Gary McCord (left) and Peter Kostis (right) are the voices behind Off Their Rockers.
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Gary McCord leans back in his chair and laughs.
“Oh, man,” he says, pausing for just a beat, the whiskers of his famous snow-white mustache curling into a smile. “Well, there is one BILLION of them.”
Subject of the day is his former CBS Sports boss, Frank Chirkinianbut we can discuss McCord’s breakfast order or favorite bird species. It wouldn’t matter. The sound of McCord’s voice spinning a yarn is comforting to the senses, like the smell of sawdust in a woodshop or click of a camera shutter during the last rays of sunlight. It’s where it belongs.
Nostalgia helps. If you’re of a certain age, McCord and his friend, Peter Kostis, provided the soundtrack to lazy Sunday afternoons for most of your golf-watching life. Your ear is attuned to their voices, jokes and sardonic quips. When you hear a good old-fashioned McCord twist, you i know Kostis is using his stick, ready to hit a line drive to center.
Both broadcasters never lost that ability, even afterward CBS took them into early retirement around the time of the PGA Tour’s final rights deal in 2019. The days went by, but the stories never faded, and it soon became clear to them that the stories never WILL it fades. Neither is their audience’s appetite to listen to them.
How have McCord, who is 76, and Kostis, 77, instilled this comfort in us? The answer is hidden right there in the question.
THIS STORY BEGINS AT THE END.
It was late 2019, months before PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan proudly reported the details of a giant media rights deal, and Kostis and McCord had just received bad news: After decades with the coverage team of CBS golf, they were out.
Perhaps the new rights deals, which promised billions for the tour over the next decade, influenced CBS’s vision for the future — but Kostis and McCord were given a different version of events.
“I was the first to be called by CBS, and they told me they weren’t going to renew my contract,” Kostis says. “The reason, they told me, was because the television broadcast had stalled, and so by inference, The it was stale.”
He stops.
“I was offended by this. The STILL take offense to it, like Gary does,” Kostis said. “My offense is that I’m coaching those people. I’m teaching them. I can relate to them, they can relate to me. Age has nothing to do with it. “
Kostis and McCord were blind. Wounded. But they were also out of options. They were on the wrong side of 60 in a young man’s game, and so they made a sensible decision: They retired.
A quiet life awaited them in Scottsdale. After decades on the road, Kostis and McCord could finally enjoy time away from air travel and the wrangling of touring schedules. While neither of them were happy with the outcome, there was a certain relief in the news; for years, golf television had moved further from its ideological starting point, something both men had seen under the tutelage of legendary producer Frank Chirkinian. They would no longer be a part of golf television, but at least they wouldn’t be around to see him succumb to his worst instincts.
“Now, golf on TV isn’t fun to watch – ANY“, Kostis said. “They got more whistleblowers. They have shown more shots – supposedly – but you have three or four people talking about each photo.
“How the hell can anyone say anything of any consequence?”
HOW LONG DO YOU ENJOY RETIREMENT McCORD AND KOSTIS?
“About 45 minutes,” McCord said with a laugh.
As they say, the work began at the “big tables” of Whisper Rock, an all-male Scottsdale club where Kostis and McCord are members — and now regulars. They had held court at the wooden tables near the range, sharing war stories from their years on the beat for CBS.
Their friends took the stories well. REALLY good. And after a few very “stuff” (McCord’s word) nights, one of the members approached the couple with an idea.
“You guys should really write a book or something,” said the friend. “Or even better, start a podcast…”
By then, the sun was already setting on sports podcasts. With its casual tone and ease of access, podcasting led an audio revolution in the early 2010s—but those same strengths paved the medium’s eventual demise. There were too many mouths and not nearly enough food. The sole survivors fell into two buckets: first movers (ie those who entered the audio space before their competitors) and established voices (ie those already famous outside of podcasting).
Kostis and McCord fit into both buckets. Golf fans had heard them call the game for decades, a run that had brought them a degree of fame. A podcast made a lot of sense. The former broadcasters hired an old friend from CBS, producer Mike Abram, to keep the trains on time. And then, just days after they had pitched the idea, they were ready to record.
A small business remained: a name. The hosts loved it Unpluggeda nod to their time on the mic and the nature of the show, which would feature no small number of stories from their CBS days, but wasn’t original IP. They thought some more and, finally, the perfect name emerged—one that was both a nod to their heritage and a cheeky dig at their former CBS bosses.
Kostis and McCord started the podcast in early 2020, and slowly began to build an audience. today, appearancewhich is produced in partnership with GOLF.com, has built a stable and engaged audience, but the hosts believe there is plenty of room for growth.
More frequency may be coming soon for the bi-monthly show. Kostis and McCord are getting more restless with age, and the increasingly chaotic state of professional golf (and pro golf TV) has only sharpened their itch to work. It might mean more long days or late nights for them, but it would also make for the best kind of listening, warm and funny, current and honest.
Off their rockers is as diverse in breadth and depth as anything in the golf audio space. An episode might include a lengthy discussion of the nuance and genius of a golf course, fueled by the kind of deep golf intellect that improves your own. The next might offer an inside look at the future of golf television followed by an extended interpolation on McCord’s newfound affinity for cryptids.
For two old TV guys, the world of podcasting, they said, feels like this new mediasometimes awkwardly. But then the light comes on and the barriers of preconceptions melt away. It is not Off Their Rockers, Podcast; it’s peter and gary.
“I’ve never felt like my age was anything but a plus,” Kostis said, “because I have the experience, I have the history, I have the opportunity to bring people the real truth about the game. , the real truth about golf on TV , all these things.”
Kostis’s voice is filled with indignation, and it’s not hard to see why. After a lifetime of building his golf acumen, he woke up one morning to find that he was also with experience.
“Now, I won’t tip my hat back; I’m not a fan of losing the game,” he continued. “There are a lot of young people out there with their podcast and all they’re doing is acting like bad guys at a drunken party – trying to be funny, not really funny. I think Gary and I offer a perspective that can be entertaining but also somewhat educational.”
On the desk chair, Gary McCord is winding down.
The question is a fastball over the heart of the plate, and we both know it. I want to know Frank Chirkinian’s best McCord story, and he has a good one: the story of how Gary McCord went from PGA Tour pro to CBS analyst.
Frank goes, ‘Hey, I need to see you in my office.’ I’m like, okay, fine. I realized I degraded it, or so it was. So I go into his office and he says, “What are you doing next week?” I go, ‘I’m going to Kemper,’ which was a CBS event. He says, ‘Great, when you miss the cut, I want you to climb back up the tower.‘”
He stops to laugh.
“That bastard, for the next three years, every time I missed the cut, which was quite often, I’d just go up to the tower and take my $500 and do a golf telecast.”
In many ways, this goofy start in the industry foreshadowed McCord’s cold and sudden end. Few people age gracefully on television, because so few people are given the opportunity to age at all. You must be good – really well – to avoid the inevitable, and even then, the current is pulling against you.
The cold truth is that the television business is built around the next big thing which also means that someone else’s time is running out. Those lucky enough to experience what it’s like to be the next big thing Never forget that fact, especially when they look at a list of their potential replacements spotted each week.
“In life, you have to change your terrain,” McCord said. “You can’t SUPPORTING on a fastball up the middle. It won’t work. So you try to do other things.”
As McCord lines up the punch line for his next joke, it hits me: it which is why it makes such a comforting listen. Not because his stories are nostalgic, or because his and Kostis’ voices are familiar. But because Kostis and McCord understand IT — the craft of storytelling, the nuance of tension and release, the power of a satisfying beginning and ending. These are skills that one either has or one does not, and they possess a magnetism that speaks to something much deeper than age or sport.
“I never plan to retire,” Kostis said. “When I’m too old to stand, I’ll sit in a chair and work.”
In other words, when you have a gift, you have to keep using it. It may not always bring you fame, fortune or adoration, but it will bring you something better: comfort and satisfaction.
None of them have an expiration date.
look”Off Their Rockers with Peter Kostis and Gary McCord” on YouTube.
You can contact the author at james.colgan@golf.com. To subscribe to his weekly (and free!) Hot Mic newsletter, click here.
