It’s just golf, you might say. A guy can’t play two rounds in a day?

Well, of course they can. But fatigue can manifest in ways you might not expect. A few years ago I noted how a study by the French Institute of Health and Research about strenuous cognitive thinking can apply to golf. Put simply, the study revealed the more hard decisions you face in a given task, the more likely you are to make a bad decision by the end. In other words, if a golfer is grinding through the first three rounds of an intense team competition, the they are more susceptible to doing something stupid in the fourth round. Or framed another way, if you need Scottie Scheffler to be at his best on what is likely to be a tense Sunday, an afternoon off is not a terrible idea.