Cruel School

CRUEL
SCHOOL

How It All Began

The European Tour Q School grew out of a time when professional tournament golfers were different to those we know today. It came about because of developments in the early 60s in America where, the modern-day great triumvirate of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player was bringing crowds to golf tournaments like never before. Even more crucially, there was a growing television audience and many pros in America were earning good money via a flourishing national golf tour.

Then in 1968, the few hundred regular American tournament pros decided it was time to distinguish themselves from the club professionals. The tournament pros began organising their own golf tour, known as the PGA Tour, that for the first time operated separately from the PGA of America, the organisation originally set up in 1916 to look after every pro golfer, especially the tens of thousands of club pros from all 50 states of the Union. However, the two different types of golf pro had grown apart and tournament golfers in America created their own structure in which to thrive. That structure included a season-long money list to rank the top pros and also an end-of-season tournament to position the fringe players and those wishing to join the tour the following year.

Not surprisingly, British golfers saw what was happening and wanted the same. Since their own professional golfers association was formed in 1901, traditional club pros had been happy with life in their shop, giving lessons, selling gear and playing in pro-ams. But by the late 1960s, there was a band of highly competitive pros who had dreams of earning a living playing tournaments not from a golf club shop and retainer.

The problem was that event prize money for the best British and European pro golfers was scarce at this time and forced almost every player to live both lives, that of the club pro and the tournament pro. Men like Neil Coles, Peter Alliss, Bernard Hunt, Dave Thomas, Christy O'Connor Snr and a young Tony Jacklin all took club jobs at least at the start of their careers because there was not a living wage in prize money alone.

There were simply too few top quality tournaments in Britain and Europe and they were scattered randomly throughout the spring and summer. Few Europeans played in UK-based tournaments and the reverse was true about British golfers playing on continental Europe even though events like the French Open (first played in 1906) and the Italian Open (which dates back to 1925) had marvelous heritages.

In addition, each event in every country was organised individually by different people usually with the host club secretary or club pro as tournament director and that meant almost no consistency or co-ordination. British and European golfers needed a strong, single, international calendar of events if they were to match the Americans and also take advantage of golf's growing popularity with TV and sponsors.

The same split between the two types of golf pros that had happened in America started on the other side of the Atlantic in October 1971 when the highly respected John Jacobs was made Tournament Director General of a new division of the PGA that was to look after the tournament pros alone.

Jacobs got started in time to plan the 1972 season and added some continental European events for the first season of the Tournament Players Division (now the European Tour). By 1975, he had reorganised the Order of Merit structure that ranked players on the tour, basing it on prize money instead of a previously-used points system and, a year later, there were more much-needed improvements: Sunday finishes were introduced in selected tournaments to help develop more TV coverage and increase attendances at the events; and pre-tournament pro-ams were played to involve and encourage big-name sponsors. But there was another change that needed to happen, just like it had in America.

The system for entering tournaments had been one of the main gripes for newly-minted tournament pros in the 60s and 70s. The process had become unwieldy, impractical and expensive for the players who were becoming bored (and even bankrupt) by what was known as Monday Qualifying.

A typical tour week consisted of: Monday - qualifying; Tuesday - practice day; Wednesday - start of the tournament; Thursday - hope you make the cut; Friday - either leave the tournament because you missed the cut or play round three and get yourself into a money-making position; and Saturday - play round four, receive a cheque and travel home. Then Sunday was either a rest day or a day to travel to the next event. It was a punishing schedule in the days before the full development of fast motorway routes and multiple cheap flight options to destinations far away.

Also, the system for pros to enter into tournaments was completely different than it is today: the top 60 players from the previous season's money list were the core of the Tour and they qualified to play in every event on Tour (today, that core number of pros qualifying on the basis of the previous season's money list is 110).

After the top 60, then the next players on the qualified list were those who made the cut the previous week; this category rewarded players on form and also meant that when they finished the tournament on Saturday, they were not faced with the prospect of trying to qualify for the next event on the following Monday, two days later.

The next qualifiers would be a number of local pros performing well on the regional order of merit (tournament directors thought these players would attract more spectators from the area). For continental European tournaments this local number of qualifiers would often be larger than for UK-based tournaments (it was a way that the tour organisers could help the development players from across Europe). Finally, there would be some sponsor's invites and, once all those players had been allocated spots in the tournament, then the number of places left for Monday qualifiers could be calculated. It was often less than a dozen.

Of course, the more successful the tour became in attracting prize money, so the number of Monday qualifiers would increase. It could mean a player traveling to an event in time to play 18 or 36 holes of qualifying golf on Monday for perhaps only a handful of starting spots and, if he failed, then he went home without any income. He would try again at the next Monday Qualifying in seven days time, but even if he got one of the tournament starting spots, then he still had to make the two-round cut in order to earn any money to live on. This system had become increasingly clunky and too expensive (in both time and money) for many pros wishing to break through. You would have to be a masochist to continue that life for more than a year or two, so something had to be done - that something was Qualifying School, introduced at the end of the 1976 season.

The plan was for Q School (sometimes also known as Tour School) to help create a fully-exempt tour, a formula by which pros were ranked in a sophisticated ladder at the start of each season using categories that rewarded success. Rather than try to turn the pro's world upside down in one fell swoop, the first Q School was staged with something more simple in mind: to create a membership. The tour wanted to control the numbers of players entering tournaments and develop levels or rankings; it wanted a system that was aspirational. The idea of the first Q School was that only if you were successful, could you become a member of the Tour. Without Tour membership, a player did not have access to the growing number of tournaments and the increasing prize money. To be on the European Tour, therefore, was to be at the top level of professional tournament golf.

"We could see ourselves being swamped by entries into Monday Qualifying by pros who just weren't good enough, but fancied turning up. That was not ideal, so we wanted a system where only players with Tour membership could enter the pre-qualifying," says John Paramor, now the Tour's chief referee, but then a key member of the tournament staging staff.

The practical benefit of the Q School's pecking order system for entry is that it allows players both at the top and bottom of the pro golf ladder to know what events are available to them before the start of their tournament year; it allows them to plan their playing calendar; and it also gives them higher level tournaments to aspire to where the bigger prize money exist.

In 1976, the inaugural Q School event would be organised by senior tournament administrator Tony Gray along with Paramor. It was decided that the top 120 players and ties would become members of the Tour. This membership would allow entry to the Monday Qualifying tournament at all the events; it did not give players a single guaranteed start in any event, but it did separate them from the rest of the tournament pros and it did give them a unique opportunity to make money on what would be an increasingly lucrative Tour

Tournament entry for the season after the first Q School (1977) was as follows: the top 60 from the 1976 Order of Merit were allowed into each tournament; those who finished 61st to 120th were allowed into every Monday Qualifying event; the Q School Tour Card winners (better known then as 'membership' winners) were also allowed into every Monday qualifying event; and, finally, any player not in the top 60 Order of Merit category but who made the cut in the previous week's event automatically teed it up at the following week's tournament. In addition, each tournament could include local golfers...