Maybe Scottie Scheffler has decided to give the rest of the field a ten shot head start, just to see how the other half lives.
A little bit like when Rory McIlroy would roar out of the traps on Thursday and then decide that golf is too easy so he would just chuck in a 78 for good measure on Friday to keep the tournament interesting.
Scottie Scheffler’s ‘Thursdayitis’ is just a trend at the moment, it’s certainly not a problem at this early stage of the season but he won’t want this issue to fester. Slow starts in major championships will surely leave him with too much to do, after all, that’s where we judge the best.
Scheffler had a delayed start to last season after a Christmas dinner incident and one has to wonder how the early part of 2025 would have panned out had he been fully fit…
The world number one has opened his last three tournaments with rounds of 73, 72 and 74 and while he was still bang in contention at in Phoenix and Pebble, his chances of winning at Riviera this week were dashed. In fact, he was languishing in last place when he was five-over through ten holes of round one before play was halted.
Last place. When has Scheffler ever been in last place?
Scheffler is not a compelling golfer or personality. At least not in front of a camera. But watching him try to claw his way back to victory in his previous two events has been thrilling viewing. Scheffler’s mere presence on page one of a leaderboard brings eyeballs, it creates drama, and you probably do root for him to mount that backdoor charge.
In his last three starts, he has been ten, ten and eleven (after 10 holes) off the pace after day one. He was twelve shots behind at one stage on Friday too.
At the moment, he is at a loss to explain why. Why is he having these false starts?
“I mean, I would not say anything in particular,” he said. “I think in both the last two, teeing off late is never the easiest and I’ve gotten off to slow starts.
“Like teeing off yesterday when we did, was pretty challenging around this golf course.
“I mean, the wind and with how soft the greens were and how bumpy they can get along with wind and they’re fast, if it was last week it would have been easier because you can kind of at least try to jam it in.
“Here it’s like you can’t — you don’t want to have another three, three and a half feet coming back.
“It was nice to get out this morning on some fresh greens and hole some putts and do what I needed to do in order to get to the weekend.”
Still, he fist pumped a seven-footer into the hole on the 36th to make his 68th successive cut – he hasn’t missed a weekend since the 2022 FedEx St Jude Championship so it’s not all bad.
It’s clear that Scheffler and McIlroy are both comfortably the two best players in the world as the chasing pack jostle to be best of the rest and now both players know what it’s like to feel like mid handicappers.
McIlroy himself struggled with ‘freaky’ Fridays before he won the 2014 Open Championship which opened the floodgates for the WGC Bridgestone and PGA Championship in successive starts that summer.
That season though the former world number one had seven nightmares when he shot 40 or more for nine holes with six of those horror shows coming on Friday. Even the week before the Open he went 64, 78 in Scotland. It became a thing and he was aware of it.
“Yes, I think it is. And it’s a trend I’d like to stop this week.
“I think I just got it into my head and I may be putting a bit too much pressure on myself, going out on Fridays and trying to back up a score.
“I have no problem shooting a low one on Thursday, s there should be no reason I have any problem shooting a low one on Friday.”
McIlroy’s second round average of 72.23 was one of the worst on golf’s major tours at the time.
It got into his head, it remains to be seen whether any thoughts will cling on and niggle at the back of Scheffler’s brain. Last year, Scheffler won six times including two majors despite his delayed start to the season.
The chasing pack will be hoping that his Thursdayitis continues for another couple of months at least.
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