Scottie Scheffler walked out of the winner’s press conference at the PGA Championship holding his one-year-old son in his arms. Behind a barrier, 50 yards away, a group of fans, most of them kids, started chanting his name. The security detail ushered him in a different direction. It is the duty of the champion to be photographed. The entitled took turns: PGA officials, police officers, some golf course staff. The child never left his arms.
Scheffler talks a lot about his family and the simple life they lead and how grounded it makes him feel. The wholesome image he projects always feels authentic. On the golf course he is temperate in his emotions and in control of his responses. He doesn’t play to the gallery or drop his game face or do something that will go viral on social media. Apart from being arrested once. Every saint has a past.
On a love/hate spectrum Scheffler doesn’t move the needle one way or the other. He’s like a rice cake: you can’t decide if it needs more sugar or more salt. But it would be irrational to dislike him. He has done nothing to deserve it.
There must be other layers, though. In his press conference Scheffler was asked if he wanted to “crush” opponents and the reporter must have hoped that the choice of language would trigger something. Instead, Scheffler chipped the ball sideways. In the great tradition of deflection, he complimented the question and ducked it.
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Nobody ever needed to ask Tiger Woods that question. Everybody knew. Golf is attended by numbers at every turn, and when Scheffler achieves something new the archivists are immediately scrambling for a correlation with Woods.
On Sunday, Scheffler became just the second player in the last 40 years to win consecutive PGA Tour events by five shots or more. Woods is the other. He became just the third player to win 15 PGA Tour events by the age of 29: Woods and Jack Nicklaus are the others. He is also just the third player to win two Masters and the PGA by the age of 30: Woods and Nicklaus are the others.
Nicklaus always spoke about allowing other players make mistakes in the final round of Majors. On the back nine at Quail Hollow on Sunday, that is what happened. Jon Rahm, the only player to join Scheffler in the lead, played the back nine in three over. Nobody within hailing distance of the lead made ground on him coming home.
Scheffler carded three birdies on the back nine, which was more than any other player in the top 10 on the leaderboard except Harris English, who teed off a couple of hours before the leaders and never had a chance to win.
But there was a period, early in the round, when his driving went haywire and he looked vulnerable. On Saturday, when the wind got up in the afternoon and was so gusty at times that players backed off their putts, Scheffler missed just one fairway. On the hardest driving day of the week, he led the field in fairways hit and strokes gained off the tee.
Then on Sunday, when there was no wind to speak of, he hit just two fairways in the opening nine holes. All his misses were left. If he was bewildered, it didn’t show. His lead stretched out to five shots and then evaporated. There was no way he was going to win without making an effective correction in-play. He was asked afterwards how he managed that, and his answer utterly demystified the process.
“I felt like in the beginning of the round, I was maybe a little short in my swing, and then I started making a good full turn,” he said. “Like, 7, 8, 9, I felt like I hit the shots really solid, and it was coming out left. And I told Teddy [Scott, his caddie] walking up the ninth, I was like, ‘That one felt pretty good. I don’t know why that was left again.’
“He was like, ‘Well, maybe you’re aimed over there. Just try and hit a little further right.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ So, I got on 10 and felt like I squared up my shoulders and hit it right up the middle. I think the tee shot I hit on 11 was the one that propelled me into a great back nine. That’s a hard tee shot for me. Doesn’t really suit my eye. I stepped up there and hit a really good shot and kid of executed really well from there on out.”
It sounds simple when he puts it like that, but everything hinged on the clarity of his response and the strong leash on his emotions. He’s not one of these players who studiously avoids leaderboards when they’re close to the lead in a tournament: between the ninth and the 13th he said he was looking at every leaderboard to see where Rahm was. He knew he was in a fight.
On another front, though, the battle was familiar.
“I feel like you’re always battling yourself, and you’re always trying to figure things out. And you’re never going to perfect it. I can be kind of a crazy person sometimes when it comes to putting my mind to something. In golf, there’s always something you can figure out.”
Nobody in the game does that better than Scheffler. Nobody has more mind for winning.
