Steve Stricker, the reigning PGA Tour Champions Player of the Year is coming off a molten-hot season. The 2021 Ryder Cup captain being a Wisconsinite, to put his sizzling performance last year in cheese terms—it would be a flambéd saganaki. Affectionately known as ‘Mr. September’ for his tendency to excel during the Fall stretch back in his FedEx Cup playing epoch, Stricker lorded over the leaderboard six times in 16 starts.
That’s a winning percentage of 37.55%. His victories included three of the senior series’ five majors and when he wasn’t winning, he came awfully close with five runner-up finishes.
Strick capped it all off by earning the Charles Schwab Cup title and setting season-records on the 50+ series for scoring average, 67.54, and earnings, $3.9 million. Those respective tallies added the Byron Nelson and Arnold Palmer Awards to a hefty haul that also included the Jack Nicklaus Award for his POY honors.
The influx of incoming hardware may necessitate putting an addition on his trophy case to make room for the new sparkling baubles, but he hasn’t even had a chance to figure that situation out yet.
“I haven’t gotten them yet. I’m waiting to get back home and then they’ll ship them to me. It was quite a year. It was a lot of fun, a lot of great memories. I had my youngest daughter on the bag for one of my major wins which was really cool. It was a very special year and one I can try to duplicate again this year. I know it’s going to be a challenge but it’s always fun trying and working toward something,” he said.
Along the savage run Stricker broke the record for most consecutive par or better rounds on a PGA sanctioned tour, carding even or better for 55 straight rounds, surpassing a mark previously. held by Tiger Woods. Now there’s a tremendous difference between making that happen on the senior circuit where courses tend to be shorter and setup is easier than on the regular tour. Nonetheless it is another feather in the cap.
“I think that has to have an asterisk by it but it’s pretty cool to get mentioned in the same breath as one of Tiger’s records,” Stricker said. So far in 2024, the good times have continued to roll for Stricker who has started the season with a pair of top ten finishes and he will be in the field at the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass in a couple weeks thanks to his Kaulig Companies Championship win last summer that earned him the berth.
Last season fellow Badger-stater Jerry Kelly, then 56, broke Arnold Palmer’s record from 1985 to become the oldest player to ever make the cut in Players Championship history and Stricker, 57, plans on making his longtime buddy’s history book mention short-lived.
“I do. I told Jerry that, I said ‘I’m going there to break your record.’ I’m going there to do better than that, I’m going there to do well, that’s my mindset and that’s what I’m gearing towards and working towards,” Stricker said.
The last time the Madison based golfer appeared in the tournament was in 2020 and he missed the cut. But in 2018, Stricker tied for 23rd place and his best finish in the last decade was a tie for 13th in 2014.
“I think it’s a course where I can play well. You don’t need to have a lot of length. It’s more important to keep the ball on the fairway and hit proper iron shots. It’s one that even at my age I think I can play well at,” he said.
His experience playing Sawgrass’ signature 17th hole, the 137-yard boogeyman that flummoxes many wedges shots aimed at the island green that end up plunking into the water surrounding the island green will come in handy. Although, even a golfer of Stricker’s caliber feels his confidence waver whenever he stares down that dastardly par 3.
“You’ve got that fear in the back of your mind, for sure. It’s one of those holes I’ve played pretty conservatively over the years. I try to hit it into the center of the green,” Stricker said.
“Some years you can be more aggressive because the green gets soft but I’ve played there some years that it gets so firm and fast that you’re just trying to get it on the green and the wind is tricky in that area of the golf course. Picking the right club becomes the challenge but most times I’m just trying to hit it right in the center of the green, take my two putts and make my three and move on.
In late March, Stricker will tee off at the Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills Country Club for the Galleri Classic. The event, now in its second year, is named after Grail’s multi-cancer early detection test, a logo that was just added to Stricker’s polo after signing a partnership deal with them last month.
“Cancer has hit all of us in some form or another, whether it’s someone we know, a friend or a relative” Stricker explained. He will also take the blood draw designed to screen for early signs of over 50 types of cancer.
“I’m excited to take the test. Hopefully they don’t find anything but if they do, I can be proactive and get more information on what I need to do,” Stricker said.
The final test for Stricker will be how he can follow up a wildly successful season with a sequel. He’s currently ranked 17th all time in PGA Tour Champions wins with 17. It would take just three more wins to work his way into the top 10 on a list topped by Bernhard Langer who has an astonishing 46 wins and is still active.
“It’s a crazy amount of wins. Someone told me after I had won those six times last year—’ok now go ahead and do that for five more years and you can catch Bernhard.’ That put it in perspective pretty quickly,” Stricker said.
“The longevity of Langer’s career is amazing and he continues to amaze us. It’s an amazing record and I don’t know if I see that being broken. You’d have to come out at age 50 and right away put the pedal to the metal and keep it going for ten years and that’s going to be hard to do.”
