Masters 2025: Everyone knows Scottie Scheffler's superpower—but they can't do it

AUGUSTA, Ga. — It's become a Masters tradition all of its own. Scottie Scheffler's feet spinning, sliding out from under him. His right shoulder twirling around him. And his golf shots flying exactly where he wants them to, lifting him towards the top.

There's no golfer, now or perhaps ever, who swings the golf club with a more overt sense of freedom than Scheffler—and he's become the best player in the world because of it, with a chance of grabbing a third green jacket in four years this weekend.

He's also come to embody an idea that is taking over the professional ranks. That the path to the promised land of better golf, for pros and the rest of us, isn't in trying to build yourself into becoming a robot, but in tapping into your innately human, athletic instincts.

It's what Scheffler has done, and it's what everyone around him is trying to do better.

First, build the guardrails

The easiest way of explaining this idea is with an example:

Imagine I asked you to do something simple 100 times in a row, like picking a golf ball up off the ground, then putting it back down again. But each time you did it, I changed something slightly. I moved the ball an inch to the left or right. Or moved you an inch further away or closer. Maybe even teed up the ball. The ball is always within reach, but never exactly the same amount within reach.

Odds are you'd be able to accomplish it 100 times out of 100—a 100-percent success rate, despite things changing each time. But similar to a problem Elon Musk once explained in his car factories, building and programming a robot to make all those little adjustments to avoid a one-inch error would be a monumental task.

In short, humans are really good at making little physical recalibrations on the fly, without even really thinking about them. It's true in life, and it's true in the golf swing.

"Scottie Scheffler has an amazingly low clubface-to-club path variability, but he never moves exactly the same way every time," Sasho MacKenzie, a leading golf biomechanist, says. "It's because Scheffler uses more degrees of freedom to accomplish his task. If one joint screws up, the other joints can step up and create the same overall outcome."

The goal, for Scheffler and other golfers, is to establish some basic guardrails—grip, alignment, sequence—in their golf swing that make it easier to hit the golf ball straight, then let their athletic instincts take over within them.

"When I'm practicing I'm working on my fundamentals, I'm working on my swing. But when it comes time to go play golf, I try to go play," he explains. "I'm not really thinking about where the club is at the top of my swing or any positions when I'm out there playing. I'm just trying to play the game and hit the shots."

It's why, ultimately, golf swings can look so different, but each can perform so well. Separating what helps a golfer deliver the clubhead more consistently from what doesn't is the ultimate skill of coaching. It's how Scheffler's legendary coach, Randy Smith, knew which idiosyncratic moves to leave in Scheffler's move. If it didn't help him hit better golf shots than he was already making, than it wasn't a change worth making.

It's ultimately the core of how Scheffler became the best ball-striker in golf today. Prioritizing the shot outcome, not the picture of the swing itself, is the hallmark of his consistency.

MacKenzie says that means never trying to make the exact same motion every single time. Instead, building into your golf swing some basic guardrails, then relying on your innately human instincts to make up the margin for errors.

"If you look at pistol shooters, amateur pistol shooters lock everything in. Their arms and wrists, and the barrel moves all over the place. Elite shooters have more variability in their joints to keep the barrel locked," MacKenzie says.

"It's not easy to swing a golf club at 183 mph in 0.2 seconds and deliver the clubface square. If you're focusing on trying to make a specific swing move, you just can't perfectly optimize for both. Scheffler is so hyper focused on delivering the clubface to execute the shot, he sacrifices every other objective in the golf swing."

Feet spinning, arms bending, shoulder flying, he doesn't care. Whatever is required in that specific moment to put the clubface square into the back of the ball. That's the goal, after all.

Then, learn to let go

In practice, pros learn to segment. Anything that helps them square the clubface is important. Anything that doesn't, isn't. And they practice this by dividing their practice, as Scheffler says.

"Every day we brush our teeth. Every day we calibrate our golf swing. Minor adjustments to make sure the clubface is giving us the shot we want," Hans Larsson, Ludvig Aberg's longtime coach, says. "After that, we move to hitting different shots. Leaving that stuff, and playing golf."

This is a pillar of Larsson's teaching. Every session he and Aberg do Tiger Woods' famed nine window drill, among other drills which force them to react. A staple at the golf academy is to ask a golfer to face with their back to the range, then, within a five second countdown, to aim at a specified target, get set and swing.

"There's no time to do anything other than react," he says. "It gets you out of your head, and react to the target."

It's learning to trust these instincts that is the ultimate separator between good and bad golf.

"I would describe being athletic as trusting myself or my ability," Thomas says. "10 tee shot is a great example. I probably couldn't tell you exactly where I'm aiming. I couldn't tell you how far right I'm swinging, about a swing path or a face angle. I'm going to aim right and I'm going to shut the face down and I feel pretty good that it's going to turn right-to-left."

He continues:

"We've done this so many times that we react and we know without almost knowing. Yeah, it does take some skill, but I've hit 5000 of those shots. It's all muscle memory, I guess."

It is, in many ways, our unique human superpower. Harnessing our ability to make little adjustments to accomplish the ultimate goal. Technique is a means to an end for that goal. Strip away the instincts we do have, and there'll be nothing much left.