Masters Sunday Will Be All About the Seemingly Unflappable Scottie Scheffler

This Masters truly began for golf's hottest player when he missed the fairway at 18. He survived that. Next up is final-round major pressure.

Author:
Michael Rosenberg
Publish date:
Apr 9, 2022

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Fifty-three holes into Scottie Scheffler’s week, the Masters began.

Scheffler stood on the 18th tee with a four-shot lead, looking like he might just suck the tension out of golf’s most tense event. All day, he had been calm and precise, smoothly keeping the field at arm’s length, and then he looked down at the little tunnel between the trees that greets anybody who arrives at 18, and hit the kind of shot that – with that swing that looks like he is trying to pull a hamstring – he looks like he should hit all the time.

Scheffler yanked it. Scheffler said later, “Obviously, I didn’t hit a good tee shot. I didn’t hear anything loud. We saw the guy with the flag that always finds the balls kind of panicking. I was like, ‘Oh crap. I wonder what’s going on here.'”

The azaleas at Augusta National are lovely unless your ball is beneath one. Scheffler spent the next few minutes doing a botany experiment. He spent enough time in there for playing partner Charl Schwartzel to hit his next shot (though Scheffler was, obviously, away), for his family to wonder why they hadn’t heard from him for a while, and for everybody watching the Masters to wonder: Bad hole, or disaster?

Sunday at the Masters will be all about Scottie Scheffler, and whether he can do what he did next: Ignore the stakes, trust the crazy swing that causes his right foot to false-start before he makes contact, and play like the No. 1 player in the world.

He hit a 3-iron even better than he could have planned on hitting it – he said afterward that he knew it was “225 yards adjusted to get it into the bunker,” but didn’t even know the yardage to the pin. It rolled off the back of the green. He two-putted from there, which was not easy. He will wake up Sunday with a three-shot lead on mulleted Aussie Cam Smith and a five-shot lead on everybody else.

What a final pairing that will be. Scheffler and Smith have arguably been the two best players in the world this year. Scheffler, the staid Texan, removed a vest and put it back on after almost every shot Saturday. Smith does not even own a comb.

Will the pressure get to Scheffler? Every indication says no, except history. Scheffler said he did not pay much attention to the leaderboards Saturday, but he didn’t avoid them, either: “I mean, you can see them every few holes, but I wasn’t putting too much thought into it. I was trying to stay in my own lane.” He just played smart golf. When his drive on 13 went a bit right, he laid up. When his drive on 15 was excellent, he laid up again.

Now he looks like he will run away with this thing. But he probably won’t. Leads in golf, like objects in the rearview mirror, tend to look bigger than they are. It just takes one Smith birdie and one Scheffler bogey for this to get awfully tight – and then what?

Will Scheffler think about winning the Masters, or blowing it?

Ideally, neither.

He just needs to play golf. Easy to type, hard to do when you sleep on the lead Saturday night. Scheffler likes to hit the driving range after a round, and so he did that Saturday, pounding driver in the darkness. He said he planned to spend the night watching “The Office” with his wife, Meredith. Golf’s next transcendent star, he is not. But that’s OK. He is playing like one.

Saturday was one of the coldest days in Masters memory – a blustery 50-something degree day that convinced Kevin Kisner to wear a winter hat. Some of the best golfers in the world looked like they might get hot, but it wasn’t much a day for hot Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas both got to 3 under par early in the third round but couldn’t sustain it. Collin Morikawa got to 2 under early and went 3 over the rest of the way.

Scheffler started the day at 8 under, got all the way to 11, and finished at 9. He has made 17 birdies in 54 holes. He is on an otherworldly run. In late January, Scheffler was No. 19 in the world and had never won a PGA Tour event. Then he won three in five tries. He is one good round away from making it four wins in six tries. He just has to play like the guy who got out of trouble on 18 Saturday, instead of the guy who got in it.

He said his heart rate “went up when I thought they couldn’t find the ball, but it went back down when they found it. I think I could have gone in and played it if I had to.”

He didn’t have to do that. He wisely recognized that. The final round of the Masters effectively started right there. Let’s see how Scheffler finishes it.

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