Back in the 1970s and the early 1980s, a full exemption for the PGA Tour meant a player had finished in the top 60 of the money winners the previous year. Not the top 125 as it is today, but just the top 60.
That meant a player who was, say, 70th on the money list one year would spend the following year chasing qualifying tournaments – like a rabbit, they used to say – just to get in tournaments week to week.
Then came 1983 and what has since been called the all-exempt tour. The number of full exemptions for the next year more than doubled, and the chances for rabbits to qualify on a weekly basis was drastically reduced…