DUBLIN, Ohio — For the past three seasons (and counting), Scottie Scheffler has finished second on tour in one crucial statistic:
Bounce-Back Percentage.
Bounce-Back Percentage is the amount of time you follow a bogey (or worse) on a hole with a birdie (or better) on the next one. Scottie does that more than 32% of the time, and at one point during the final round of his recent PGA Championship victory, he was bouncing back at an almost 60 percent clip while the field was hovering at 16 percent.
On paper it makes sense Scottie would be good at something like this. He's the best ball-striker in the world, and makes more birdies than anybody else on the PGA Tour. Yet it's not a clean, one-to-one translation. There are lots of good ball-strikers and birdie-makers who aren't that great at bouncing back.
So what makes Scottie so good at this unique skill? He said it's a combination of physical skill but also mental awareness that the rest of us can learn from...
Step 1: Accept that mistakes happen
This is golf. Hitting bad shots; having bad holes; making big numbers is an inescapable part of the game. The first step of bouncing back from them is simply accepting that fact, and not denying that making mistakes won't happen.
As Scottie explains:
"Over the course of a 72-hole tournament, you're going to make plenty of mistakes. Going back to junior golf, I think I didn't handle things as well as I could have, and I feel like I've always battled to handle things the best way I can. I'm going to make plenty of mistakes over a 72-hole tournament, but it's more important for me not to let the mistakes bug me and to continue to bounce back and keep fighting out there."
Ben Jared
Step 2: Make bouncing back part of your identity
Scheffler alluded to it there, and spelled it out more plainly later on. The World No. 1 is elite at avoiding mistakes, sure. But he takes the most pride in bouncing back from the mistakes he does make. That, in many ways, is the identity he wants to have as a golfer.
"My attitude has gotten better over the years, and I feel like that's why that statistic is one of my stronger ones. That's definitely something that I take pride in, being able to bounce back from mistakes. To have the ability to bounce back and not let those mistakes get the better of me, I think I'm really proud of."
Step 3: Treat each mistake as a refocus opportunity
Nobody can maintain a state of intense focus over the course of an entire nearly five-hour round of golf. It's natural to phase in and out of focus, and for pros, their focus often lapses when they get bored (something I wrote about here).
Again, mistakes will happen. But Scottie says that's occasion to recognize that the cause of them is primarily a lack of focus. Treat it as an opportunity to reset.
"Sometimes throughout a 72-hole tournament, you kind of have lapses in focus. It's a long time to be out there competing and playing, especially over the course of a whole season too...sometimes, those mistakes sharpen my focus...Over the last couple years, I've done a really good job of keeping my focus on the task at hand."
Step 4: Don't stress about the why
Perhaps the worst way of handling mistakes is stressing about why the mistakes are happening. As Scottie says, you're not really going to be able to fix them on the fly.
"It's time to compete. I'm not going to be trying to fix my swing. I'm not going to be worried if I hook it off the first tee, or how am I going to not hook it off the second. No, I'm going to step on the first tee, try and hit my shot, step up to the approach shot, try and hit my shot, and then deal with whatever the results are. And if I miss the green, I'm going to try to get up-and-down. It's always kind of on to the next thing in golf, and I try to hit each shot kind of objectively and kind of go from there."
Step 5: Don't chase birdies
Finally, some counterintuitive advice from Scottie, but some good advice, too. Pushing too hard after making mistakes is a surefire way to make more of them. Instead, treat it as a reset, and think about how to plot your way through the hole you have ahead.
He describes this using an example from his 72nd hole during his Memorial victory last year:
"I've got a two-shot lead and all of a sudden we get to 17, I had a fairly simple up-and-down that I played a little sloppy and didn't get the ball up and down, so all of a sudden my two-shot lead is now a one-shot lead. The way I refocused on 18 was just to tell myself, listen, like, my job on this hole is to go out and make a par. And so that's not going to help my bounce-back stat, but when I step up there, the only thing I'm trying to do is now hit one good shot to get it in the fairway because now I got to get this ball in the fairway. Then when I got the ball in the fairway, the discussion was, at the time, because it was so windy and firm, basically which side of the green do we want to chip from, but it was basically like, what are we going to do here to where we can make a par. That was what we were focused on, and I wasn't thinking about the last hole. I wasn't thinking about what Collin was going to do. I was trying to make a par."
Resetting to your natural state in Scottie's case is trying to make a simple par. And then, about 30 percent of the time, he's able to walk away with a birdie instead.