Ian Poulter has Brian Gay to thank after the 41-year-old Ryder Cup star had his PGA Tour status returned to him just a week after he thought he’d lost it.
Poulter had lost his full playing status after failing to earn enough points in a designated number of tournaments this season after returning from a foot injury that curtailed his 2016 campaign.
But fellow PGA Tour player Brian Gay uncovered a discrepancy in the points allocation for players coming back off medical exemptions, which resulted in the Tour recalculating the points tally based on a different formula and concluding that both players had done enough to keep their cards until the end of the season.
“It’s obviously a big bit of good news,” said Poulter. “For the Tour to unanimously decide that was the fair thing to do, puts me in a very different situation, being able to play the Players Championship, and all the remaining events I would like to play.”
Gay, who had also been playing on a medical exemption, said he had received several texts from Poulter following the official announcement that both players hadn’t lost their playing rights. “Ian wrote, ‘I freakin’ love you’ with a bunch of red hearts,” said Gay. “He said he would get me a proper bottle of wine. I was thinking more like some private jet flights, but that’s OK, I’ll take the wine. We talked later, and he didn’t even know the FedEx points were different this season. He was happy and he was angry, because his people hadn’t known what was going on and obviously the Tour did a poor job of explaining it, and the guy has gone through hell over this.”
Gay added: “I really expected the Tour would say ‘tough luck’, but I’m happy they stepped up and made it right. You can’t change the formula in the middle of a medical exemption. That’s just not fair. They were essentially taking points away from me.”