World number one, Scottie Scheffler, is the defending champion at this week’s Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands in Connecticut, and is looking forward to a different sort of challenge than the one he and the rest of the PGA Tour’s stars faced at Oakmont last week.
“It’s good to be back,” Scheffler said in his pre-tournament press conference. “This is always a nice relaxing week after the U.S. Open. We just get treated great at this event. The food’s always really good. We love coming back here to Cromwell, always get great fan support. It’s one of our favorite stops of the year. It’s fun to be back.”
Last year, Scheffler edged out close friend Tom Kim in a playoff after the duo found themselves locked at -22 after 72 holes, but he doesn’t understand the discourse around low scoring.
“Golf’s funny in that sense,” he suggested. “People, when they watch golf, it’s not like other sports where you want us to look like y’all when we play golf. It’s one of those funny things. You watch the NBA, and you’re not like, I wish they couldn’t dunk, I wish they were scoring less, I wish their shooting percentage was lower on 3-pointers. If you watch tennis, you’re not like, man, I wish the ball was going slower so they look like me out there playing tennis. It’s not like that.
“As much as some people want us to feel like them, professional golf is different than amateur golf. We get a lot of time to prepare to go out and play. The guys out here are really good at golf. If you stand here on the driving range and watch a range session, that ball doesn’t go offline very often.”
Particularly on the back of the U.S. Open where J.J. Spaun was the only player in the 156-man field to finish in red figures, the world number one feels that the emphasis on a winning number can be over-inflated. Quality golf, Scheffler feels, should always be rewarded and TPC River Highlands allows that.
“I think sometimes, especially in this day and age, people get way too caught up in the winning score being what is a proper test. I think a proper test is good shots being rewarded and bad shots being punished. I think this is one of the best golf courses for that,” he explained.
“There’s opportunity out there, and there’s also punishment. You look at the closing stretch; 15, if you hit a good shot, you’ve got a birdie opportunity. If you try to bail out right, you’re going to be in a bunker short right of the green and have a 40-yard bunker shot, a hard shot. 16, if you hit a good shot, you’re going to have a good look at birdie. If you bail out and go long, it’s a tough chip down the hill. 17, you hit the fairway, you have a chance to hit in there close to the pin. If you hit it in the left rough, you probably can’t get to the green. That’s what we look for in golf courses, in terms of you want good shots to be rewarded and bad shots to be punished. It’s as simple as that.
“The winning score, I think people get way too caught up in. I’m not saying necessarily that even par is a bad winning score. Some weeks like the U.S. Open, you hit two great shots and you’re going to get rewarded with a par. That’s fine. That’s good too.
“Across the board, the way we get tested in professional golf is very good. We play different types of golf courses, different types of grass, we play different types of winning scores. We just see different tests, and I think not one is better than the other.”
And if keeping scores lower means playing havoc with traditional golf course setups, then Scheffler feels that it may compromise their fairness of the test being presented, and, besides, he sees birdies down the stretch as an exciting way for a tournament to come to a close.
“I played good last year, and if they somehow change it to 12-under by making the pins in silly spots and doing things to trick up the golf course,” he shrugged, “what we want is a fair test. I think having birdies at the end sometimes is a pretty exciting finish. That’s really all there is to it.”
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