CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Jeff Darlington did not think his commute to work on PGA Championship Friday morning would wind up the subject of a national media story.
His drive in darkness from the Embassy Suites in Louisville to Valhalla Golf Club was designed to be uninteresting: 30 minutes of boredom on a few interstates and a two-lane highway in Kentucky before a long day in golf. He didn’t know the context that would greet him when he arrived to find a traffic jam outside the golf course — context that would change his life by the time the sun rose in Louisville on Friday morning. Soon, though, Jeff Darlington would learn it all: The story of the World No. 1 golfer’s stunning arrest, of a shocking police response, and his own role as one of the few eyewitnesses to the golf story of the year.
The ESPN reporter was a golf TV newbie when he hopped in his car before dawn on Friday morning at the 2024 PGA Championship. He’d been a golf diehard forever, and he’d waited a long time for his employers to ask him onto their golf portfolio. Now, at Valhalla, he’d gotten his breakthrough.
Darlington was a unique fit for golf. Raised in Florida, he’d cut his teeth as a print reporter for University of Florida sports and the Miami Dolphins before shifting to TV with ESPN’s NFL coverage. He was, in many ways, the archetype of the modern sports reporter: majoring in storytelling and minoring in versatility. Underpinning both of those skillsets was a background in journalism; the business of context.
It was there, outside Valhalla Golf Club in the pre-dawn hour, that Darlington first saw something peculiar. A white, tournament-branded SUV sliced in front of a traffic chokepoint, leaving a screaming police officer in a yellow rainjacket chasing behind. Seconds later, the officer pulled the driver from the car and placed him in handcuffs.
It was only then that Darlington got a good look at the driver, a young man with a beard, his clothing adorned with an unmistakeable Nike swoosh. The Louisville police had detained Scottie Scheffler, the No. 1 golfer in the world.
Darlington immediately stepped out of the car and started recording a video on his phone as he walked toward the officers. He tried to talk to the officers — he’s heard on the video yelling “Guys!” — but when it became clear they were going to arrest Scheffler anyway, he stopped recording and starting reporting.
“I never even looked at my phone after I posted the video,” Darlington told GOLF.com. “I just remember putting my phone down and saying, Focus on the camera. Because everybody’s gonna find the story, but I felt like the story required some nuance and context that TV could create.”
Nuance had a few meanings in the minutes after Scheffler’s arrest, but mostly it meant detail. Darlington had seen every second of the interaction, from Scheffler’s attempt to route through traffic into the golf course to the moment the squad car left the scene with Scheffler in the back. The reporter was one of the only people in the world who knew exactly what’d happened.
“I had every bit of context,” Darlington said. “A lot of times for any story like that, you don’t have every bit of context.”
But even with the benefit of a first-person view, he was struggling to make sense of what he saw.
“If you walk into a situation like that, you have to assume that the law enforcement has a reason to do this,” he said. “But then there’s part of me that’s saying, just logically, that felt really aggressive and really unnecessary. And then you add a layer of I am familiar with Scottie Scheffler. I certainly know his reputation. We’re talking about someone who is just not that guy.”
It wasn’t until after Scheffler had driven away that Darlington says he realized the full scope of what happened. The rest of the world failed to see the situation’s innocence, how easily it might have happened to anyone. The traffic chokepoint, the player who’d been instructed to bypass it, and yes, the officer who’d failed to piece together why his orders weren’t immediately followed — all were plausible points of failure in Scheffler’s situation reaching an amiable conclusion.
Scheffler didn’t deserve to be freed on the basis of his fame, but his fame was another critical part of the story. Had he not been a professional golfer with a tee time, he would not have been trying to enter the golf course, and might not have trusted that on-site security would see his courtesy vehicle and let him through. And had the officers tried to learn who Scheffler was, they might have understood his motive for cutting through traffic, and might not have followed through with the arrest.
“No one wanted to be an adult in the room,” Darlington says. “Until the guy came up to me after with his pad out and said, ‘And who was it that we just arrested?’ I go, That was Scottie Scheffler. It was only at that point that I realized, ‘Oh, you guys don’t have any idea what you’re getting into.'”
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The police weren’t the only ones acting on instinct. Darlington sprung into action the second Scheffler emerged from the car. Without consciously thinking about it, he’d clicked into his inner reporter: seeking to understand the situation in its entirety and cover it as such.
“I had friends say, you should have gotten arrested with him,” Darlington says with a laugh. “You never know how you’re going to handle that situation until you’re in it.”
In the days that followed, Darlington felt concerned the story might have burned a bridge with Scheffler. He wasn’t trying to dramatize one of the most serious moments of Scheffler’s life, and he certainly wasn’t trying to pilfer fame from Scheffler’s legal troubles. But the arrest was also one of the stories of Darlington’s life; it was his duty to cover it fairly.
Darlington reached out a few days later to apologize for the media circus, but Scheffler cut him off.
“He was worried that I thought that he was doing it to help himself,” Scheffler said in a story that was later relayed on Pardon My Take. “I was like ‘listen man, I’m glad that somebody saw what happened.'”
In truth, Darlington had handled the situation flawlessly — and his eyewitness account of the arrest had served as a necessary component of Scheffler’s eventual release. Scheffler had witnessed, and intuited, one of the key reasons for the press’s existence: If not for Darlington’s coverage, the truth of the situation might never have come to light — and the headlines would have read much differently.
“What really blows my mind, which is one thing, but the reason I got arrested is because the police officer charged me second-degree assault,” Scheffler said. “That’s a very serious charge.”
Even if Darlington didn’t want to take advantage of the situation, his career has benefited from the story. After a strong week of coverage at the Masters, he will serve as one of the network’s most prominent voices at this week’s PGA Championship in Charlotte, N.C., where a reunion interview with Scheffler is in the works.
If there is a lesson from the morning of Scheffler’s arrest, Darlington says it’s simpler than the arguments that have played out over social media over the last 12 months. The story of that morning at the PGA Championship is not about good guys and bad guys, but about the virtue of cooler heads.
“I don’t care if it’s Scottie Scheffler or anybody, he deserves to have everybody calm down, assess the fact that maybe there were some misunderstandings about where people were supposed to go, and figure things out,” Darlington said. “It doesn’t matter who he is, everybody deserves that context.”
Context. It’s Jeff Darlington’s business, and many days that’s nothing special … right up until the morning it changed the golf world.
