In his two tournament starts since welcoming a second child into the family, Scottie Scheffler has lost to just two golfers – Rory McIlroy and Matt Fitzpatrick.
Against the former, he started the weekend with a 12-stroke deficit and ended the week just one shy. And I’m still not sure how his birdie putt on 17 stayed above ground; a birdie putt that, had it dropped, would’ve seen him pull within one of McIlroy who was in the trees on 15 and had work to do to even leave himself one of the scariest wedge shots in professional golf.
Against the latter, he was three behind with four to play and cranked the pressure up with birdies on 15 and 16 and a clutch up-and-down on 18 to force a playoff.
On both occasions, nobody shot lower on the weekend than Scheffler. He was the first player since 1942 to go bogey-free for the final two rounds at Augusta National, and though he did make one bogey at Harbour Town Links, it came on a front nine on Saturday that featured six birdies and in a round that he took just 64 strokes in.
Those two performances saw him move back to the top of the FedEx Cup standings, maintain a healthy six-point-plus advantage over McIlroy at the top of the world rankings – for context, 19th-ranked Jacob Bridgeman is closer to McIlroy in OWGR points than McIlroy is to Scheffler – and he leads the PGA Tour in scoring average, birdie average, and Strokes Gained: Total.
This all makes it rather odd to suggest that chinks may be appearing in his armour, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Let’s face it – apart from his season debut at the American Express Championship where he won by four on a setup favoured by bomb-and-gouge merchants – he’s achieved all of this with little more than his ‘B’ game for 72 holes – maybe even ‘B-minus’ – and there’s two ways to look at that. The obvious one is that, when he actually brings his ‘A-minus’, ‘A’, or ‘A-plus’ game, then he’s back on top, back in the winner’s circle, and Remy gets his first chance to compete with Bennett for the spotlight on the 18th green.
The other is that the longer he goes without bringing those variations of his ‘A’ game to the table, the harder it is to draw it out and the more ‘B’ and ‘C’ variants become the norm.
It’s hard to picture the Scottie Scheffler of 2022, ’23, ’24, or ’25 hitting it into the water on both par-5s on Augusta National’s back nine over the course of four rounds, never mind in the same round, but he did.
It’s hard to picture the Scottie Scheffler of 2022, ’23, ’24, or ’25 coming up 37 yards shy on a 185-yard approach shot when he absolutely needed to deliver – even if it was into the wind – like he did on that playoff hole against Fitzpatrick, but he did.
All those comparisons to peak Tiger Woods were valid, because what he was producing on a consistent basis was the sort of golf we hadn’t seen since Tiger was in his prime, but there’s a very simple reason for that… It’s astoundingly hard to do, and infinitely harder to maintain.
Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, Dustin Johnson, and McIlroy himself have all made the game look ridiculously easy for a period of time, and all had periods where they were undoubtedly worthy of the world number one position, but none of them could sustain it. Spieth and Day’s drop offs were the most significant, while both DJ and McIlroy managed to have multiple spells in which they were clearly a cut above.
Scheffler has now spent 188 weeks – 153 consecutively – at the top of the world rankings, and could go on to eclipse Greg Norman’s 331 leaving just Tiger’s 683 to aim for, but to do it with the level of consistency and success he’s shown over the past four seasons is unlikely.
I’m not saying the aura is gone – McIlroy referenced seeing Scheffler’s name on the leaderboards at Augusta National on Sunday, and I’m not sure anybody else could’ve overturned that three-stroke deficit to Fitzpatrick over the final four holes – but he’s shown that he’s human, that he can and will make mistakes, and if you’re daring enough, and able to execute, he can be outgunned down the stretch.
Of course, his ‘B’ game is one that most of his PGA Tour contemporaries would kill for, and even without upgrading to his very best, he could go on to win all three remaining major championships this year and Remy Scheffler stars in his own photoshoot with the Wanamaker Trophy, U.S. Open Trophy and Claret Jug, but there’s no guarantee that he joins the Career Grand Slam winners’ club before Rory completes the double set, and that seemed like a formality just nine months ago.
Pádraig Harrington has often suggested that most golfers peak for an 18-month period, and they have their greatest successes during that run. Scheffler is no ordinary tour pro though, so he’s not restrained by normal conventions, but even if his peak is a 36- or 48-month period, then there’s a good chance that the vast majority of it is in the rearview mirror.
Tiger lost more majors than he won over his decade-plus of dominance, he hit bad shots, he was beaten in playoffs, and even he eventually saw the aura fade. Like Scheffler’s, his peak was defined by relentless, metronomic excellence, week after week, month after month, season after season. But peaks, no matter how extraordinary or consistent, are never eternal.
Maybe his true apex still lies ahead, and one-by-one he starts to close in on Woods’ records – records that were believed to be untouchable. Or maybe the era of near-automatic dominance could be giving way to something more vulnerable, more human, and ultimately more compelling for the game.
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