Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy at the PGA Championship this week.
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — These choice exclamations, in good times and in bad, they’re revealing. Scottie Scheffler after his Thursday round here, offering a soliloquy from deep within his experience about . . . mud balls.
Elite men’s professional golf has never had so much money floating around it, and everybody seems to be on edge, now more than ever before.
Collin Morikawa, after his fourth-round 72, to nobody in particular: “Pathetic f—ing golf.”
Rory McIlroy, walking over a players’ bridge to an early-morning tee time, hearing the stop-play whistle, and offering these see-through words to his inner-life: “F— off.”
Scottie Scheffler, after holing a birdie putt on 18 on Saturday to make his lead only bigger: “F— yeah, baby.”
I like it. It shows how high-strung they are, how intense tournament golf is, what control freaks they are.
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Scheffler’s Thursday soliloquy was brilliant in its articulation. I didn’t agree with any of it, but I respect what he was really saying: You have no idea how hard this all is! Pay particular note to his use of the word life:
“I understand how a golf purist would be, ‘Oh, play it as it lies.’ But I don’t think they understand what it’s like to literally work your entire life to learn how to hit a golf ball and control it and hit shots and control distance and all of a sudden, due to a rules decision, [all] that is completely taken away from us by chance.”
It weirdly reminded me of a Tiger Woods moment, at Augusta, years ago. He went to the little members’ range during a rain delay to hit pitch shots. A member came over in a cart to tell Woods he needed to be on the course, ready to play, in six minutes. The look Woods gave the poor guy was absolutely withering. As if there was any chance he did not know. You’re welcome to write your own thought balloon. I might suggest it have a least one bomb in it, but it’s just a suggestion.
The players despise being told what to do.
And we’re all there, doing exactly that, telling them what to do. Members from the host course. Writers and broadcasters. Caddies and swing coaches. Tournament officials. Rules officials. PGA Tour suits. Can any of them shoot an even-par Sunday 71 on an impossible course with one of golf’s oldest and most prestigious trophies waiting for you and an engraver in a cozy clubhouse room where, despite the day’s intense heat, a gas fireplace is going?
The player who had the weirdest weekend was Rory McIlroy, a two-time winner of the PGA Championship who last month became the sixth player to win the professional career Grand Slam when he won the Masters in a one-hole playoff. Ties there used to be broken by an 18-hole playoff but the people who run the tournament have changed their minds about the matter over the years. It’s their tournament.
A couple of weeks after his win, McIlroy was chatting up Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, wearing his new club coat. (The club permits the current winner to wear it off-campus.) It was a charming interview. McIlroy said, “Everybody comes up to me and they’re like, ’Oh, you don’t know what you put us through on that Sunday. And I’m like, ‘How do you think I was feeling?’”
He conveyed the intensity of it all so well. Nobody can understand what it means to be a tournament golfer except other tournament golfers. Mickey Wright told me years ago she talks about tournament golf only with the women who were on the LPGA tour with her, because they are the only ones who understand.
On Friday, news broke — news by golf’s modest standard for the term — that McIlroy was playing with a new driver, not the one he had used at Augusta, because it had failed a routine pre-tournament test for compliance standards. Maybe the report is not accurate. (Seems unlikely.) It’s not exceptional. (Scottie Scheffler had to play with a new driver this week for the same reason.) But McIlroy did not stop to talk to reporters on Friday or Saturday or Sunday to offer any sort of explanation. Why? I don’t know but I’m going to make a guess:
Because you are not the boss of me! I am the boss of me!
In my opinion, he is turning a molehill into a mountain. But, you know: his driver issues, his choice.
Golf to me — and surely to Rory McIlroy; Shane Lowry; Scottie Scheffler and his Sunday playing partner, Alex Noren; Collin Morikawa; Tiger Woods; and millions of others of us, at every level of the game — represents freedom. But not boundless freedom, where there are no consequences. You get to do exactly what you want to do, to a point. There is a point. McIlroy did not cross a line. Neither did Lowry or Morikawa or Scheffler, no matter what you think of what they did and what they said.
The corridors of a golf course, from the first tee to the bottom of the hole on 18, call to millions of us. Golf at Quail Hollow was freedom, of a wild and windy sort. Freedom with boundaries created by the rule book, by water hazards and hazardous rough, by the social contract of playing-partner propriety.
“It was intense out there,” Noren told me Sunday night. “Scottie was intense. I was intense. The course is hard. It’s Sunday at a major, in the last group. It’s very intense.” Noren was doing his own thing, as best he could, to the degree he could. He shot 76 and tied for 17th.
Scheffler was asked Sunday night to describe the intensity of tournament golf.
“It’s really hard to describe,” he said. “I don’t think you can really understand what it’s like, in the arena, until you step in it, and it’s all on the line.”
In all these cases, in all these f-bombs, in these various examples of players blowing off reporters, that’s what we’re seeing, little scenes from their lives inside the arena.
Michael Bamberger writes for GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. Before that, he spent nearly 23 years as senior writer for Sports Illustrated. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has written a variety of books about golf and other subjects, the most recent of which is The Second Life of Tiger Woods. His magazine work has been featured in multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing. He holds a U.S. patent on The E-Club, a utility golf club. In 2016, he was given the Donald Ross Award by the American Society of Golf Course Architects, the organization’s highest honor.
