Greg Norman: Last of The Original Silly Season Tournaments

There used to be a time in the golf calendar called Silly Season. It was called that because golfers like Greg Norman were invited to no-cut events with guaranteed money.

All golfers had to do was show up and play, and money rolled into their bank accounts. It was a popular time of year.

Silly Season started with The Skins Game in 1983, a four-man event that pitted stars – we’re talking Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Gary Player — against each other for what, at that time, was a boatload of money.

The Skins Game begot many other events. The Kapalua Invitational, started by Mark Rolfing, now of NBC. The Shark ShootOut, the original name, started by Greg Norman. The Chrysler Team event. The Merrill Lynch Shootout. Wendy’s Three Tour Challenge. The Skills Challenge. The Senior Skins Game. The Sarazen World Open. And more.

The J.C. Penney Mixed Team event was a two-person team composed of an LPGA player who picked a PGA Tour player as a partner. The World Cup was usually played during this time, although nobody ever called it silly. And there were others.

Now called The QBE ShootOut, Greg Norman’s event, is the only one of the Silly Season contests that remains from that earlier era. It’s celebrating 32 years.

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“To me it tells you how much the players love it,” Norman said prior to this year’s outing at Tiburon, the golf club in Naples, Florida, that has hosted for the last 20 years. “They just keep talking about it. I’m talking about not just the professionals, I’m talking about the professionals and amateurs.”

What’s not to love? An invitation for free money? Yes. An invitation to play with a top professional like long hitting Tony Finau or Cameron Champ and in a pro-am? Yes. That’s why it’s been around this long while others came and went.

It’s still popular with Tour players.

“First couple years I played with Lexi (Thompson),” Finau said before the event. “This year she’s at the U.S. Women’s Open, but I have a great partner here in Cameron Champ.”

You decide if that’s an upgrade or a downgrade! He and Champ have said they will give us bombs off the tee.

“We’re going to unleash. We know what the people want to see,” Finau promised.

Matthew Wolff, the long-hitter who challenged Bryson DeChambeau at the U.S. Open, is paired with Abraham Ancer. They have a mutual sponsor, Perficient, who suggested the pairing.

“I’m going to try to secure the fairway and have a look at the green, and he’s going to just rip it,” Ancer vowed.

For many years, Fred Couples, who won this event three times with different partners, was the king of Silly golf. He was even called Mr. November because he sometimes made more money in that one month than he did in the rest of the year. To give you some idea, in the Silly Season of 1994, Couples raked in $907,000. His regular tour earnings were $625,654.

While many of you will say is that all, 1994 was back in the day before million-dollar first place prizes. In 1994, a victory typically got you a little over $200,000, and the total purse for a 144-man field was about $1.2 million. Many PGA Tour events pay that to their winners now. Clearly, the early days of Silly Season were Pre-Tiger Woods.

During Silly Season of old, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into some made-for-tv golf special. They started the first or second week of November and ran all the way until just before Christmas. Honestly, it was a lot of fun, and it was great to see some top players then because regular tournament golf was dark between November and the second week of January. The Golf Channel wasn’t even a glimmer in Joe Gibbs’ eye.

The Silly Season in the US spread to other countries, too. There was the Million Dollar Challenge in South Africa. Johnnie Walker World Championship. And more. If there was a golfing country, they probably had a Silly Season event.

One reason for the demise of many Silly events was that Tiger Woods could not or was not interested in playing all of them. Who can blame him? He one-upped everybody by creating two of his own, the series that was called Showdown at Sherwood which became the Battle of Sherwood and Battle of Bighorn and his World Challenge, now the Hero World Challenge. (Believe it or not, you can find the first Showdown on Turner Classic Movies.)

In addition, the cost of the purses plus the television fees began to really add up, and it was harder and harder to find sponsors willing to write checks that big for a non-PGA Tour event. As events dwindled, the PGA Tour started enlarging its November calendar and used those weeks to expand their footprint to golf-crazed Asia.

Norman is now the last man standing from the early days of the Silly Season. His personality and the legend of his career have carried the tournament along, season after season while others were unable to do it. This year, he achieved a milestone that would have seemed small 12 months ago, but in the world of COVID, it’s huge. His tournament had a pro-am draw party.

“I was told it’s the first function the PGA Tour has allowed to have, right, where we had like 150 people maybe in a gathering,” Norman explained. “We had them all tested, and not one person tested positive.”

He said it was a testament to the management company running the tournament and to the PGA Tour for what the organization has done this year to allow professional golf to happen. He also hopes that the increase interest in the sport, the increased number of people playing, will live will beyond the pandemic.

And for now, the draw party is another of the baby steps forward for golf, and it happened at the oldest Silly tournament on the calendar. Maybe it’s not so silly after all.

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