PGA Championship: Scottie Scheffler is now chasing history

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — There’s something anticlimactic about rolling a tap-in to win a tournament, especially when you’ve just missed a makeable putt that would have brought the grandstands down. The gallery at Quail Hollow — perfectly congratulatory when Scottie Scheffler tapped in to win the PGA Championship — was still antsy for a reason to explode. So Scheffler gave it to them in an unexpected way.

“F*** yeah!” he bellowed, spiking his white Nike hat onto the pristine 18th green and slapping palms with caddie Ted Scott. “That’s what I’m talking about!” And that tore the roofs off the surrounding luxury boxes.

This is something new from Scheffler, who spent most of his first two years as a Tour champion going about his business with all the verve and flair of ChatGPT. There were moments — his tears after a Ryder Cup loss, his rage earlier this week at the local rules which, as it turned out, didn’t hurt him at all — but for the most part, Scheffler showed up, won, gave a little fist pump or two, took the trophy and went on home.

He clearly cares deeply about winning — you don’t amass three majors and rise to the top of your profession without a competitive streak that verges on sociopathic — but he hasn’t always shown that on the course. In a social media-driven world that thrives on exuberant displays of emotion, he was no Bryson DeChambeau, bellowing to the heavens, or Rory McIlroy, collapsing to the turf. But he approaches winning in a methodical sort of way.

“Winning is a lot of fun, and I think winning as often as I can is a lot of fun. Each week you’re playing in a tournament, and you want to try to give yourself a chance to win,” Scheffler said. “When I stepped on the tee on Thursday, I’m not thinking about what’s going to happen on Sunday. I’m preparing for a 72-hole event. That’s what I tell myself on the 1st tee: It’s 72 holes. That’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of holes. That’s a lot of shots.”

So why the 72nd-hole spike? Maybe it was the rollercoaster of starting with a three-stroke lead, losing every bit of that lead at the turn, and then rebounding with three birdies over the back nine to seize control of the tournament before he even reached the Green Mile. Maybe it was the release of winning a major outside of Augusta, Georgia, and stomping out one of the few remaining “Yeah, but…” narratives around his career. Hell, maybe it was revenge for the chaos that the Louisville police caused him a year ago at this time.

“Just a lot of happiness,” Scheffler said after the round when asked about the hat-spike. “I think, you know, just maybe thankful as well. It was a long week. I felt like this was as hard as I battled for a tournament in my career. This was a pretty challenging week.” (He did laugh when he said “I definitely have a few jokes that I want to say that I’m probably going to keep to myself” about Louisville.)

Whatever the reason, Scheffler’s release was a cathartic one, both for himself and for the sport. He’s firmly established himself as the sport’s alpha dog now. Consider: he’s won 15 times on the PGA Tour in the last three-plus years, and only two players have taken less time to win their first 15 tournaments: Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.

On a micro level, he’s in elite territory as well. For instance, he’s the only player besides Woods to win consecutive tournaments by at least five strokes. He’s the only player other than Seve Ballesteros to win his first three majors by three strokes.

What does all this mean? Scheffler is rapidly approaching the point where he won’t be competing with the players on the leaderboard, he’ll be competing against the players in record books. Yes, McIlroy, Brooks Koepka, and — if you want to be technical about it — Woods and Phil Mickelson still have more majors than Scheffler among active players. But no one currently combines willpower, resilience, skill, touch and step-on-your-throat competitiveness quite like Scheffler.

In an era of giants — virtually every major winner in the 2020s is a multiple-major winner — he’s standing the tallest. And he’s having fun doing it … which ought to scare the hell out of the rest of the field.

“I’ve prepared my entire life to become somewhat decent at this game, and to have a chance to win a tournament that I dreamed about as a kid is a pretty cool feeling,” he said. “When you step out on the 1st tee, it’s pretty dang cool. There’s definitely stress. It’s definitely challenging, but at the same time, I mean, it’s a lot of fun.”

And speaking of kids … Sunday evening, as he left the scorer’s room after his round, Scheffler held his young son Bennett. When Scheffler went to pass off Bennett to his mother Meredith — so that Scheffler could go claim the Wanamaker Trophy — Bennett began crying and clutching at Scheffler’s collar. Everybody else in the Scheffler entourage was all smiles … and might be for a long, long time.