The money, believe me, was insane’: Gary McCord on LIV Golf decision

For years, Gary McCord was a staple in CBS golf broadcasts, one of the most recognizable personalities and voices coming through your TV screens.

However, McCord’s contract was not renewed by CBS in 2019, and he lost his job as an on-course reporter. He was 71 years old at the time, and although he was disappointed in CBS’ decision, it was later discovered that he had other options to get back on track.

In a July 2022 media interview, McCord said he was in talks with LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman to join the broadcast team, which already includes a long-time collaborator of McCord’s. He said that included David Feherty. Feherty was with McCord at CBS, but he moved to NBC Sports in 2015 before joining LIV. LIV not only offered large upfront payments for star players, but also offered large upfront payments for some of its broadcasting teams.

But McCord never followed Feherty to LIV. On this week’s episode of GOLF’s Subpar, he explained why.

“My last conversation with Norman was: ‘Greg, I’m 75 years old, I don’t want to go to Adelaide, I don’t want to go to Hong Kong, I don’t want to go to Riyadh. ‘I can’t do that,’ McCord said.

Mr McCord then predicted cost reduction optimization for all golf broadcasts and stated that he would have been interested in this to reduce travel costs if he had contracted with LIV.

“No matter what the future holds, every golf program will send its broadcast staff to a studio somewhere in the United States,” he said. “It airs every week and two people come on location and someone does an interview, but they don’t know that I’m in a studio in Dallas, Texas, and the other two are talking. If you put the background of the 18th hole in there, they’ll never know.

Finally, McCord returned to the real question: Why didn’t he go to LIV Golf with Feherty?

“I was going to go and then, the money, believe me, was insane,” he said. “Greg never told me what I’d be, but I had to ask Feherty, ‘Let me ask what you are making?’ And I went, ‘What did you say?!’,” McCord said. “I never told anybody. To this day I never told anybody. But that was interesting.”