Front Row Seat
Anatomy of a rout: An up-close look at Scottie Scheffler's emphatic PGA Championship win
CHARLOTTE — It is difficult to imagine the feeling Scottie Scheffler must have had as the minutes and hours passed before his 2:40 p.m. tee time on Sunday at the PGA Championship. These major mornings have always felt long to him, so he did his best to sleep in. Yet with a 1-year-old at home, there's only so much he could do. Things simplify when he arrives at the course, but there is nothing simple about a major Sunday. As Scheffler said later, he has worked his whole life for these opportunities, and when they come, there is no escaping the enormity. When things become this momentous, he catches himself wishing he didn't care as much as he does, that he could shrug off a loss, that he wasn't "kind of a crazy person" in chasing down his dreams. But in the end, the game just means too much. This is his endless pursuit.
Did he have some level of comfort inside all the tension, anticipation, expectation? Did he think about how it would bolster his legacy to win a new major outside Augusta National? If an intrusive thought came—what if you blow it?—how did he manage? Was he close to nausea, close to tears? Did he wish time would move faster?
Ted Scott showed up with the gold-and-black bag on the left side of the driving range at 1:49, a few feet away from Jon Rahm in his bright pink Callaway hat. The "Scottie Scheffler" placard was already on the grass, and a moment later, from the direction of the putting green, the promised man appeared. There's a bigness to Scheffler, an imposing solidity, and if he lacks the leonine grace of a Dustin Johnson, he makes up for it with the impression of sheer power. Even his jaw, prominent but rounded, speaks of an oak-like sturdiness. No golfer, maybe ever, has looked more like a jock.
He looked sharp, too, in his khakis, blue Nike shirt, white Nike hat, white Nike shoes. A long bottle of Gatorade water lay on the grass behind him, and his longtime coach Randy Smith watched him swing from various angles, beginning with the wedges. Peering down the range, you could spot, in order, Rahm, Si Woo Kim, Davis Riley, Gary Woodland, Alex Noren and Tom Kim. Behind him, a CBS spotter spoke into his radio:
"Range still."
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Wedges gave way to longer irons. At the end of his swing, you could just see the black Whoop band that circled his right bicep. Smith moved from the side to the rear. On the shot tracker on the scoreboard, Scheffler’s carry yardages approached and then exceeded 300 yards. How does a person generate so much power, with such a simple motion? Everything Scheffler did had the look of pure athleticism, down to the spin he put on the rangefinder he tossed to Scott. Even the dollar-sized strips of turf that went flying after his swing seemed to trace an elegant parabola.
At 2:20, precisely 20 minutes to tee time, Scheffler picked up the bucket of balls and a wedge. Scott took the bag and disappeared while Scheffler walked with Smith to the short-game area.
He strode to the second practice green at 2:24, and took nine downhill chips to four different flags, all with different trajectories. A camera on a wire running across the grounds swooped left and right, and the Goodyear blimp with its subtle drone hovered above. Two minutes later he left, past the fence, to the road, momentarily among people who were so surprised they could do nothing but shout.
Scott was waiting quietly on a bench by the putting green. Scheffler reappeared behind him at 2:30, 10 minutes to go, and the way Scott's hand rose, and the way Scheffler handed him the wedge, had the look of choreography. Cheers rose when Scheffler marched to the green. He grabbed his putter and one ball and went from hole to hole on the green, ushering the ball along with his putter between strokes. A welcome breeze blew, and though Scheffler was being watched by around 300 people, the moment felt surprisingly private.
At 2:34 he walked to his bag, now by the footbridge that would carry Scheffler to the first tee. He pounded fists with Scott. He pulled out his phone, scrolled for a moment, and then zipped it into a pocket of his bag. Scott handed him the yardage book, Scheffler wrote something inside and placed that in his back right pocket.
At 2:37, player followed caddie to the stairs. As Scheffler climbed, children shouted his name, and he waved to them. At the top, he crossed the bridge and disappeared. The field of battle waited on the other side, with its ironclad guarantee of adversity and its single relevant question:
Are you up for it?
There is very little to say about Scheffler's final round that you haven't already seen. He struggled, he wobbled, the disaster looked and felt tangible. The brilliant run on Saturday night, when he played the last five holes in five under, sustained him, but just barely. Later, he acknowledged that aside from that brief run, he didn't have his best stuff at Quail Hollow, and it was more or less grit and a little luck that let him stay close. All afternoon, he had been short with his swing and maybe, unknowingly, aiming a bit left. He figured it out by the back nine, but in the meantime things got tight.
Darren Carroll/PGA of America
Rahm tied him on 10, and Scheffler knew it, but as he encountered the leaderboards on the next three holes, he couldn't get a reliable update. He liked the manual leaderboards at Augusta, where the leaders are always evident, but here he kept catching them at the wrong time, when they were scrolled to the also-rans. ("If people want to know who's in 30th, look at your phone," he joked later.) In the absence of information, Scheffler fought on, trying to do the one thing he had excelled at all week—bouncing back. Starting Thursday, he followed more than half of his bogeys with a birdie, and now that resilience would have to be exercised on a grander scale.
On 13, Scheffler finally got the information he wanted—a one-shot lead on Rahm. Two holes later, Scheffler saw that Rahm failed to go up and down from the bunker on 16, and hadn't gained any ground. What Scheffler didn't know is that Rahm had failed to birdie the relatively easy 14th and 15th holes.
Scheffler got them both, and by 15 green he had re-established a four-shot cushion at 12 under. Even the sun had lost its intensity, and for the first time all weekend the Charlotte air was cool. Moments after his drive, Rahm was victimized by the Green Mile, the brutal three-hole closing stretch at Quail Hollow, with a double at 17. By then, only a total collapse by Scheffler could have helped his enemies, and there is no player on earth less likely to give that gift.
That isn't to say Scheffler wasn't worried. But just as he hedges his optimism, he also hedges his anxiety.
"I told myself, I can't control what these other guys do," he said. "If I make three pars, the golf tournament's mine, and that's what I was focused on."
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From the outside, you'd be tempted at these moments to look for him to break character—to smile, to laugh, to even give a look to Scott, a look that says, "this is happening."
There was nothing on 15. As he attempted his eagle lag from the fringe above the hole, at least 50 voices urged the ball onward, crying, "go! go!" Scott, only a little more muted, waved it on. Close enough—Scheffler tapped in for par and trudged to 16 tee, the fingers of his white glove flaring out of his back pocket.
Following his drive into the fairway bunker on 16, Scheffler walked down the center of the fairway, his eyes stubbornly tracking a spot about three feet in front of him and occasionally rising to stare a thousand miles into the distance. But never left, never right, never on a human face as the shouts rained down:
"Nobody better, Scottie!"
"One more step to the grand salami!"
"It's over, Scottie!"
In the sand, he switched his irons, had a brief rules discussion about a bug and played a sensible shot short of the green and far away from the water that was now his most terrifying opponent.
David Cannon
Every step now was deliberate, as though he were actively fighting against the notion that nothing could stop him, that his lead was in the process of ballooning to six shots, that his skill set could not slide to such depths that this tournament could ever be a loss.
The lag was superb, the par putt fell.
From the green on 17, Scheffler was barely more than a dark silhouette on the tee, only his club glinting in the sun as he took his practice swings. The shot was cautious—short, but abundantly safe. In the hospitality tents, they cheered his name when he walked by, a good 90 percent of them experiencing the moment secondhand, behind their phones, gathering video nobody will ever care about—a vignette to make you long for luddite Augusta.
In his thoroughness over the chip, you sensed a certain pride in Scheffler, a hunger to make par even if it didn't matter. He did. But still he wouldn't break character.
He leaned hard after his tee shot on 18, the most difficult hole on the course, and he lingered in that tilt as the ball rolled into the pine straw.
"You could hit out of bounds twice," one fan shouted. "You're fine."
His eyes never left the ground as he walked down the hill, over the stone bridge, under the pines and oaks. Scheffler had no great longing for heroism and played a safe chip into the shadows by the creek.
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With 138 yards left, he hit a low, spinning wedge to the top tier, and when it halted seven feet from the hole, the crowd exploded. In the fairway, for the first time, we saw it: the tension release. You had to look fast, but it was there as he and Scott put an arm around each other in a fierce half-embrace, and he wiped his face with the towel, and he took off his hat.
While Noren slogged his way closer to the hole, Scheffler wiped the handle of his putter with a towel and bent over in a long stretch. He lined up the putt from the hole, from halfway, from the mark. If time had crawled earlier in the day, you wondered now if he wished this particular moment could last forever.
Scheffler placed the ball down, missed the putt, and tapped in, finishing off an even-par 71 for the day, an 11-under 273 for the tournament and a five-shot victory. Scheffler and Scott embraced. He shook hands with Noren and his caddie.
Finally, Scheffler raised both hands to the crowd, and then came the catharsis. He took off his hat, and in a flood of emotion, he whipped it as hard as he could at the surface of the green. Everyone understood immediately—the loudest roar of the day greeted this spontaneous act, and in it you could see a lot more than the triumph of victory. You could see the pain of doubt, the long hours of anticipation, the nerves and the anxiety—the knowledge, as he said later, that he battled harder for this win than any other in his career, final margin be damned.
Scottie Scheffler had survived everything. Whatever peace and perspective comes for him later, you could feel in your bones that nothing could match that single outpouring—the exact moment when everything you fear crumbles, and there you are, still standing.