Only One Player Can Win a Grand Slam This Year. Remember Scottie Scheffler?
TULSA, Okla. — This week’s PGA Championship at Southern Hills is one big slice of misdirection.
This PGA isn’t all about Tiger Woods playing, defending champion Phil (The Invisible Man) Mickelson NOT playing, $18 concession-stand beers or which PGA Tour stars may jump to Mickelson’s rival LIV Tour for billions in Saudi dollars. (Say it isn’t so, Rickie Fowler …)
The real story is the clear-cut Champion Golfer of the Year, so far — Scottie Scheffler. The Masters was his fourth victory in six weeks, he’s hotter than a lobster boil, the obvious favorite to add a PGA to his resume and, oh yeah, the only player who can still win a calendar-year Grand Slam in 2022.
That’s not a prediction, it’s just a fact.
Scheffler is the No. 1 player in the world by a large margin, according to the Official World Golf Ranking’s mind-numbing math. You don’t have to know algebra and speak Egyptian to understand the system but it helps.
He also has to rank No. 1 in the world in confidence after his recent run. You know it, he knows it, four-time major winner Brooks Koepka knows it.
Asked if Scheffler was the man to beat this week, Koepka said, “He’s No. 1 in the world, isn’t he? That usually has something to do with it. He won Augusta, he’s No. 1, you’ve kind of got that swagger when you walk on the range. I know I did. I’m pretty sure everybody else who’s been No. 1 has had a little extra strut, whatever the hell was going on. But you’ve got a little something and I think it’s noticeable.”
Koepka hadn’t seen Scheffler yet to verify that as of Tuesday afternoon but he may be disappointed. Scheffler, who was comfortable enough in his own skin to admit that he’d cried like a baby Sunday morning when he had the Masters, seems too humble to let anything go to his head.
“Tiger’s here so nobody really remembers that I’m here,” he said. “It’s all good. I don’t feel any different, I don’t get any extra shots this week. It’s nice to have the ranking, it’s a tremendous honor but when I show up at a tournament, we all start at even par.”
Consider the fact that Scheffler won the Masters, rose to No. 1 and here we are a month later, and he’s somehow fallen off the radar. Masters champions don’t fall off the radar without some effort. It helped that Scheffler didn’t play until last week’s AT&T Byron Nelson. It helped even more that the media and public are focused on Tiger’s tribulations, Phil’s follies and the coming LIV Tour, golf’s version of the USFL.
This has done Scheffler a favor. He played so well so often this year, wouldn’t you expect him to be peppered with questions about the Grand Slam?
Some jag-off writer (OK, maybe you guessed it was me by the detailed description) asked him Tuesday how long after the Masters it was before somebody mentioned the words “Grand Slam.”
“To me?” Scheffler asked. “Like, right now.” He then gestured toward the afore-mentioned jag-off writer.
“Like I said, I kind of keep my head down and do my thing,” he added, smiling. “I’m (only) a fourth of the way there.”
So what you’re really saying, the culprit writer said, is that the Grand Slam is at the forefront of your mind.
“Yeah, it’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last few months,” Scheffler said, laughing. “I haven’t thought about that — looking at the British Open or the next tournament is not going to help me play well here.”
He sounds like a Texan who absorbed Ben Hogan’s advice that the most important shot in golf is … your next one.
Scheffler is more about quiet confidence. He spent the next four days after his Masters win doing yardwork. It would be great if he wore The Green Jacket while weed-whacking his garden or using a leaf-blower in his Dallas backyard. That’s a visual that all golf nuts could fantasize about for a full afternoon. It almost surely didn’t happen but a golf nut can dream, can’t he?
This is a good time to remember, or possibly realize for the first time if you’re not up on your Scheffler profile, how similar Scheffler’s career has been to Tiger’s. Scheffler dominated junior golf, as Tiger did. He was a college star at Texas, just like Tiger was at Stanford. Scheffler won a U.S. Junior Amateur but didn’t snag a U.S. Amateur. Tiger captured three of each in a span of six straight years. Tiger won his first major at 21. Scheffler won his first major at 25.
So he’s a little off Tiger’s pace but nobody should be compared to Tiger, who fellow player Stewart Cink called a “one-in-ever player.” Scheffler’s recent play has unquestionably raised the bar on the PGA Tour and his trajectory is at least in the same solar system as Tiger’s … maybe. Is he just on a hot streak or is this the level he’s going to play at from now on? That’s the billion-dollar question. But in 2022, the man doesn’t have a hole in his game. Which is in part why he’s dangerous at Southern Hills.
There are more reasons to believe in Scheffler. Do practice rounds mean anything? Scheffler stopped off at Southern Hills Country Club last week and cruised around for “an easy 64.” That’s how a Southern Hills assistant pro who caddied for Scheffler described it to PGATour.com. Scheffler also won the 2015 Big 12 Conference Championship here, which happened before the course was dramatically renovated by designer Gil Hanse.
Scheffler finished fourth and eighth in his first two PGA Championship appearances. His last six major championship finishes were, in chronological order from oldest to most recent, 4th, 18th, 8th, 7th, 8th, first. You think he’s only been on a run in the last two months? Those numbers say otherwise.
But the Tiger-Phil-LIV circus is in the news and just about every player the media talks with gets asked about those three, not Scheffler. Meanwhile, golf’s No. 1 player arrived with little fanfare. Which is just the way he likes it. He wore blue shorts, a white Nike shirt with a blue Nike hat and looked like just another recreational golfer — only tall and athletic and color-coordinated. (So definitely not a writer.)
“I’ve never been a guy who looks at too much stuff about myself,” he said. “I don’t want to get too high or too low. I’ve performed my best when I keep my head and down don’t pay attention to anything else. We celebrated for a bit after the Masters but not for too long … living in the moment is what works best for me.”
You will hear theories about what type of player Southern Hills favors. There are dog-legged fairways and bottle-necked fairways that may cause players to hit fewer drivers, which may put more emphasis on iron play. The greens, newly tweaked by Hanse, have more false fronts and sides, so there will be more missed greens and more emphasis on chipping. Bermuda grass is not the easiest to chip from. What the world saw at the Masters was a player who is good in every part of his game.
“Something I always go back to, Jordan Spieth said after one of his first majors that you have to have trust in all facets of your game in order to win these tournaments,” Scheffler said. “Having the trust to say, Hey, I can attack this pin because I know this spot off the green is somewhere I can get the ball up and down. It may not be somewhere where everybody can but I know I can. It’s just managing your way around the course and making a lot of pars.”
Maybe that’s the kind of inner swagger-confidence Koepka actually meant. Scheffler had a turning point in Phoenix this year. He made four bogeys in the first 11 holes but still was able to win the tournament. “In the past, I believed I had to play perfect golf on Sunday in order to win,” he said. “For me to know that I can make mistakes and bounce back and still be able to win is really important. The biggest change for me was Sunday at Bay Hill, I made some mistakes and I was able to pull out the tournament.
‘Golf is really chancy. It’s not consistent like other sports. We play outside, there are bad waves, bad bounces, all kinds of stuff that can happen.”
Anything can happen and something will. At Southern Hills, the Grand Slam is realistically still in play. Only for Scheffler.
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