If any golf fan or media member ever uses the word ‘boring’ in connection to Scottie Scheffler, their Masters credentials should be revoked, their golf clubs taken away and their country club logo polo shirts burned into a heap of ash.
Because what is the point of this game if not to witness and recognize the brilliance, ruthlessness and efficiency of the greatest player we have seen since Tiger Woods?
It has been in fashion over the past few years during Scheffler’s rise to dismiss him as a personality, as an entity, regardless of his performance on the course. Too vanilla. Too understated. Too wholesome. Too much of a regular guy to lure the masses into watching a major championship Sunday.
It’s true that if Woods was dominating the Open Championship the way Scheffler did this weekend, culminating with a four-stroke victory and fourth major title, it would be a national event. Scheffler does not have that kind of pull now and probably never will. It’s possible nobody ever will.
But to downplay Scheffler because he doesn’t generate that kind of fan adoration, or to ignore the fascinating moment he’s creating right now for golf, is to completely miss the point.
If you aren’t enthralled watching somebody run laps around their peers in a sport that isn’t supposed to produce week-in, week-out dominance, did you even like golf in the first place? If you aren’t entertained by a player who picks the right strategy on almost every hole, controls his distances far better than anyone on the planet and is now an increasingly Woodsian clutch putter on major weekends, maybe pickleball is more your speed.
What, do you want Scheffler to fist pump a little more? Start beefs with Rory McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau? Reveal a messy personal life with a bashed-in windshield?
Sorry, but that’s not the way the Scheffler era is going to go down. Nor is it going to be an obsessive march toward Woods in the all-time major count the same way that Woods devoted his career to chasing down Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18.
In fact, it seems just as possible that whenever Scheffler inevitably wins a U.S. Open to complete his career Grand Slam, he might just head home to Texas for good, knowing there won’t be much more to add to his legacy in the game.
And we can speculate about that possibility because of what Scheffler revealed at his news conference before the Open began. The question was about how long Scheffler had ever celebrated a victory. What followed was a 494-word answer in which Scheffler described a phenomenon that many elite athletes, and particularly in this generation, understand innately but hesitate to talk about publicly.
‘It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for, like, a few minutes,’ Scheffler said. ‘It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling. To win the Byron Nelson Championship at home, I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf to have an opportunity to win that tournament. You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister’s there, it’s such an amazing moment. Then it’s like, OK, what are we going to eat for dinner? Life goes on.
‘Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport. To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world because what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.’
He went on from there, talking about the wrestling match in his mind between desperately wanting to win tournaments such as the Masters and the Open and then realizing that, as soon as it’s over, you kind of just move on to the next thing.
‘At the end of the day, sometimes I just don’t understand the point,’ he said.
If only Woods ever said anything half that interesting or revealing about his state of mind. Instead, he spent most of his prime regurgitating cliches and keeping his most humanizing qualities private until they unintentionally spilled out into the public realm.
But Woods was a different phenomenon. He literally changed the game with his length of the tee, his physicality, his Black and Asian identity, his charismatic celebrations. It was fascinating and thrilling to watch it in real time, even as inevitable as his victories often seemed.
Scheffler’s superpower is that he clearly doesn’t need this. He’s driven to be great, but he also understands at age 29 that his life isn’t going to be different in any meaningful way if he wins four majors or 14, and even his mood isn’t going to change for more than a few minutes whether he wins or loses.
And lately, there have been a lot of wins: 17 of them in his past 80 tournaments on the PGA Tour, with a statistical profile that puts him a lot closer to Woods than most people recognize.
What Scheffler did this week at Royal Portrush to crush the field was clinical and skillful and often just breathtaking. Maybe that kind of monotonous winning doesn’t sell a lot of golf clubs or watches to the casual fan, but it’s authentic to a player who should only be accused of boring the masses in one sense: He’s figured out this game in a way only a small handful of others ever have.