Scottie’s Run of Success

I wanted to draw attention to Elizabeth’s fine article on Scottie Scheffler…

Watch enough golf, and you’ll start to feel like you’ve seen everything. Say, a man wading knee-deep into a water hazard with his pants rolled up, or another man chasing after a missed putt and then whacking it again while the ball is still moving, or John Daly doing anything. But I’m not sure there’s ever been a golf week like this. Lord knows, at this point, we’ve experienced plenty of Scottie Scheffler in the winner’s circle. Coming into the Open Championship at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland, the 29-year-old Texan and world no. 1 had won three times this season, including the PGA Championship in May. He hadn’t finished outside of the top 10 in a tournament since March. And this came after a monstrous nine-win season in 2024, which included his second Masters victory and an Olympic gold medal. 

Since emerging as a generational talent in 2022, Scheffler has been both spectacular and spectacularly consistent. On the course, he projects a placid, even slightly hangdog demeanor, loping along while offhandedly executing one brilliant shot after the next. Off the course, he has tended to come across as soft-spoken and affable, God-fearing and family-oriented, likable but not exactly knowable. Those of us who cover pro golf acknowledge a dichotomy: With some players, it feels like they are truly dimensional—with interests and pursuits and opinions and emotions that supersede their performances between the ropes—while with others, it can feel like their public personalities revolve almost entirely around launch angles and swing speed metrics. Until this week, it wasn’t entirely clear which side of that divide Scheffler fell on. 

And this is the man that so many of y’all would have put in the Kentucky State Penitentiary system…