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Vijay Singh had just peppered the flagstick with an approach to win the tournament. Then, he took one of fellow competitor Mike Weir's wedges and did it again...left-handed. His fellow players hollered and guffawed their approval, slapping his back.
The 2001 EMC Skills Challenge was far from a serious golf event, but that didn't matter. That moment left a lasting impression on 11-year-old me, and the fun and camaraderie of it was essential.
As part of professional golf's "silly season" - non-tour events, often one or two days with some different formats and small fields of players - it provided an interesting contrast to typical PGA Tour events, which primarily showed players at their most serious.
I'd hardly seen the typically intense Singh crack a smile under normal circumstances, much less mess around and hit a shot left-handed. But that quick, low-stakes turn of events showed an impressionable kid just how freakishly good pros were at hitting all kinds of shots - especially the most unexpected ones.
Golf's silly season has died out in recent years. The skyrocketing of purses and the explosion in lucrative playing opportunities - especially since the tour instituted a "wraparound" season schedule, beginning in the fall of 2013 and concluding the following September.
But with the wraparound schedule breathing its last this year, and with renewed energy around the game, the silly season is back, baby, and figures like Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are going to be in the middle of crafting it.
Tiger, Rory and pro golf's new approach to less-serious, fun-forward events
Bottom line: the tour's compressed main schedule from January through August provides ample opportunities for other potentially amusing events to crop up, adopt important positives from the old crop of silly-season events and put a new spin on the elite game.
We've already seen it with The Match, whose latest edition pits Tiger and Rory against Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth at Florida's Pelican Golf Club at 6 p.m. EST Saturday on TNT.
It's a perfect old-meets-new occasion. The Match is in many ways a 21st-century version of the long-running Shell's Wonderful World of Golf series, where two well-known players would square off in a tape-delayed, 18-hole stroke-play tussle for some extra cash, often at a scenic destination course that was not likely to host a full-blown tour event.
This live edition of The Match will be only 12 holes, compressing it into a more manageable time frame. It will air when no college football games will sap away viewership. This means it will be played partially under floodlights, a callback to the flashy Monday Night Golf events - you may recall the "Showdown at Sherwood" and the "Battle at Bighorn" - that ran from 1999 to 2005, giving an extra jolt of visibility to the game in the peak-Tiger era. The combination of evening-golf novelty with great players and an intriguing course should make for entertaining viewing.
The Match is just part of the new, amped-up silly-season. 2024 will bring the premeire of The Golf League (TGL), the first major production of TMRW sports, whose principals include former Golf Channel boss Mike McCarley and, yes, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. Airing on Monday nights during the PGA Tour season, TGL brings the small-field format of The Match to an indoor stadium setting that uses golf simulator technology to provide the course. By bridging some of the gap between golf's green-grass world and that of video games, it seeks to rope in a potentially new audience that may think about the game differently than they have in the past.
Some holdovers from the previous silly-season era have survived, too. The PNC Championship at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Orlando, Grande Lakes has been completely revived from near-irrelevancy by the infusion of Tiger and Charlie Woods into its field. And it was announced this week that starting in 2023, the QBE Shootout (formerly the Shark Shootout and the Franklin Templeton Shootout) at Tiburon's Gold Course will feature a mixed field of PGA Tour and LPGA Tour players on mixed teams. Bringing the men's and women's tours together has long been thought a great idea from fans and industry insiders, and hopefully this is the beginning of a greater overall integration of the two tours.
The media landscape has never been more fertile for entertaining golf viewing outside of the norm. Full-time YouTubers get millions of views on relatively minimally-produced matches amongst themselves, and tour players are starting to feature in those videos as well. And with indie events like Linksoul's annual Wishbone Brawl at Goat Hill Park in Oceanside, Calif., airing on YouTube and appealing to their own audiences, the silly season is getting seriously stacked.
