Steve Stricker had a historic 2023 season on the PGA Tour Champions. He won six times and had 15 top-10 finishes in 16 starts, earning him his first Charles Schwab Cup.
To cap off a great year, Stricker swept the Champions Tour awards.
He was named the 2023 Jack Nicklaus Award Champions Tour Player of the Year at Tuesday night's annual awards dinner. Stricker also won the Arnold Palmer Award, given to the season's top money winner. The last award the 56-year-old claimed was the Byron Nelson Award, which is given to the player who leads the league in points per season.
Stricker sat at the top of the standings 25 of 28 weeks last season. He becomes only the third player in the 44-season history of the Champions Tour to spend at least 25 weeks at No. 1 in a year, joining Bernhard Langer in 2014 and Hale Irwin in 2002.
“What an honor and what an honor it is to receive such a special award,” Stricker said. “We’re grateful to have the opportunity to compete against each other…The passion of playing against the best players at our age is still really special to all of us.”
In 2023, Stricker never finished lower than 15th, but that happened once at a Constellation Furyk and Friends event. Outside of this tournament, Stricker's other 15 starts all finished at his T8 or higher.
The former Ryder Cup captain incredibly won three of the five majors in 2023 and finished runner-up in the other two. Having won these majors, he and his daughter Izzy competed in his PNC championship last December, finishing 10th.
Stricker earned $3,986,063, setting a single-season record, surpassing Langer's winnings in 2017.
His season average was also a record-setting 67.54 points. Fred Couples had previously maintained a score of 67.96, but changed his settings back in 2010.
The former Illinois Illini also set a record for consecutive rounds of par or better across the PGA Tour's sanctioned leagues. He shot 55 consecutive rounds from June 2022 to June 2023. Tiger Woods holds the record for 52 rounds, albeit on the PGA Tour, and could potentially be a little more impressive.
Still, it was a perfect season for Stricker. He aims to build on that momentum with his first Champions Tour event of 2024, held at his course at Hualalai Golf in Hawaii.
Savannah Lee Richardson is a golf staff writer for SB Nation's Playing Through.If you want to know more about golf, please follow us. @_PlayingThrough On all major social platforms. You can also follow her on Twitter @SportsGirls and Instagram @savannah_leigh_sports.
