Go back 12, 24, 36, even 48 months, and Scottie Scheffler opening a tournament with a 60 was game over. The proverbial Fat Lady wasn’t clearing her lungs, she was mid-encore.
But in 2026, as evidenced at the Travelers Championship, there’s no such guarantee.
That was the World Number One’s 13th start since opening his year with a four-stroke win at the American Express, an event Jon Rahm once labelled a “piece of s**t putting contest”, where a supreme ball-striker’s advantage is supposedly negated because everybody’s hitting fairways, everybody’s hitting greens, and the flags are typically planted in friendly positions. Thus, anybody with a hot putter is going to score well.
Scheffler winning was still no surprise, but Scheffler winning by four in cruise control with what was probably his A-minus game should’ve been accompanied by the Star Wars Imperial March tune.
In a weird way, what he’s done since is almost more impressive. His A-plus, A, and A-minus games have only ever shown up for brief periods – see Thursday’s opening round at the Travelers, for example – and the max grade he’d award himself on any of the baker’s dozen starts since is probably a B-plus.
Yet he’s continued to distance himself at the top of the world rankings, and you have to go all the way back to the 2023 PGA Championship to find the last time he teed it up without being introduced as the world number one. That’s 163 consecutive weeks and counting, and he’s almost two thirds of the way to equalling Tiger’s record of 264, though Woods’ 683 cumulative weeks is still a long way in the distance.
There’s no doubt that the game doesn’t feel as easy to Scheffler as it did last year, or the year before. He’s shown himself to be human, with all the classic traits: frustration, doubt, anger, confusion, and even fear.
This all makes him much more relatable to the common fan, even if the fact that he’s virtually ever-present on the first page of leaderboards in spite of all this should make him even less relatable.
More importantly, this evolution has made both Scheffler and the tournaments he plays in far more compelling.
What made Tiger such a great closer wasn’t simply that he was the best player in the world, it’s that his closest challengers always expected him to pull away and with that mindset, it’s hard to keep your foot on the pedal. And each time the seemingly inevitable happened and Woods flourished while others wilted, it perpetuated the myth that he couldn’t be beaten.
But then, slowly but surely, people began realising that Woods was human after all. The multitude of injuries and surgeries didn’t help his cause, of course, but even still, once there was blood in the water, the sharks came sniffing. Some still got their heads bitten off by the bigger fish, but the feast was spread out.
That’s what’s happening with Scheffler now. First Chris Gotterup saw a charging Scottie at the WM Phoenix Open and pressed his own foot down equally hard. Rory McIlroy did the same at Augusta National. He opened the door enough to see Scheffler wedge his Nike shoe inside, but forced it back out with a meaty push of his own.
Matt Fitzpatrick looked to have handed Scheffler all the initiative he needed at the RBC Heritage, but when the big moment was called for, it was Fitzy who answered loudest.
Cameron Young faced him for four days straight at Doral and simply outgunned him, and then Viktor Hovland became the latest man to defiantly stand his ground and then land the knockout punch at the Travelers.
While some of these close calls reflect normal variance on a strong tour, the pattern is unmistakable: top players are no longer folding once Scheffler applies pressure.
But the one constant throughout, of course, has been Scheffler himself.
He ranks first in Scoring Average, first in Greens in Regulation, first in Scrambling, first in Birdie Average, and first in Strokes Gained: Total, and he’s back at number one in the FedEx Cup rankings, yet trails Fitzpatrick, Young, Gotterup and Wyndham Clark in victories.
Winning isn’t everything, of course. But when you’ve reached the point where money is no longer of any concern, and legacy is all that matters, it pretty much is.
It’s the highest possible compliment to say he played to the standard he did and made it look routine. Now, it’s a lot more interesting.
Leave a comment