If a golf fan or a media member uses the word “boring” in relation to Scottie Scheffler, their master’s references should be dismissed, their golf clubs removed and their polo of the logo of the Country Club burned in a heap of ashes.
Because it is the interest of this game, if not to testify and to recognize the brilliance, the impressive and the efficiency of the greatest player we have seen from Tiger Woods?
He has been fashionable in recent years during the Scheffler climb to reject him as a personality, as an entity, whatever his performance on the course. Too vanilla. Too discreet. Too healthy. Too much of an ordinary guy to attract the masses to watch a major championship on Sunday.
It is true that if Woods dominated the open championship as Scheffler did this weekend, culminating with a four-stroke victory and the fourth major title, it would be a national event. Scheffler does not have this kind of traction now and will probably never do it. No one may ever do it.
But minimizing Scheffler because he does not generate this kind of adoration of fans, or ignore the fascinating moment that he currently creates for golf, is completely missing the point.
If you are not fascinated to see someone pouring towers around their peers in a sport that is not supposed to produce a week of a week during the week, did you even like golf in the first place? If you are not entertained by a player who chooses the right strategy on almost all hole, controls his distances much better than anyone on the planet and is now an increasingly Woodsian clutch putter on major weekends, maybe pickleball is more your speed.
What, do you want Scheffler to pump a little more? Start the oxen with Rory Mcilroy and Bryson Dechambeau? Revaluate a disorderly personal life with a denigrated windshield?
Sorry, but that’s not how the Scheffler era will drop. Nor will it be an obsessive walk to Woods in the major number of all time in the same way that Woods devoted his career to hunt the Jack Nicklaus record from 18.
In fact, it seems that possible that each time Scheffler inevitably wins a US Open to finish his big career slam, he could well return to Texas for good, knowing that there will not be even more to add to his inheritance in the game.
And we can speculate on this possibility because of what Scheffler revealed during his press conference before the start of the open. The question was how long Scheffler had ever celebrated a victory. What followed was a response of 494 words in which Scheffler described a phenomenon of which many elite athletes, and in particular in this generation, understand innate but hesitate to speak publicly.
“I feel like I work all your life to celebrate the victory of a tournament for a few minutes,” said Scheffler. “It only lasts a few minutes, this kind of euphoric feeling. To win the Byron Nelson championship at home, I literally worked all my life to become good in golf to have the opportunity to win this tournament. You win it, you celebrate, that we are going to eat for dinner?
“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and do the things I have in the golf game? Yeah, it makes me cry just to think because I literally worked all my life to be good in this sport. To have this kind of feeling of accomplishment, I think, I did not go out here to be the best player in the world because it is the point?
He started from there, speaking of the fight in his mind between wanting to desperately win tournaments such as The Masters and The Open, then realizing that, as soon as it’s over, you simply go to the following thing.
“At the end of the day, sometimes I just don’t understand the point,” he said.
If only the woods said something half This interesting or revealing of his state of mind. Instead, he spent most of his main shots to regurgitate and keep his most private qualities until they are involuntarily spreading in the public domain.
But Woods was a different phenomenon. He literally changed the game with his tee length, his physique, his black and Asian identity, his charismatic celebrations. It was fascinating and exciting to look at him in real time, even as inevitable as his victories often seemed.
Scheffler’s superpower is that he does not clearly need This. He is led to be great, but he also understands at 29 years that his life will not be different in a significant way if he earns four majors or 14, and even his mood will not change more than a few minutes, which he wins or lost.
And lately, there have been many victories: 17 of them in his last 80 tournaments on the PGA Tour, with a statistical profile that puts him much closer to Woods than most people recognize him.
What Scheffler did this week at Royal Portrush to crush the ground was clinical and skillful and often breathtaking. Perhaps this kind of monotonous victory does not sell many golf clubs or an occasional fan watches, but it is authentic for a player who should only be accused of having bored the masses in a sense: he understood this game in a way that only a small handful of other people.
