Plenty of professional golfers will be teeing off at the site of this week’s PGA Tour event, Port Royal Golf Course in Bermuda. Measuring just 6,828 yards, it has out of bounds or hazards everywhere and is often the windiest place the pros visit each year. In other words, it is it can become a torture chamber. (Not very dissimilar to tight players found last week on the DP World Tourin India.)
But you know what? This is the fall season, and it has a nickname that suits you better than ever: the silly season. The pros are competing for some money, sure, but they’re mostly just trying to improve their FedEx Cup standings against a a host of other mid-level professionals which are in a similar place.
Are there any downsides to playing? Nah. Is there any upside? For sure. But is it kind of, sorta, pretty meaningless to the bigger picture of the 2027 season? For sure! We used to call him “stupid” for a reason. Fall golf can be like that. The end of the golf season is in sight for them as it is for you. And embracing the silly season may not pay huge dividends, but it remains a means of getting out there and just…getting on…doing it.
So let me make the awkward transition yours game, then, because daylight is waning in America—silly season is absolutely upon us, too. Your handicap is basically closed for the calendar year. In about a month, where I live in Chicago, the GHIN app won’t even accept scores as it is considered outside of the normal posting schedule. So there’s never been a better time to get out and play golf of a more frivolous and 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 — sweets, plus a stinger — spreading throughout. We played 27 holes alternating between the front, gold tees (which is sweet) and the black tips that Brooks Koepka won (which is the stinger). This forward-india combo is so ridiculous that it helps to ignore the typical trap in your brain of trying to shoot a specific point. When you go all the way back to Erin Hills, you’re excited for a par, and maybe even a bogey. And when you push forward a few tee boxes on the next hole, you can pull hybrids to reach a par-4 in one. Everything you do around the greens dictates how many pars you make, providing a great test for your short game.
You can also play a very fun game this way, as I have done with colleagues in the past, calling it Heads or Tails. Decide the number of shots you want to give or receive from your golf buddy and then toss a coin into each tee box. If it lands on the heads, they direct you to the forward tees. If it lands on the tail, the tail will return to the tips. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’s a frequent afternoon. Maybe you will be unlucky. What matters is that you won’t talk about your score after the round. We will talk about specifics hit you and your partner are guilty.
Most every fall, I compete in the Big Cup Scramble in Lawsonia, Wisconsin – an event that has become my favorite on my golf calendar. Typically played the second weekend in October, the Big Cup is exactly as it sounds – cups cut about 2.5-times its normal diameter, but placed in brutal places on the greens. A drivable par-4 isn’t as much fun for a four-player scramble team — each group will probably make a 2 — but it gets more interesting when the big cup is cut on a 10-degree slope just a step from a bunker lip. And when everyone misses a putt, you won’t clean them up quickly. Rather, you can spend 15 minutes fighting for the bogey. Golf indeed it starts to feel like a team game when your four-man scramble team is instructed to finish eight under.
Yes, these ideas have a Northern, Midwestern backbone. The months of October and November are stormy for those of us above the Mason-Dixon. The weather can be positively delightful on Tuesdays while you’re working from home and annoyingly horrible on Saturdays when you’re free. And so, we should thank our 103-win Milwaukee Brewers for winning their first pennant in 44 years. Because tickets to Brewers home games have been so outrageously unaffordable that we’ve had to get creative. We had to book flights to central Florida, where the golf course grass might be dormant, but the weather is predictable, and baseball didn’t fail me. So let’s be more silly this silly season and take Bermuda grass between Orlando and Tampa – the kind I haven’t played on in over a year. I hope so ! That’s what the silly season decided for me. And no matter what he throws, we’ll be watching a World Series game that night.