Photo by Chris Condon/PGA TOUR
As if the 2023 season couldn’t get better for Stricker, he won all the Champions Tour awards, filling his trophy case.
Steve Stricker recorded a historic 2023 season on the PGA Tour Champions. He won six times, recorded 15 top-10 finishes in 16 starts, and took home his first Charles Schwab Cup.
To cap off that incredible year, Stricker swept the Champions Tour awards.
He was named the 2023 Jack Nicklaus Award as the Champions Tour Player of the Year on Tuesday night at the annual awards dinner. Stricker also won the Arnold Palmer Award, given to the season money leader. The final award the 56-year-old claimed was the Byron Nelson Award, given to the player who led the season in scoring average.
Stricker sat on top of the standings for 25 of the 28 weeks of last season. He became the third player in the Champions Tour’s 44-season history to sit at No. 1 for at least 25 weeks during a year, joining Bernhard Langer in 2014 and Hale Irwin in 2002.
“What a privilege and what an honor to have won these special awards,” Stricker said. “I’m thankful that we have the opportunity to compete against one another…The passion that we all have to play against the best at our age is still really special for all of us.”
In 2023, Stricker didn’t finish lower than 15th, and that happened once at the Constellation Furyk and Friends event. Taking that tournament out of the picture, Stricker’s other 15 starts all resulted in a T8 or better.
The former Ryder Cup captain incredibly won three of the five majors in 2023 and was runner-up in the other two. Winning those majors got him and his daughter Izzy into the PNC Championship this past December, where they finished 10th.
Stricker set a single-season record by winning $3,986,063, beating out Langer’s 2017 winnings.
His season average was also a record-breaker at 67.54. Fred Couples previously held it at 67.96, set back in 2010.
The former Illinois Illini also set the record for consecutive rounds of par or better across any of the PGA Tour’s sanctioned leagues. He recorded 55 straight rounds from June 2022 to June 2023. Tiger Woods held the mark at 52, albeit on the PGA Tour, making it potentially a bit more impressive.
Nevertheless, it was quite the season for Stricker. He’ll look to build off of that momentum in the first Champions Tour event of 2024 at the Hualalai Golf Course in Hawaii.
Savannah Leigh Richardson is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. For more golf coverage, be sure to follow us @_PlayingThrough on all major social platforms. You can also follow her on Twitter @SportsGirlSL and Instagram @savannah_leigh_sports.
