PONTE VEDRA — When Scottie Scheffler was a boy, he spent innumerable hours hanging around the chipping green at Royal Oaks Country Club in Dallas. It was the only place, according to his coach Randy Smith, Scheffler would let his body and his brain slow down. He was constantly talking, running, buzzing with energy. Although the Legend of Scheffler often references his childhood humility, obnoxious would be a more honest description.
“As a little kid, he would get a little red and hot,” Smith said. “I said you’d better quit it now because there are some people who will really give you crap the older you get. He was outgoing, chirpy, zoom zooming everywhere. He was like the Energizer Bunny, into everything.”
It was exhausting. But when it came to chipping contests, Scheffler was fearless. He would stare down anyone who would take him on, whether it was kids his own age or the club’s PGA Tour regulars like Justin Leonard and Colt Knost.
“If you took all those contests when he was little, every single one of them, he’d be batting 70 percent from about age nine against the pros,” Smith said. “Now he’s got a couple kids doing to him what he did to them. I’ve seen [Scheffler get beat] once. He did not take it well.”
There are a few ways to look at Scheffler, who continued to make his case on Sunday that he is the best golfer in the world with a five-stroke win at The Players Championship, a win that returned him to No. 1 in the Official World Golf Rankings and earned him $4.5 million.
You can view him as brilliant but bland, a little too corporate and too genial of a player in which to emotionally invest your fandom.
Or you can grow to appreciate him for what he is, an artist with irons and wedges who — despite projecting a friendly and humble persona — burns with a quiet, competitive rage that he’s learned to channel into the biggest moments.
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“Every once in a while he’ll have a bit of an explosion,” Smith said while Scheffler was inside scoring, putting his signature on a final round 69, his sixth career win. “But he’s kind of figured out that there is nothing [good about] burning up the energy inside you that you need to create the best stuff. You watch great basketball players. They get mad. Oh god, do they get mad. But it’s amazing how fast they’re right back into the heat of the action. That’s what he does. He doesn’t burn up a lot of mental energy on getting mad. Now, he may completely go off at the range. But he doesn’t do it out here.”
The Players is decidedly not a major championship (sorry Mr. Monahan). But it does always serve as a good spot to assess where pro golf stands with majors just beyond the horizon. A few storylines took shape early in the week. The absence of the players who defected for LIV was clearly felt, none more than defending champion Cam Smith. Jon Rahm even fielded a question asking if Smith should have been granted an exemption, a delightful bit of theater considering he was answering it in the PGA Tour’s Media Center surrounded by PGA Tour employees.
“I mean, yes and no,” Rahm said. “I feel like as defending champion you've earned a right. But we're talking about a very unique circumstance in the world of golf. Some players made a choice of going to a different golf league knowing that they weren't going to be allowed to play here. And yes, this is a massive event. It is very close to a major quality event, but it's still a PGA Tour event. So with that regard, no. I don't think just him should be allowed to be here.”
It also became clear that Rory McIlroy remains the game’s most interesting golfer, especially if you factor in how much he means to the sport and the ways he’s chosen to take the lead in re-shaping the PGA Tour. He spent his Tuesday morning in a 2-hour player meeting helping the Tour present the plan for 2024, a plan that creates eight designated events (all of them likely to be held without a cut) for the Top 70 players in the FedExCup standings.
“I'm not going to sit here and lie, I think the emergence of LIV or the emergence of a competitor to the PGA Tour has benefited everyone that plays elite professional golf,” McIlroy said. “I think when you've been the biggest golf league in the biggest market in the world for the last 60 years, there's not a lot of incentive to innovate. This has caused a ton of innovation at the PGA Tour, and what was quite, I would say, an antiquated system is being revamped to try to mirror where we're at in the world in the 21st century with the media landscape.”
If McIlroy holds the title as the most compelling golfer for reasons beyond the course, then Rahm continues to be the most intimidating and relentless golfer, the man you least want to see charging up the leaderboard or standing across the tee box. But neither man was able to stick around for the weekend, Rahm suffering from a stomach ailment that forced him to withdraw Friday morning, and McIlroy suffering from a driver that, of late, has made him feel similarly queasy every time it drifts offline.
“I’m ready to get back to being purely a golfer,” McIlroy admitted after 76-73 left him outside the cutline. “It’s been a busy couple weeks. Honestly, it’s been a busy six to eight months.”
Rahm and McIlroy’s early exit created an opening for some of the game’s understudies to make their case that they deserve (particularly next season) to be chasing the same rapidly-expanding purses that the superstars have earmarked for themselves. There was a lot of talk early in the week that Sawgrass was the kind of democratic test that might throw a wrench in the narrative that the Tour should be built around its stars, particularly when journeymen like Chad Ramey, Ben Griffin, and David Lingmerth surged into contention. Griffin — who quit golf and became a mortgage broker several years ago, only to return to the game — found himself playfully answering questions about interest rates while in contention at the Tour’s $25 million flagship event after he opened with a 67.
“They’re too high if you're trying to buy a house,” Griffin said. “A $500,000 house two years ago was a little bit more affordable and it's probably double the cost now on a monthly payment. I picked a good time to get out of the mortgage industry, and I don't know how, but people think I'm a wizard for timing it so perfectly.”
Even 56-year-old Jerry Kelly turned a few heads by becoming the oldest player in the history of The Players to make the cut.
“Basically I took another two or three years off my life,” Kelly said. “I’m happy where I’m at on the Champions Tour.”
But the longer the tournament went on, the clearer it was that Cinderella stories were taking a backseat to Scheffler, who ended up making a convincing argument that he — not McIlroy or Rahm — is the most complete player in the game. Scheffler nukes his driver, he can usually shape it in both directions as needed, and he is one of the best iron players on earth. It was all those chipping contests at Royal Oaks, however, that gave him hands as delicate and precise as a violinist.
“Just by eye, it looks just kind of homegrown, which I always feel like works pretty well,” said Max Homa, when asked to describe Scheffler’s short game prowess. “Jordan [Spieth’s] is kind of similar. Obviously, they have great mechanics, but it feels like they do it a different way, which means they typically own it a bit more. I feel like [Scheffler] just knows what he's going to do. He has this stabbing spinner. He's got the really good kind of soft one out of the rough. I feel like he's just very artistic in that way.”
Scheffler’s hands have, over the last 18 months, become the game’s most underrated weapon. Every time he needed his short game to rescue him this week, it was there, much like it was when he won the 2022 Masters. He made only five bogeys all week, a remarkable statistic on a course with water lurking on every hole.
“I think I just like the challenge of harder golf courses,” Scheffler said. “I found a way to choose my moments.”
Scheffler chipped in twice on the weekend — once for eagle at No. 2 on Saturday, then again for birdie at No. 8 on Sun
Source: https://nolayingup.com/blog/kvv-scottie-scheffler-s-complete-game