Scottie Scheffler can be an all-time great - but he won’t transcend golf
World No1 may avoid the kind of slump that stalled Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, but while he is as dominant as Tiger Woods, he is a different type of superstar.
Jordan Spieth was once golf’s brightest star. He was the phenomenon, the youngest two-times major winner since Gene Sarazen in 1922, and the youngest US Open champion since Bobby Jones in 1923. Forget the career grand slam, he came close to doing it in four months. So when this scarred figure, marooned on three majors, suggests Scottie Scheffler will never transcend golf, it is worth paying attention.
That is not a criticism of the world No 1, who dominated the Open Championship at Royal Portrush. Quite the opposite. Spieth was just explaining why Scheffler is a different sort of sporting giant and rejecting the notion that a swing of more orthodox brilliance would have him being compared to Tiger Woods.
“He doesn’t care to be a superstar,” said Spieth, 31, who has known Scheffler since their Texas youth. “He’s not transcending the game like Tiger did. He’s not bringing it to a non-golf audience. He doesn’t want to go do the stuff that a lot of us do, corporately or anything like that.
“He just wants to get away from the game and separate the two because I know that at one time he felt it was too much, that he was taking it with him. Now he’s always with his family. They’re always doing stuff.”
This insight finished with Spieth saying that Scheffler’s success was partly primed by a “difference in personality from any other superstar that you’ve seen in the modern era and maybe in any sport”. In short, Spieth concluded of his friend: “I don’t think anybody is like him.”
Others think he is, well, a bit boring. We prefer the tortuous mental anguish of Rory McIlroy at the Masters. We like to think people are having the best day of their life when we invest some time to watch them, but Scheffler sometimes looks like he would rather be putting the bins out.
Yet there are similarities with others. For a start there were 1,197 days between his first and fourth major wins. Ditto Woods. It took him ten major appearances to win one, 18 to get two, 23 to make it three and 25 to have a quartet. For McIlroy, those numbers were uncannily close: 11, 17, 24 and 25.
So do the second stages of the careers of Spieth and McIlroy provide cause to postpone paeans? Not necessarily. Spieth’s implosion at the 2016 Masters preceded swing tweaks and a litany of injuries. McIlroy’s golden year in 2014 was statistically comparable to the one Scheffler has just had, complete with three wins, including the same Open-US PGA Championship double, in 21 days, but there were caveats even then.
Not long after McIlroy had won his Open at Hoylake and opened the floodgates to fantasies about what he might achieve, Woods was sounding a cautionary note. He said: “When he gets it going, he gets it going, but when it gets going bad, it gets real bad.” It sounded like a country song but was prescience based on McIlroy’s streakiness. After winning the PGA at Valhalla, the pride of Portrush spent 11 years chasing his past until that Augusta triumph this April.
Nobody thinks the older and uber-consistent Scheffler will suffer like that, but it shows that nothing lasts for ever. In the words of this most singular of golfers, the euphoria lasts a couple of minutes. When McIlroy won the Open, attention turned instantly to the career grand slam that would take more than a decade to complete. After Scheffler’s Open win on Sunday, he just said: “I don’t focus too much on that stuff.” What about McIlroy’s suggestion that only two or three players had ever been on a run like the one Scheffler is on? “I don’t put too much thought to that.”
Yet when you dominate a sport in the way Scheffler has been doing, it is natural to want to put him in even a premature historical context. There is a fascination in the 1,197 number. What did he think of such comparisons? “I think they’re a bit silly. Tiger won, what, 15 majors? This is my fourth. I think Tiger stands alone in the game of golf.”
If he will not catch Woods in major wins, the dominance and increasing awe of his peers is Tiger-esque; it is astonishing that he has been 46 shots better than anyone else at the majors since the start of 2020.
Of course, others have also enjoyed a period of success that lasts two, maybe three, years, before other things or players get in the way. Spieth looked unstoppable in 2015 but soon stopped challenging. Like Scheffler, McIlroy won four majors in four seasons, and while he deserves more credit than many afford him for his results since - 23 major top-tens, including a win - his brilliance has been laced with struggle. Brooks Koepka’s five majors spanned seven years but he had a three-year spell when he was a machine.
Scheffler has some things on his side that McIlroy and Spieth did not. For a start he was already married, which may sound irrelevant but hints at stability and the greater role in life he was speaking about last week. He also sees the folly in golf’s fetish for tinkering. His swing, with its long arc, hip drive and sliding feet, is unique, but he has avoided any urge to tweak it. “I’ve had the same coach since I was seven years old and I don’t think we’re going to change anytime soon,” he laughed when asked about it. Describing his veteran coach, Randy Smith, he once said: “He’s totally out of his mind, but when it comes to the golf swing he is such a genius, a little savant.”
Indeed, they have known each other so long that any minor glitch in the swing is obvious to the savant, such as a small amendment to his grip mid-Masters last year. Scheffler won that one. Phil Kenyon is also a key part of his team, sometimes dubbed the “Pep of Putting” - albeit not by himself. The quiet figure from Southport did not blind Scheffler with science when they started working together in 2023, but he did help him with lining up putts, his grip and relying on feel. He is 21st on the PGA Tour in the strokes-gained putting stats, which is some improvement given he was 162nd when he called Kenyon.
And although it may irk some non-believers, he also has God on his side. “Like Scottie says, it takes some of the pressure off because ultimately God is in control,” was Bernhard Langer’s assessment of the power of prayer. “It’s not a matter of life and death if you make a six-foot putt.”
Scheffler is 29. McIlroy had four majors at 25, Woods four at 24. Scheffler once said he had fought his swing and injuries in his college days and was making up for lost time. He may end up as one of the greatest players of all time. Just don’t expect him to transcend his sport.
The Times
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