Embrace your own ‘silly season’ of golf

Plenty of pro golfers will scoff at the site of this week’s PGA Tour event, the Port Royal Golf Course in Bermuda. It measures just 6,828 yards, has out of bounds or hazards everywhere and is often the windiest location pros visit annually. In other words, it can become a torture chamber. (Not too dissimilar to the tightness players found last week on the DP World Tour, in India.)

But you know what? This is the fall season, and it used to have a nickname that fits it now better than ever: the silly season. Pros are competing for some money, sure, but they’re mostly just trying to improve their FedEx Cup rank against a bunch of other middle-rank pros who find themselves in a similar spot. 

Is there any downside to playing? Nah. Is there any upside? Sure. But is it kinda, sorta, pretty meaningless for the bigger picture of the 2027 season? Sure! We used to call it “silly” for a reason. Fall golf can be that way. The end of the golf season is in sight for them just as it is for you. And embracing the silly season may not pay great dividends, but it remains a means to go out there and just … keep … doing it. 

So let me make the clunky transition to your game, then, because the daylight is decreasing in America — silly season is absolutely upon us, too. Your handicap is basically locked in for the calendar year. In about a month, where I live in Chicago, the GHIN app won’t even accept scores as it’s considered outside the normal posting schedule. So, it’s never been a better time to get out and play golf of a more frivolous, adventurous variety. 

Take the ‘Honey Bee’ event I recently attended at Erin Hills. It was a beta test for a bigger event the Wisconsin staple wants to host next year, with the idea of honey bees — sweet, plus a stinger — littered throughout. We played 27 holes alternating between the forward, gold tees (that’s sweet) and the black tips Brooks Koepka won from (that’s the stinger). This forward-backward combo is so ridiculous that it helps ignore your brain’s typical trap of trying to shoot a specific score. When you go all the way back at Erin Hills, you’re thrilled with a par, and maybe even a bogey. And when you push forward a few tee boxes on the next hole, you might be pulling hybrid to reach a par-4 in one. Whatever you do around the greens dictates how many pars you make, proving a great test for your short game. 

You could even play a very fun match this way, as I’ve done with colleagues in the past, calling it Heads or Tails. Decide the number of strokes you’d like to give or receive from your golf buddy and then flip a coin on every tee box. If it lands on heads, you head to the forward tees. If it lands on tails, you tail it back to the tips. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’s a heads-frequent afternoon. Maybe you’ll get unlucky. What matters is you won’t be talking about your score after the round. You’ll be talking about specific shots you and your partner hit. 

Most every fall, I compete in the Big Cup Scramble at Lawsonia, up in Wisconsin — an event that has become my favorite on my golfing calendar. Typically played the second weekend in October, the Big Cup is exactly as it sounds — cups cut about 2.5-times their normal diameter, but placed in brutal locations on the greens. A drivable par-4 isn’t that fun for a four-player scramble team — every group is probably going to make a 2 — but it gets extra interesting when the big cup is cut on a 10-degree slope just one pace off a bunker lip. And when everyone misses a putt, you won’t be cleaning it up quickly. Rather, you might spend 15 minutes there struggling for bogey. Golf really starts to feel like a team game when your four-man scramble team is grinding to finish eight under. 

Yes, these ideas have a Northern, Midwestern twinge to them. The months of October and November are tempests to those of us above the Mason-Dixon. The weather may be positively delightful on a Tuesday while you’re working indoors and annoyingly horrific on Saturday when you’re free. And so, we must thank our 103-win Milwaukee Brewers for winning their first pennant in 44 years. Because the tickets for Brewers home games have been so outrageously unaffordable that we had to get creative. We had to book flights to central Florida, where the golf grasses might be dormant, but the temps are predictable, and the baseball isn’t going to bankrupt me. So we’re getting extra silly this silly season and taking on the Bermuda grass between Orlando and Tampa — the kind I haven’t played on in well over a year. So be it! That’s what the silly season has decided for me. And no matter what I shoot, we’ll be attending a World Series game that night.