A Brief History of The Skins Game

Golf fans love a comeback and were delighted to hear the iconic Skins Game would be making a return this Black Friday on Amazon Prime. The Skins Game holds a special place in the hearts of many for a few reasons. For starters, it’s traditionally held around the holidays, so our minds often harken back to sitting with friends or family as we enjoy the golf.

Additionally, The Skins Game airs right about the same time many of us have put our clubs away for the season, vicariously scratching that itch to play as we watch the pros swing away. Even those who don’t play and seldom watch golf get sucked in, because watching four people play a hole for half a million dollars is Must See TV (more on that later). Whether you’ve watched every vintage of The Skins Game ever aired or you’ve never seen a swing, here’s what you need to know.

The Etymology of Skins

As is the case with many golf terms, nobody is certain where the term “skins” comes from. The best guess is that “skins” references animal pelts that merchants traded and bartered with. The game could just as easily be called “bucks” or “duckets” but skins carries a certain gravity that can’t be denied.

How Skins Is Played

For these made-for-television matches, four players compete on each hole for a pre-set amount of money. There needs to be a sole winner for someone to win said money. If no single player wins a hole outright, the money carries over to the next hole. This is where we get the term “carryovers” from. Because of the one-tie-all-tie nature of Skins and carryovers, you could feasibly play horrible for 17 holes, get really lucky on the 18th hole and win the entire pot.

Golf Goes Primetime

The Skins Game did not mark the first time golf had been televised outside of the majors and PGA TOUR’s regular schedule. There was also a series called “Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf” that ran mostly on weekends in the sixties. For viewers, it was far less engaging as the format was stroke play, with only two players going head-to-head to see who could shoot a lower 18-hole score. Not exactly thrilling television in the event of a blowout. Primetime television needs drama, and there was nobody better suited to bring golf, and the drama it can produce, together than Don Ohlmeyer.

A polarizing figure, Ohlmeyer understood the American appetite for sports entertainment, and entertainment in general, like few others ever have. He played a crucial role in the development of Monday Night Football, and was at the helm of NBC when the network created “Must See TV” in the nineties with shows like “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and “ER.”

While others doubted that golf in the winter could be successful, Ohlmeyer believed it could be, and in 1983 he introduced The Skins Game starring Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, and Gary Player, undoubtedly the biggest names in the world of golf at the time. The Skins Game was played at the brand-new Desert Highlands Golf Club just outside of Scottsdale, Arizona. For added drama, a substantial purse was up for grabs — $360,000 dollars, which was substantial considering the leading money leader in 1983 won just over $425,000 for an entire season. Sparing no expense, Ohlmeyer tapped fellow Bel-Air Country Club member and television legend Vin Scully to do the play-by-play, paired with Ben Crenshaw’s comforting Texas twang.

RELATED: Enjoy the Full Broadcast of the 1983 Skins Game

Follow the Money

The gamble paid off as The Skins Game was a huge success and drew more viewers than the 1983 U.S. Open. As for the skins up for grabs, Player ($170,000) and Palmer ($140,000) won the big dollars with Nicklaus ($40,000) and Watson ($10,000) finishing a good margin behind them. Controversy was also part of the plot as Gary Player’s reputation for having a cavalier relationship with the rules of golf found him — once again — in an uncomfortable situation for moving a branch on the 17th hole.

The foursome would meet again the following year, again at Desert Highlands. This time Nicklaus and Watson won all of the money; $240,00 and $120,000, respectively. The ratings were strong, which made the network happy, but the real winner was Desert Highlands developer Lyle Anderson, who in two short years nearly sold out memberships to his newly developed Desert Highlands, mostly to snowbirds who had learned about the club through the televised matches. The real estate/membership marketing boon The Skins Game could provide a club would be a key factor in determining future locations.

California, Here We Come

After two strong years in the Arizona desert, The Skins Game moved to Bear Creek in Murrieta, California. Like Desert Highlands, Bear Creek was a new Nicklaus development in need of the bump a televised Skins Game could provide. Once again, Nicklaus, Watson and Palmer played, but Player was out and the gregarious 1984 U.S. Open champion Fuzzy Zoeller would take his spot. Zoeller would dominate, winning $225,000 of skins money, more than doubling the $94,000 he won in the ’84 U.S. Open.

In 1986, after one year at Bear Creek, The Skins Game moved to arguably its most famous home, The Stadium Course at PGA West in La Quinta, California. Zoeller set a new Skins record, winning $370,000 in the ’86 match. But it was 1987 when one of the most famous shots in Skins Game history was struck. Six-time major champion Lee Trevino made his famous hole-in-one on the island green 17th hole. “When it was in the air, Jack (Nicklaus) said, ‘That’s a pretty shot.’” Trevino said moments after the shot, giddy with laughter, “It can’t get any prettier than that!”

The Skins Game had arrived and seemed to have cracked a code that grabbed the interest of American viewers: beautiful settings, big personalities, and high stakes equaled high ratings. The Stadium Course hosted The Skins Game until 1991, which was the last year Nicklaus competed, and marked a changing of the guard.

A Changing of the Guard

In 1992, The Skins Game moved across the Coachella Valley from La Quinta to the newly developed Big Horn Golf Club. As you might have guessed, Big Horn was also looking to sell housing lots, and what better tool than The Skins Game to announce the club’s presence on the scene.

The ’92 Skins Game marked a new era. Gone were the Big Three of Jack, Arnie and Gary Player. In came the new blood, led by 1992 Masters champion Fred “Boom Boom” Couples, 1991 Skins money leader Payne Stewart, Greg Norman, and, oddly, the mild-mannered Tom Kite.

You could call Big Horn “The House That Boom Boom Built”’ as Couples won $910,000 over the three years the event was held at Big Horn. More impressively, Couples would go on to win The Skins Game five times, and remains the all-time leader in events played (11) and money won ($4.4M) and skins won (77). They don’t call him “Mr. Skins” for nothing.

RELATED: Who Has the Most Wins in The Skins Game?

Hello, World

Tiger Woods arrived in 1996, and gave new life to The Skins Game. The field featured Woods, Couples, Tom Watson and John Daly. To give you an idea of the power of the Tiger Effect, the Nielsen ratings for the 1995 Skins Game (Couples, Watson, Corey Pavin and Peter Jacobsen) was 4.0. The ’96 edition (Woods, Watson, Couples, Daly) more than doubled that number to reach 8.2, which was even better than the final round of the ’96 Masters. Woods would play in a total of six Skins Games, never winning the event, but managing to take home a tidy $655,000 over a half-dozen appearances. Safe to say the network got their money’s worth.

Hello, Annika

It’s hard to overstate the greatness of prime Annika Sorenstam. For my money, she’s the greatest woman to ever play golf, and whoever I would tell you is second best is not particularly close. Her dominance on the LPGA Tour was such that she took her talents to the PGA TOUR in 2003 to play Colonial Country Club for the Charles Schwab Challenge. She did not make the cut at Colonial, but she did make history by becoming the first woman since Babe Zaharias (1946) to compete on the PGA TOUR. Later in 2003, Annika would make her Skins Game debut and win $225,000.

Say what you will about sexism in sports but, sadly, perhaps the most enduring memory from the Annika Skins Games appearances is when she outdrove Fred Funk, which led to Funk having to wear a skirt for the rest of the hole, the penalty for being outdriven by a girl.

The Slow Decline

Fatigue had begun to set in by the early aughts. Not even Tiger and Annika could get folks to tune in the way the Big Three could. By the end of the run in 2008, the event was drawing a piddly Nielsen rating of 0.8. The novelty was gone, and given that Tiger had driven PGA TOUR purses to astronomical levels, some of the luster of pros playing for a few hundred thousand dollars had worn off, as well. Further, for a few years the PGA TOUR insisted that if you won The PLAYERS championship, you got a spot in The Skins Game. This led to Americans being forced to watch Stephen Ames and the aforementioned Funk, rather than the entertaining likes of Trevino and Stewart. Also, remember all of the new housing developments that were using The Skins Game to market second, sometimes third residences to snowbirds? Many of them were rife with foreclosures after the subprime crisis of 2008. The end of an era had come.

A Time for Revival

As I wrote in the beginning, golf fans love a comeback. Just look at the success of Happy Gilmore 2, which was streamed over 45 million times in the first three days of its release, the strongest Netflix performance in U.S. history.

Much like a sequel that introduces new characters and plot twists, the newly revamped Skins Game will also feature some changes. For starters, it will be streamed on Prime Video rather than aired on a network. The newly imagined Skins Game will also be played in Florida for the first time in Palm Beach Gardens at Panther National. We also have four new faces: Xander Schauffele, Keegan Bradley, Tommy Fleetwood and recently announced, Shane Lowry. Justin Thomas was originally set to play but had to withdraw from the event after undergoing a microdiscectomy.

Additionally, players will begin with $1 million in what’s being called a “reverse purse” and have the chance to win or lose money on each hole. We will see how it all plays out, but make no mistake: we are thrilled The Skins Game is back and, hopefully, better than ever.

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