Major Golf Tours Descend Upon Tiburon Golf Club And Southwest Florida

As professional golf shifts to its (brief) offseason, the eyes of the golf world turn toward the southwest corner of Florida, specifically to Naples, where Tiburon Golf Club is set to once again host some of the best golfers in the world.

After a thrilling year on the LPGA Tour, Nelly Korda and company look to complete their season at the CME Group Tour Championship on Tiburon’s Black Course November 21-24. The Black Course is one of two Greg Norman-designed championship layouts at Tiburon, the other being The Gold Course.

With a blend of traditional and modern design elements, both courses feature crushed coquina-shell waste bunkers, pine straw-lined fairways, and undulating greens which provide a stern test for players. What you won’t find at Tiburon is conventional rough. Instead, those coquina-shell waste bunkers offer a different challenge off the fairways for players to navigate than a typical week on tour. Bermuda grass makes up the tees and fairways, while the greens are Tifeagle Bermuda grass, the ideal grass-type to withstand Florida’s rugged heat.

The Gold Course at Tiburon Golf Club opened in 1998.

It’s a par-72 and measures 7,382 yards from the championship tees with a course rating of 76 and a slope of 137. The Black Course opened three years later in 2001. It plays to a par-72, as well, coming in at just under 7,000 yards from the championship tees. The average length of a course on the LPGA Tour is 6,200-6,600 yards, making the Black Course one of the longest courses the women play each year.

Upon crowning their season-long points leader the “Race to the CME Globe Champion,” several LPGA Tour stars will team up with their PGA Tour counterparts and return to Tiburon just three weeks later to compete in The Grant Thornton Invitational, a co-sanctioned event between the LPGA and PGA Tours that is in its second year.

The Grant Thornton Invitational is a mixed-team format with 16 teams comprised of one LPGA Tour player and one PGA Tour player, with everyone competing for an equal prize fund of $4 million. Among the 16 teams participating this year are the formidable duo and defending champions, Lydia Ko and Jason Day. They will look to fend off high-profile rivals like Nelly Korda and Tony Finau, Lexie Thompson and Rickie Fowler, and the ‘Oh, Canada’ team of Brooke Henderson and Corey Conners.

Then, just two months later, the PGA Tour Champions will visit Tiburon for the Chubb Classic, its third event of the 2025 season. 2024 champion Stephen Ames will seek to defend his title against the 2022 and 2023 champion, Bernhard Langer. The German-born legend has found his form over the last quarter of the season, including a win at the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, and looks to keep that momentum going to start the 2025 PGA Tour Champions campaign on a course he plays well.

Although the offseason is approaching for all the major tours, golf in southwest Florida is just heating up.