Scottie Scheffler Is Gaining on Golf's Ghosts

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—It’s the ghosts that make golf so interesting. During the final round of the 107th PGA Championship, Scottie Scheffler was not really competing against Jon Rahm, a two-time major champion desperate to reclaim his place at the front ranks of the game, or Bryson DeChambeau, a two-time U.S. Open winner who hungers for more renown. On Sunday they had only one role to play—get beat by Scheffler—and they fulfilled it with a minimum of fuss. No, the undisputed world number one can now be measured only against the past.

After this gritty victory, Scheffler, 28, has three major championship victories, joining the rarified air that includes Henry Cotton, Jimmy Demaret, Billy Casper and Hale Irwin; one more major and Scheffler is shoulder-to-shoulder with titans Old Tom Morris and Willie Anderson. Scheffler now has 15 PGA Tour victories (all in his last 70 starts!), joining Bobby Locke and Tommy Bolt on the all-time list. (One more gets him to Tom Weiskopf and Ralph Guldahl.) For all of the history that Scheffler is making, this stat is the tastiest: Since World War II, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods are the only other players to have won three major championships and 15 TOUR wins before turning 29.

Scheffler has turned himself into a hybrid of the two greatest players of all time, marrying Big Jack’s driver with Tiger’s irons and wedges while channeling their canny course management and indomitable competitiveness.

He began the final round of this PGA with a 3-stroke lead and the deserved reputation of a ruthless closer, having previously converted all seven of his 54-hole leads, including twice at the Masters. He pushed his lead to five strokes with a birdie on the second hole. Across golf Twitter and in the locker room at Quail Hollow the consensus was deafening: It’s over. I asked defending champ Xander Schauffele if Scheffler had reached the point, like Woods and Nicklaus before him, that other players began to pucker when they see his name atop the leaderboard. “Oh yes, definitely,” said Schauffele. “I would be shocked if Scottie didn’t win this. When he puts himself in this position, he slams the door.”

But Scheffler’s usually formidable ball striking was shaky across the front nine. He saved three pars with Woodsian scrambling but bogeyed the 6th and 9th holes just as Rahm was making three birdies in four holes around the turn; the last of them, a bending 15-footer on 11, gave Rahm a share of the lead at -9. All of Quail Hollow seemed to tilt in his direction.

Something immediately changed in Scheffler’s countenance. He may be a humble, God-fearing, All-American kid straight out of Mayberry, but beneath the aw-shucks facade there is plenty of Draymond Green. “I was a good defensive basketball player in high school,” says Scheffler. “I was the lockdown guy. I was the hustle guy. That's what happens when you don't have a lot of talent, you've got to hustle.”

He’s coachable, too. On the tee of the par-5 10th hole he asked caddy Ted Scott what was wrong with his vaunted swing. Scott pointed out that Scheffler kept missing left on the front nine and might consider making the same swing but aiming a little more to the right.

It’s that easy?!

“It can be,” says Scott.

Scheffler suddenly looked like a young Jack Nicklaus, bombing a 312-yard drive down the middle of a tight, twisty fairway. The ensuing up-and-down for birdie restored his lead. Then he followed with a series of what he understatedly called “quality shots.”

Said playing partner Alex Noren, “He was fighting those misses to the left and then on 10 he freed himself up and let one go. Then you could feel the momentum building. It’s not easy to change the whole direction of everything like that in the middle of the round. It takes a lot of toughness.”

That he was in a dogfight with Rahm had a little extra meaning for Scheffler, who arrived at the 2021 Ryder Cup winless in two seasons on Tour. Rahm, then World No. 1, was the raging bull of that Cup, winning 3.5 points in four matches across the first two days. But Scheffler drove a sword through his heart in singles, winning the first four holes en route to a 4 & 3 victory. “That was big-time,” says Schauffele, a fellow member of that U.S. team. “Scottie may have seen it coming but for us it was like, Holy smokes, who is this edgy young guy?” Scheffler rode the momentum from that performance into the most dominant run of the post-Tiger epoch, which shows no signs of slowing. Importantly, he doesn’t just want to win, he wants to beat the other guy. This mentality will be familiar to anyone who has studied Woods, to say nothing of Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. Rory McIlroy’s much ballyhooed victory a month ago at the Masters got under Scheffler’s skin. “It's always motivating when you just get beat,” he says.

Scheffler was spoiling for a fight on the back nine of Quail Hollow and Rahm did not appear to want that smoke. At the short par-4 14th, Rahm lost his drive into a greenside bunker and then babied the sand shot. The ensuing 5-footer for birdie never had a chance. Rahm missed another opportunity at the par-5 15th, 3-putting from off the back of the green for a deflating par. Scheffler’s putting can come and go but in the big moments he has the rare ability to will the ball into the hole. After a deft shot from the same bunker on 14 that had ensnared Rahm, Scheffler gutted a crucial 6-footer for birdie, doubling his lead. Rahm heard the roars and then on 16 hooked his drive to the edge of the hazard. He made bogey from the greenside bunker, falling three back. Scheffler made two spectacular swings at 14, producing a tap-in birdie from the same spot where Rahm had his cock-up and stretching the lead to four strokes. It was all over but the shouting.

Scheffler closed out the win with suffocatingly good golf; after looking lost during a front-nine 37 he roared home in 34 (with a meaningless bogey on 18) to win by five shots. (Having taken his previous start by 8 strokes, Scheffler joins Woods as the only player since 1985 to win back-to-back Tour starts by five or more.) This PGA is just another legendary performance in what is shaping up as a career for the ages. The scary thing for the competition is that Scheffler’s formula for success travels. “He does everything really well,” says Max Homa, who lost to Scheffler by 11 strokes when they were paired together during the third round. “It’s a lot like when Tiger did it—through the bag everything is so good so he’s bound to make a bunch of birdies and not a lot of bogeys.”

Including his final round 62 to steal the gold medal at the Paris Games, Scheffler is now three-fifths of the way to the Golden Slam, and his dominance is only accelerating—since 1950, only Nicklaus and Woods have enjoyed a shorter span between their first and 15th wins, and it’s only by a matter of weeks. Along the way Scheffler has broken the spirit of two would-be challengers: Rahm, who rinsed balls at 17 and 18 en route to a brutal back nine 39; and DeChambeau, who also ate Scheffler’s dust at the ‘24 Masters and whose short-iron and wedge play is so inferior to Scottie’s it’s hard to see how he can ever overtake him. How much Scheffler wanted to crush them was evident on the final green when, in victory, he spiked his hat like a latter-day Rob Gronkoswki and loosed a very uncharacteristic “Fuck yeah!”

“He lives to compete,” Ted Scott said Sunday evening in the locker room, artfully applying product to his hair to smooth over his hat-head. “He just wants to win. Every week. He’s not in it for any other reason. He doesn’t care about fame, he doesn’t care about money. Yes, he gets paid, but what inspires him is so pure. It’s almost like he’s an amateur, playing for the love of the game and the love of the competition. It’s like he’s Bobby Jones.”

Ah yes, the great Jones. That’s one more ghost for Scheffler to chase on his march toward golf immortality.