Peter Dobereiner, the fantastic writer about golf whose perceptive and humorous work graced the pages of British newspapers and magazines and the American Golf Digest until his death in 1996, summed up how vexing the shortest strokes can be when he wrote, “Half of golf is fun; the other half is putting.”
Anyone who has ever been frustrated on the greens—make that anyone who has ever played golf, if we’re being honest—can relate to the truth behind Dobereiner’s 10 words. When putting, the end game of the game, is a problem, the struggle can infect a golfer’s psyche with doubt and dread. It can be a path into a box canyon for professionals, no matter their expertise in other aspects of golf, with no good way out.
Scottie Scheffler certainly can relate. In the grumpy world of golf where there seems to be little agreement on very much, there has been unanimity that if Scheffler could only start putting decently everyone competing against him would be in a world of hurt.
It’s safe to say Scheffler delivered many figurative punches over the weekend at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the blows delivered with a velvet touch using a new mallet-style putter. He one-putted the last seven holes of the third round as he surged into a 54-hole tie with Shane Lowry at 9 under par, rolled in a 13-footer for birdie on the first hole Sunday afternoon and never looked back. Counting the tiddlers, including one at the last hole to wrap up a closing, six-under 66 and a five-stroke victory over Wyndham Clark, he was 17 for 17 inside 15 feet in the final round and only took 24 putts.
Scheffler’s ball-striking has been top shelf for a while. How else to explain how he finished in the top-10 in 17 of 23 PGA Tour appearances last season while ranking 161st in Strokes Gained: Putting? Or that, arriving in Orlando for the API, he had four top-10s in five 2024 starts without exactly running the tables on the greens given that he was 144th in that crucial stat category? And then he had 31 putts in a first-round 70 at Bay Hill. To hear Scheffler tell it after winning his second API in three years, it was mind over missed putts on Thursday.
“That was an important day for me,” Scheffler said. “I got off to a horrible start with the putter. I hit a really bad putt to start the day, and I missed a couple other makeable ones on the first few holes. When I got to the practice range after, the discussion was not what are we going to fix. It was how well that I did. And that all goes back to the process that we're working on. And it’s not results-based … It wasn’t like we were searching for anything out there. It was more just kind of a reflection of where I was mentally at the time, and I thought we did a good job.”
Scheffler’s number of putts went down as the week went on, like a fever on an improving patient until, on Sunday, it was as if he’d never been sick. He had a comfortable lead by the time he got to the 15th hole but sank a 35-footer for birdie anyway, an exclamation point on the putting turnaround. It didn’t seem possible that just a day earlier he had come off Bay Hill’s 11th green as hot as a couple of his choices for the Champions Dinner at the 2023 Masters, given that he had bogeyed two of the last three holes and had fallen six behind leader Will Zalatoris.
Dick Wilson, the underappreciated architect who originally designed Bay Hill, believed that a course should be a measure of all parts of the game, not just a couple. Scheffler prevailed by doing everything nicely on Sunday, including some deft sand play and his usual tidy chips and pitches. His actual scoring average in 2023, when his lone official victory came at The Players Championship, was 68.23. In 2024 it’s nearly a shot better, 67.32. In Tiger Woods’ monster 2000 season, he averaged 68.17. On clover and common Bermuda during his record 18-win 1945 season, Byron Nelson averaged 68.33. Scheffler is residing in a golf penthouse.
Now Scheffler goes to northeast Florida in very good shape to do what no one, surprisingly, has ever done at The Players: successfully defend his title. Not that he gauges his life by tournament results.
“I try not to place too much of my identity in what I do out here on the golf course,” he said after winning Sunday evening. “There’s a whole other part of my life that is not in front of you [reporters] that I think is what's most important to me. So, yeah, my life's not a golf score, it’s not how many trophies I’m going to win, it’s not anything like that. I’m proud to have a great wife and a great family, and we have great friends at home. And I’m very grateful for the other part of my life that’s away from the golf course.”
On the course, he has solidified his perch atop the Official World Golf Ranking that he has occupied for a year and a half. Scheffler is the 25th golfer to be No. 1 in the list that began in 1986, and only a handful of players have had longer stays at the top (led by Tiger Woods’ astounding 683 weeks).
“I don’t really look at the world rankings very often,” Scheffler admitted Sunday. “That said, it’s nice to be No. 1. I would much rather be No. 1 than No. 2. It’s something that I don't try to focus on, it’s not something I place my identity in. For me, as a golfer, I just try to put the work in, and just because you make it to the top, I mean, the work almost gets more difficult to stay there. It’s a challenging thing. Everybody, I guess, now is kind of looking up at me at the top of the rankings and trying to take me down. So, to stay up there, you’ve got to put in a lot of work.”
If putting can become a strength not a weakness, if one afternoon can morph into many when the smallest shots don’t cause the largest worry, those trying to dislodge Scheffler as No. 1 have a tough assignment. Complacency better not be in their makeup because it isn’t in his.