Scottie Scheffler Has Become Golf’s Most Pleasant Destroyer

It’s a shopworn cliché that the Masters doesn’t really start until the back nine on Sunday. But clichés get shopworn for a reason—they tend to be true. Scottie Scheffler, the world’s no. 1 player, the 2022 champion at Augusta, and the prohibitive favorite going into this week, is well aware of the kinds of Sunday dramas that so often take place around Amen Corner. So he decided to call game on this year’s tournament before we even got there.

In a dizzying flash of inspiration, Scheffler made three consecutive birdies—on the eighth, ninth, and 10th holes—to turn what had been a tense four-way duel into a quasi-comfortable runaway. With preternatural calm, he proceeded to make three more birdies against one bogey to shoot 11-under par on the week and prevail by four shots over Ludvig Aberg, the exciting young Swede. Golf is a sport obsessed with numbers and records to the point of concerning disassociation, but this week, one stat sticks out above the others. By bagging his second green jacket, the 27-year-old Scheffler becomes the fourth-youngest player to prevail at the Masters multiple times. The three ahead of him? Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and Seve Ballesteros. How’s that for rarefied air?

What made the dominant finish by Scheffler, who led by one stroke entering Sunday, all the more remarkable is what directly preceded it. For once in what has been a brief but remarkably storied career, Scheffler had looked deeply uncomfortable. Following a roller-coaster Saturday that combined an uncustomary double bogey–bogey stretch at 10 and 11, but also a chip-in birdie and an eagle, the most consistent of players seemed to be flying too close to the Georgia sun. He hit only three of his first seven greens Sunday, and it seemed his precision distance control had lost its GPS. Attempting to navigate Augusta National with a loose long iron game is a bit like playing with plutonium in your garage. It seems like it might be OK for a while, and then there’s a flash and suddenly all that remains is a small, glowing mass and whatever surviving klediments your loved ones might remember you by.

By contrast, Scheffler’s playing partner, the young and supremely gifted two-time major winner Collin Morikawa, seemed serene and locked in with seven pars and a birdie on his first eight holes. To read the body language of the two athletes at that moment was to perceive that it was Morikawa’s tournament to win. But how quickly things changed on no. 9, where Scheffler poured his approach to kick-in birdie range while Morikawa took two shots to get out of a bunker and two putts to make a double bogey: a three-shot swing. Morikawa would compound the wound by rinsing his approach on 11 and making another double, but by that time, the die was cast. Aberg made the same mistake of going left into Rae’s Creek, with the same result. Max Homa bounced his tee shot on 12 into the azaleas, had to take an unplayable lie, chunked his chip, and made a double bogey. From there, everybody just blinked and Francesco Molinari–ed their way out of the competition.

Outside of Scheffler, the other big winner this week was certainly the PGA, which finished with a clean sweep of the top five finishers and only notional challenges from LIV contenders Bryson DeChambeau and Cameron Smith. Defending champion and main apostate Jon Rahm seemed troubled by the circumstances all week and carded a sorry 9-over par. Phil Mickelson failed to build on the momentum of his T2 finish from last year. Weirdest of all, 2020 winner Dustin Johnson carded a 78 and 79 in the first two rounds as if he were a reluctant late entrant in a Wednesday four-ball. Meanwhile, as he has now done several times previously, Scheffler chased down the best of the best. Iron sharpens iron, which proved out this week.

Scheffler is the main attraction. He is the once and future king, which makes the Rahm departure sting less, as he barely made the cut and limped to T45. These circumstances create a fun thought exercise: How does the PGA Tour, apparently locked in a forever cold war with LIV, market the soft-spoken Texan, who has locked down a starring role by dint of his dominance? He is, in some ways, the actualization of the earnest-man-of-the-people-with-electric-game gimmick that was affixed to Phil Mickelson and heavily promoted in Mickelson’s early career until he turned out to be a David Mamet character. Scheffler seems like a genuine everyman, unlikely to be losing bazillions in betting anytime soon.

Affable and possibly a tad oafish, Scheffler doesn’t seem like a bully. He has nothing of Tiger’s borderline psychopathy or Phil’s above-it-all swagger or Brooks Koepka’s kick-your-ass-in-the-cafeteria jock-ness. But after watching him win week after week—this makes for three wins in his past four starts—I think he might be a bully just the same. On Sundays, he’s like an anaconda that slowly suffocates its prey. He’s undemonstrative to the point of signaling inevitability. His game seems to say: “I will continue to do unbelievable things until you agree I am the winner, and then we can go back to being friends.” You could argue that’s even scarier than Tiger’s legendary mindset. We’ve seen great champions such as Rory and Jordan Spieth bubble up and win a bunch of majors and then recede to merely being amazing. Scheffler may be different. I suspect his second green jacket won’t be his last.

Elizabeth Nelson is a Washington, D.C.–based journalist, television writer, and singer-songwriter in the garage-punk band the Paranoid Style.