His two best days were certainly not those of 1974 when he was playing the Talahassee Open. Mike Reasor then achieved the not so coveted record of having the two worst cards in the history of the PGA Tour once he passed the cut. The American professional signed 123 strokes (+51) on Saturday and 114 (+42) on Sunday.
Reasor, who was on the PGA Tour from 1969 to 1979, never won a tournament, but finished in the top ten ten ten times. He played 241 tournaments and made the cut in 102 of them. His earnings during his career as a professional golfer were $101,000.
What could have happened to cause Reasor to set such an unprecedented record? The truth is that it wasn’t a couple of bad, disastrous performances due to a lack of concentration or mental factors that affected his results in such a way. Nothing of the sort.
The key to what happened is to be found in the way of qualifying for PGA Tour tournaments at that time, when the emoluments and survival of professionals on the Tour depended on how they played each week.
Today, the top ten finishers in a PGA Tour tournament earn their spot in the next one, as long as it’s not a major or an invitational. But in the 1970s things were different. If you made the cut, you had a spot. the following week. If you were in the top 25, you could play the next tournament and were also exempt to play the event in which you finished top 25 the following year. In those days, the top 60 on the PGA Tour earnings list were exempt, unlike the 125 today. So making the cut was much more important then than it is today. For players like Reasor, playing all four days was critical to making a living from golf, and in fact he made more than half the cuts every year of his career on the American Tour. It was critical to get a spot in the next tournament.
But, apart from passing the cut, there was an unavoidable clause to be able to play the next competition: it was necessary to complete the tournament, that is, the four rounds.
This meant that a disqualification or withdrawal due to illness or injury after having passed the cut was in practice as not having passed it, so that no place was obtained for the next tournament.
After posting a second round 71, one under par, at the Tallahassee Open, Reasor got the idea to go riding early in the morning with a friend. Reasor’s mount got spooked for some reason and bolted at a full gallop until it slipped on a bed of pine needles and the rider flew off the horse. The result was that the golfer suffered a dislocated left shoulder, a knee ligament injury and fractured two ribs.
In today’s PGA Tour, such an incident would logically lead to withdrawal from the competition. But this was 1974 and things were very different. At that time only the top 60 on the Tour’s money list were exempt from playing tournaments, and Reasor was one of them. To play the next tournament without the need to play a previous qualifier, players had to pass the cut and finish the tournament.
And that is what Reasor did, in a performance never seen before and since in the PGA Tour: he played with only one arm. And there was no rule that required playing with both limbs.
Using a 5-iron for most of the last 36 holes of the tournament – a club with which he could reach 110 yards with one arm – Reasor pinned his left arm to his body and used his right arm to swing. Apart from the 5, he only used two wedges and a putter.
“At least I made 10 on just one hole,” joked Reasor after his bulging rounds. Such was the hype organized by the unusual situation that his match attracted more fans than that of the tournament leaders.
Despite his delicate physical condition, Reasor did not slow down the pace of his game, as he barely took time to prepare and execute his strokes, so that his match partners on Saturday were not affected by it and recorded good results: 70 and 67, or 14 strokes more between them than the 123 that Reasor hit that day.
“He had personality, he was honest. He decided he was going to do it (play despite injuries),” said Reasor’s wife, Caron. “No one would have done something like that. He wasn’t embarrassed by those results. He had to do it and he did it, and then he came home on Monday and he was in bad shape.”
His physical condition was certainly not good, especially after having made such an effort to finish the tournament, and his determination and dedication did not help him to achieve his goal, as his fragile condition prevented him from playing the Byron Nelson Golf Classic, which started four days later. Nothing was broken, but he was very sore and bruised.
His injuries healed over time and Reasor was able to return to competition, and he did so with a good start, so much so that a couple of months later he was back in the competition.
later achieved his best result in a major, fifteenth in the 1974 U.S. Open, which was won by Hale Irwin. That result gave Reasor the right to play his only Masters at Augusta, in 1975, where he missed the cut, as he did in the second US Open he played.
Injuries forced him to leave -in 1979- the PGA Tour, and he dedicated himself then to work as an instructor in a Washington club. On September 19, 2002, Reasor shot the last round of his life: 75 strokes, 3 over par, in a senior tournament in Oregon. After the match, he had arranged to meet a married couple for lunch at the clubhouse, but he didn’t show up. He died of a heart attack, leaving his wife, to whom he had been married for 35 years, and his two children, both adopted, devastated. He was 60 years old and 28 years had passed since his two stratospheric rounds at the 1974 Tallahassee Open, which he finished with 381 strokes, 93 over par, 85 strokes behind the second-to-last place finisher and 107 behind the winner.
ARNOLD PALMER’S CADDY
A curious fact in Reasor’s life is that he was Arnold Palmer’s caddie during the 1966 U.S. Open, in which the legendary player squandered a seven-shot lead with nine holes to go and finally lost in a playoff to Billy Casper.
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