Scottie Scheffler Extends Lead He Was Handed at the Start of the Tour Championship
ATLANTA—Normally, right now you’d be reading about a rip-snorting first round Thursday at East Lake Golf Club and how Joaquin Niemann and U.S. Open champ Matthew Fitzpatrick fired 64s to share the lead.
Of course, no self-respecting golf writer would leave that sentence uncluttered without a few sexy adjectives such as “sizzling,” which would be lifted directly from Roget’s Thesaurus to display the writer’s total command of Inglesh. (Who needs spellcheck when you’re a professional golf writer?)
The Tour Championship isn’t your normal PGA Tour stop, however. It holds the distinction as being the only tournament where the player who shoots the lowest score in Round 1 may not be the leader. Thank the FedEx Cup’s Head Start Program for that. The FedEx Cup season-long points race results in a unique—and uniquely uncomfortable—staggered start this week, the better to reflect which players have had better seasons. Funny, that idea that seems less relevant now that there’s no longer a need to rig things to ensure that Tiger Woods (semi-retired) and Phil Mickelson (fully banished) are in contention going into the weekend for the tour’s season-ending, lollapalooza grand finale.
Meritocracy, the PGA Tour’s greatest asset, died earlier this week when commissioner Jay Monahan announced changes that will enable the game’s richest players to get even richer and force the not-so-rich to work twice as hard to keep up. Love ‘em or hate ‘em—bigger purses for smaller fields, mainly, and double the money-for-nothing Player Impact Program—the changes were necessary to stick a hot fork in rival LIV Golf’s direct-deposit program.
So Niemann and Fitzpatrick are not your exciting first-round leaders, one stroke ahead of Scottie Scheffler, J.T. Poston, and Aaron Wise.
Instead, Fitzpatrick’s 64 left him six strokes behind Scheffler. Niemann is seven back. Xander Schauffele, who shot 66, trails by four shots at 10 under par. What could have been a sizzling start—oops, the writer’s handbook says never use the same adjective twice, dang it!—turned into a drizzling start. Especially when a torrential monsoon hammered the course for 15 minutes before the leaders teed off.
The flaw or the beauty in the staggered start rides with Scheffler, the No. 1 player in the world. He birdied his last three holes to shoot 65 and prevent anyone from substantially gaining on him. Do we have a good old-fashioned horse race in progress? No, because Scheffler is the biggest horse in the field and so far he looks like the love child of Secretariat and Seabiscuit. All he did was pile up four birdies and an eagle.
Nobody would sweat that quick start if it was posted by a middle-of-the-pack guy who had a good day. But in this case, the world’s best player is on a roll and he already has only four players within seven shots thanks to his automatic 10-under-par starting point. If this format feels like you’re fast-forwarding to watch the end of the movie before you get to the middle, you’re not wrong. (Spoiler alert: The old lady throws the rare gem back into the ocean—oh, come on!—and then meets the defrosted Leonardo DiCaprio in the afterlife on a sunken ship’s staircase.)
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The PGA Tour has long tried to find a way to finish its season with a big bang. The only good solution would be to close with a major championship. That doesn’t work because the PGA Tour doesn’t run any of the four major championships. The Tour Championship, back when it was a little 30-man outing with just another paltry $1 million first prize, didn’t fill the bill, either, especially when Tiger and Phil took turns skipping it in November.
So we’ve got this FedEx Cup extravaganza. For all its faults, the handicapped start is the best version so far, enabling viewers to quit caring about esoteric point totals and understand who’s leading and by how much. It’s different and that’s not all bad. Plus, it works. The big dog still has the lead. Scheffler is -15 and trying to ignore his position.
“It’s a bit strange, so that’s why I talk about not looking at the leaderboards,” Scheffler said. “If I go out and do my best and pretend I’m trying to win a regular stroke-play event for our days, I think I’m going to be in a good position come Sunday afternoon. So that’s going to be my plan.”
Scheffler is back to feeling like he’s on top of his game after an unglamorous injury that hampered him at the British Open on the weekend. He had a pilonidal infection, an ailment not uncommon for men in their 20s. He bluntly described it: “It’s an infection at the top of your butt crack. It was really hard for me to bend down. It was really hard for me to make a swing on Sunday. Walking was extremely difficult.”
Left unattended, the infection can often require surgery but Scheffler got help from European doctors to “flush” the infection and start him back to health. “It was brutal,” he said. “It’s one of those things that just happens.”
Another thing that just happens in a small event featuring pre-emptive strokes is that only 13 players in the 29-man field are still within 10 shots of Scheffler, a position rarely seen after a first round in a regular tournament.
One of those players was Rory McIlroy, whose round was alternately sizzling—rats, Roget says to change that to thermogenic!—and fizzling. McIlroy began the day six shots behind Scheffler. He hit his drive out of bounds on the first hole, then bogeyed the second and was quickly 10 shots back. The most pertinent stat was that McIlroy had only five pars. He salvaged a 67 thanks to a back-nine 31 and needed seven birdies and an eagle to post a round of 3 under.
“I was 4 over through three holes in Boston and won the Deutsche Bank a few years ago,” McIlroy said. “It’s not like I haven’t done it before. But it’s different when you are giving strokes back. I’m just really proud of how I fought back today.”
McIlroy also drew inspiration from Tom Kim, a first-time winner a few weeks ago at the Wyndham Championship. Kim made a quadruple bogey on the tournament’s opening hole en route to victory.
The Tour Championship’s staggered start staggers some players’ (and fans’) brains. It adds a level of strategy to the second round that isn’t normally there.
“If I go out and shoot a good score tomorrow and Scottie and a lackluster day, he brings a lot of guys back in and anything can happen over 36 holes,” McIlroy said. “Tomorrow is a pretty pivotal day for the rest of the field to try to get a little closer to Scottie.”
The Tour Championship remains the only tournament that can look like a runaway after just one round—at least, one that doesn’t have a young Tiger Woods leading by five after the first day.
“It’s a weird event for us,” said Schauffele, an Olympic golf gold-medal winner. “We do this once a year. It’s one of the bigger events for us and because of that, you have to try your best to stay present and not get ahead of yourself.”
Schauffele doesn’t have to worry about getting ahead of himself. Scheffler and the format have already taken care of that.