Scheffler turns Sawgrass into Scott-land

The Masters champion dominates The Players and recaptures No. 1, maybe for a long while.

The weekend gave golfers a reason to join the LIV Tour that had nothing to do with money, blood-stained or otherwise. They can save their self-esteem by hiding out from Scottie Scheffler.

Otherwise they can spend four rounds, not just three, at the mercy of Scheffler’s metronome. That mercy was severely limited at The Players, and has been since Super Sunday, 2022.

Scheffer won the Players, and the accompanying $4.5 million, by five strokes. When threatened on Sunday, he put together five consecutive birdies. Playing with Scheffler, at times like this, isn’t like getting caught in the same deafening vortex that once subsumed challengers to Tiger Woods. Scheffler is respected by golf fans but not idolized, at least not yet, and he hasn’t pulled in those from the golf-averse community like Tiger did. But who knows? He is only 26, and already has a Masters championship, a WGC Match Play title, and now has thrashed the deepest field of any tournament in the world, an event so financially decadent that even the fifth-place man, Hideki Matsuyama, made $1.025 million.

In fact Scheffler has five wins since his first victory in Phoenix, over Patrick Cantlay in a playoff. He came into that tournament ranked 14th worldwide. Now he is No. 1 again, for the third time. More to the point, those six wins have happened in 56 weeks. Except for last fall’s Tour Championship, which he lost to Rory McIlroy after he held the 54-hole lead by five, Scheffler has been oblivious to pressure, fame, and doubt. As his top rivals stumbled all over TPC Sawgrass, Scheffler gave a tutorial to Min Woo Lee, Cameron Davis and the others who were poking their heads into the Sunday hothouse for the first time. It is doubtful they learned anything. You’re either Scheffler or you’re not.

“East Lake (in Atlanta, site of the Tour Championship) at the end of last year was pretty challenging for me just to handle,” Scheffler said. “It was obviously very sad and hard and I didn’t expect things to finish that way. This one’s a lot sweeter now.”

What has singled him out? Talent is first, of course. He’s 6-foot-3 and strong enough to lead this field in driving distance, yet he grew up realizing that the short game was the path to success, and few players can match his knack for saving par from dubious locations. But Scheffler really wins because of relentless logic and peace of mind. He is first on the PGA Tour in the “bounceback” stat, measuring one’s ability to follow bogeys with birdies. Last year he was 23rd. He can win by lighting up the scoreboard and he can also win by grinding, as he did last year by turning the usually riveting Masters into a test pattern. He is also the tour leader in bogey avoidance and was ninth last year, and he is fourth in 3-putt avoidance. He realizes, as Woods did, that you often win golf tournaments by letting everyone else lose them.

If you took that upper crust of golfers and had them play their absolute best, McIlroy and Justin Thomas would probably be in a playoff every week. That, of course, never happens. Scheffler, at least in this stretch, has shown he can reach his A game more often than anyone else.

After he won Phoenix in 2022 he was seventh in L.A., won Bay Hill, finished 55th at the Players and won the Match Play and the Masters. Then he was second at Colonial, second at the U.S. Open, and 21st at the Open Championship. He also played more often than the other headliners. This year he was 17th at the Tournament of Champions, first in Phoenix again, 12th at L.A., fourth at Bay Hil and now this. His only missed cuts were at the PGA Championship, the Scottish Open and at Memphis.

Scheffler hit 72.79 percent of greens in regulation, tops on tour. This year he is at 73.77 percent and is still leading. At the Players he was fourth in strokes gained/approach, first in tee to green, fourth in around-the-green, and first with 75 percent of greens hit. He didn’t scramble particularly well except when he chipped in on the second hole, just as Lee had moved to within one shot. Same thing happened at Augusta last year where he started sluggishly and then rammed home a chip on the third hole. If that ball hadn’t hit the pin and sunk, Scheffler was looking at bogey at best. It was a break, but Scheffler turned it into a three-stroke victory, and it was only that close because he 4-putted the 72nd hole.

Scheffler’s spree has coincided with the arrival of caddie Ted Scott, a Foosball wizard and the co-pilot of Bubba Watson’s two Masters victories. The two met in a Bible study group. Scott routinely talks of being “humbled” and “blessed” to latch onto to such a hot horse, and says Scheffler is buoyed by the fact that he’s “well-loved” at home and brings that assurance to the course.

Scott also challenged Scheffler to turn his chipping ability into results that move a leaderboard. He said he’d pay Scheffler a stipend after 10 chip-ins in the 2022-23 season. Scheffler did it twice at Sawgrass and moved his total to 11.

“It’s probably more fun for me than him because I get to chip in and he has to owe me for it,” Scheffler said.

“I think Teddy made a very bad bet,” Jordan Spieth said.

Spieth is one of the few who has been No. 1 in the world for a while and has shared that 10-feet-tall-and-bulletproof feeling. When Spieth put together any sort of weekend birdie string in 2015-2017, the ground started trembling and his fellow leaders got the shakes. Now he sees it in Scheffler, a fellow Texas Longhorn and Dallas resident. Spieth’s family moved to Big D from Pennsylvania, Scheffler’s did the same from New Jersey. But while Spieth played all sorts of sports, Scheffler was pretty much tunneled on golf. As Scott noted, junior golfers customarily wear shorts, but the 7-year-old Scottie played tournaments in long pants, because that’s what the pros did.

Spieth explained that a win like last year’s Masters has freed up Scheffler to play on the edge, because it gave him “house money.”

“If you feel like it doesn’t matter, you’re going to play the shot that could go closest even if it means disaster could happen,” Spieth said. “You still sit there and go for it and pul it off, similar to how Phil Mickelson played most of his rounds. There’s nothing to lose, everything to gain for him. it’s a really nice place to me. I’ve been there.”

In Scheffler’s past two wins he has received checks totaling $7.7 million. The house is growing, but, at this moment, only one man has the key.