British Open 2025: If you can't appreciate Scottie Scheffler, that's your problem

PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — I'd like to give the microphone first to Jordan Spieth, who, with his usual insight, had some essential analysis on your 2025 Champion Golfer of the Year:

"He doesn't care to be a superstar. He's not transcending the game like Tiger did. He's not bringing it to a non-golf audience necessarily. He doesn't want to go do the stuff that a lot of us go do, corporately, anything like that. … Whenever he made that switch, I don't know what it was, but he has hobbies. He's always with his family. They're always doing stuff. I think it's more so the difference in personality from any other superstar that you've seen in the modern era and maybe in any sport.

"I don't think anybody is like him."

Is that a case for the prosecution or the defense? Neither, I think—it's just more confirmation that Scottie Scheffler will not meet the modern sports world on its terms. That behavior is interpreted, by some, as evidence that Scheffler is boring, when in fact it might make him the most interesting athlete we have. As someone who has covered hundreds of extremely boring golfers, I would like to assure you that Scottie Scheffler, your 2025 British Open champion, is not boring, he's certainly not dumb, and he's not even vanilla.

Let's go back to Spieth, a moment later in that same interview after his own fourth round at Royal Portrush:

"I see him here and there off the course, but when we're playing on the course at home, he shit talks. He's very witty. You can't really go at him because he's smart, and he's got good bullshit."

Now, why don't we see Scheffler as the smart, vicious shit-talker? Because he won't do it for the camera. He won't project a persona for our consumption; not in interviews, not on the course, and not in the passenger seat of a golf cart with a famous YouTuber. With a few notable exceptions, he keeps himself private.

Put more simply, he won't perform.

In 2025, there may be no greater sin for a high-level athlete. As Spieth pointed out, the off-course currency for guys like Scheffler is supposed to be corporate integration, social media exposure, and maybe even a few ritual public displays of personal drama. You're supposed to ham it up like Bryson DeChambeau, or turn yourself into a spokesman with loud viewpoints that shift 180 degrees every few months like Rory McIlroy.

In short, there's supposed to be a price to pay for existing in the media-saturated world of athletics as Scottie Scheffler, and that price is at least a little piece of your soul, stripped naked for the ogling masses.

Scheffler won't give it. Not on those terms. He'll talk about Jesus, but not too much. He'll play with his son, but all you're getting is a photograph from afar. You'll see his wife on the 18th hole, but her Instagram is set to private. He'll be a subject on Netflix's "Full Swing," but it will be a comically thin depiction clearly borne of scant access. Hell, you can even throw the man in jail, and he won't milk the trauma. It is almost impossible to believe that someone this good, this famous, living under this microscope, could possibly be this grounded.

You can call it boring, but I'd call it an incredible feat of grasping some semblance of a real human life from the hellish morass of over-exposure and attention-seeking that constitutes modern life. We know very little about his parents—of course we do—but there's an urge amid all this to congratulate them on what they've pulled off here.

I became intensely curious as to how he knew to protect that part of himself, and when I asked him at his victory press conference—after he methodically won his fourth career major by four shots, the fourth time he's won a major by at least that large a margin—he told an interesting story about, of all things, two Chipotles near his home. At one, by the SMU campus in Dallas, it would be difficult to go and escape attention. At another, whose location he wouldn't reveal, nobody has ever known him. You can guess where he goes.

On one hand, that's a story about trying to get dinner without a hassle. On the other, it's another little miracle of Scheffler's wisdom—a discourse on fame, and how it's totally subjective based on the audience, and therefore basically ephemeral. He never really answered how he achieved this perspective, when so many who have fame thrust on them only figure it out too late, so you go back to the idea that it must be natural. And if so, you can look at it as an even greater gift than his talent.

But what does that leave for the rest of us, after a day like Sunday when he lived off the land, tuned out the hordes of Rory supporters and marched his inevitable march to victory?

A lot, actually, if you know where to look. Speaking of golf alone, there's a misconception that he puts on a monotonous display of fairways and greens. Yes, he's a phenomenal ball-striker, but how many times on Saturday and Sunday did he save par from impossible positions, often with lengthy putts? How consistently did he bounce back from messes like the one he made on No. 8, when he left an approach in the bunker and made double bogey, only to claw one of the strokes back on the next hole? There is resilience and inventiveness on display, and skill in ways that are both natural (driving, approaches) and improved by relentless practice (putting) and possibly magical (scrambling). I will grant you that it's dispiriting golf, but only if you're his opponent, or someone rooting for his opponent. Otherwise, you don't even have to squint your eyes to find this kind of thing thrilling.

Physically, there may be a solidity that works against Scheffler. Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy have a certain thin, whip-like quality about their movements that conveys both electricity and volatility. It seems to extend to their lives off the course, and the sense that they're careening between extremes. Woods was more of a competitive killer, and McIlroy more of a lonely soldier, but they share the dynamic pedigree. In contrast, Scheffler is built like the consummate American Jock, tall and oaken, shoulders broad, jaw prominent, the picture of slow but reliable power. He looks and acts like a grown-up and has seemed roughly 15 years older than his actual age since he first emerged as a professional. Where others seem dashing, he's inescapable; where others are the vagaries of free will, he's fate.

Still, we can see him. He's there for us, if we want to look. For every plodding major campaign, there is a story about his pathological competitive streak, even when he's playing rec basketball against old men. For every press conference when his verbal cadence gets faster and faster, as if he's hoping to speed up time, there's a remarkably honest and even philosophical discourse about the fleeting and ultimately unsatisfying nature of victory. He can be short and occasionally snippy with media, but then he'll do something like admit that he cries. And for every blank stare and grimace on the course, there is an admission of his own weakness, a deep and sometimes confusing urge to win, and the fear of that desire, and the fear of the fame he knew was coming even hours before his first major victory.

There's passion, too, and the passion is unmistakable. At one point in his press conference, reflecting on his love for golf, he spoke in words so poignant that they wouldn't have been out of place in a film.

"I grew up wearing pants to the golf course because that's what I wanted to do," he said. "I saw professional golfers like Justin Leonard, Harrison Frazar, those types of guys on TV wearing pants, and I was like, I want to be like those guys. So I used to wear pants to grow up to play golf. It would be 100 degrees out. I'd be way too hot. People would make fun of me. But that's what I wanted to do; I wanted to be a professional golfer, so I wore pants. I don't know why I'm so lucky that I get to live out my dreams."

He is never trying to be something different from his essential self, and it's his greatest strength. It could only be called boring in the context of an expectation that our heroes become addicted to attention, and then repelled by it, and then addicted again. To see someone indifferent to all that is stunning, and confusing, and ultimately, for some, a little enraging.

What I would suggest is that perhaps we should admire it, even if we have to admire it from a distance. Let me ask you this—if someone threw hundreds of millions of dollars at you and challenged you to retain your best and most inherent attributes in the life that awaited, what better model could you have than Scottie Scheffler? He doesn't have to inspire kids, or future generations of golfers. Let him inspire you.

We despise an artist who panders to his audience, but if there's such a thing as Scottie Fatigue, it is from those who resist the idea of a truly independent athletic superstar. It's a symptom of a modern disease, but we don't have to succumb. Scheffler is private, but he's not hiding. Let's see him for who he is, divorced from our toxic models and lowered expectations. Let's praise him for existing as a rebuke to the entire awful paradigm.

There will be talk now of his responsibility to the sport, and whether simply winning isn't sufficient. Even Spieth's remarks above sounded halfway to mild disapproval. What will be the fate of the sport, if he maintains his dominance, but opts out of the other obligations? What will be his legacy, if privacy is his way of life instead of the name of a yacht? What will we do, without a bombastic, controversial, larger-than-life figure atop the world rankings? What if the chosen one is just an obsessed, absurdly competitive juggernaut who plays beautiful golf and thrives under pressure?

I think it will be fine. Even great. And what's best about this question, if you have a predilection for admiring the bold assertion of personal sovereignty that is the radical proposition of his life, is that Scheffler just will not care.

"When Scottie is done playing, he's not going to show back up at tournaments," said Jordan Spieth. "I can promise you that."

This is self-esteem without self-importance, and a champion who knows nothing quite as well as he knows himself.

Is it the British Open or the Open Championship? The name of the final men’s major of the golf season is a subject of continued discussion. The event’s official name, as explained in this op-ed by former R&A chairman Ian Pattinson, is the Open Championship. But since many United States golf fans continue to refer to it as the British Open, and search news around the event accordingly, Golf Digest continues to utilize both names in its coverage.