Embrace Your Own Silly Season of Golf

Many professional golfers will probably scoff at this week’s PGA Tour venue, Port Royal Golf Course in Bermuda. It measures only 6,828 yards, has out-of-bounds areas or hazards everywhere, and is often the windiest place the pros visit all year. In other words, it can become a torture chamber—much like the tight conditions players faced last week on the DP World Tour in India.

But this is fall, the season once nicknamed the silly season. The pros are competing for money, of course, but mostly they are trying to improve their FedEx Cup position among a group of mid-ranked players in a similar situation.

Is there any downside to playing? Not really. Is there an upside? Certainly. But does it matter much in the bigger picture of the 2027 season? Probably not. Fall golf was called silly for a reason. The end of the season is in sight for the pros just as it is for you. Embracing this season may not produce major rewards, but it is still a way to go out and keep playing.

Now apply that idea to your own game. Daylight is shrinking in America, and your silly season is here too. Your handicap is essentially locked for the calendar year. In about a month, in Chicago, where the author lives, the GHIN app will stop accepting scores because the normal posting schedule will be over. That makes it an ideal time to play a more frivolous and adventurous kind of golf.

The author recently attended the Honey Bee event at Erin Hills, a beta test for a larger event the Wisconsin course hopes to host next year. The concept revolved around honey bees: sweetness plus a stinger. The group played 27 holes, alternating between the forward gold tees and the back black tees from which Brooks Koepka won. This front-to-back combination is so unusual that it helps players ignore the instinct to chase a specific score. From the back tees at Erin Hills, par feels excellent and bogey may be acceptable. Move forward a few tees on the next hole, and you might use a hybrid to reach a par-4 in one. Your play around the greens determines how many pars you make, making the format a strong test of your short game.

You could also play a fun match in a format the author has used with colleagues: Heads or Tails. Decide how many strokes you will give or receive, then flip a coin on every tee box. Heads means the forward tees; tails means the back tees. You may get lucky and have a heads-heavy afternoon, or you may not. What matters is that after the round, you will not be discussing your score. You will be talking about the specific shots you and your partner hit.

Almost every fall, the author competes in the Big Cup Scramble at Lawsonia in Wisconsin, his favorite event on the golf calendar. Usually played on the second weekend of October, the event features cups cut at about 2.5 times the normal diameter but placed in brutal locations on the greens. A drivable par-4 is not especially interesting for a four-player scramble team—most groups will probably make a 2—but it becomes far more compelling when the oversized cup is cut on a 10-degree slope just one pace from a bunker lip. If everyone misses a putt, you will not clean it up quickly; you may spend 15 minutes there trying to make bogey. Golf starts to feel like a team game when a four-player scramble team is grinding to finish eight under.

These ideas do have a Northern, Midwestern flavor. October and November bring volatile weather for those of us north of the Mason-Dixon line. Tuesday may be beautiful while you are working indoors, then Saturday can be miserable when you are free.

So we have to thank the Milwaukee Brewers, who won 103 games and captured their first National League pennant in 44 years. Brewers home-game tickets were so outrageously expensive that the author had to get creative: book flights to central Florida. The golf grass there may be dormant, but the temperatures are predictable, and baseball will not bankrupt him. So this silly season is getting even sillier as he takes on the Bermuda grass between Orlando and Tampa—the kind he has not played on in well over a year. So be it. That is what the silly season has decided for him. And no matter what he shoots, he will attend a World Series game that night.