s Golf World story catching up with Gary McCord, now a former CBS broadcaster.

McCord, a former PGA Tour player and winner of three PGA Tour Champions events, is smarting over the decision mostly because he didn’t have a chance to personally thank all his CBS teammates behind the scenes who have supported him through the years, people who have become like family. “You just don’t do something like this,” he said. “You shouldn’t do it this way. No chance to say thanks to the viewers, to all my CBS friends? That’s what you get for 35 years?”

“Bottom line, they fired me.”

The story says CBS offered McCord the opportunity to work the first two weeks of 2020’s broadcast schedule, but he declined.

He also shares the one bit of reasoning given to him by the head of CBS Sports, Sean McManus.

“He [McManus] tells me, and he told Peter the same thing, that ‘We think CBS golf is getting a little stale, and we need to go in another direction,’ ” McCord told Golf Digest by phone from his home in Scottsdale. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but one thing I’ve never been called is stale.”

There was a great deal of sniping in recent years over McCord’s act having grown thin, but never felt that way. He was often the one person trying to inject some life into telecasts, but without his old foil David Feherty or many opportunities to exhibit his knowledge of the swing, McCord was often limited to the role of 16th hole traffic cop. Therefore the notion of “stale” strikes me as more a statement about the CBS production elements (Yanni?) or overall energy than the work of any one announcer.