DREAMING OF SUFFOLK PUNCH’S BREAKFAST BOWL, N.Y. — Who’s Scottie Scheffler like?
The comparison exercise can be both lovable and loathable, right? Relatability helps us understand — he hits like him, she putts like her and so on and so on, all the way until things make a bit more sense. On a less profound note, it makes for fun bar talk, too. Anyways, in the case of Scheffler, your 2025 PGA Championship champion, he sees your pressure and raises it … kinda like Woods. His game can travel everywhere … kinda like Nicklaus’.
Then there’s the thought of the path he’ll follow in the coming years, and, conveniently, three models have come recently. Will he be like … Woods, who followed major wins with more major wins? Will he be like … Jordan Speith, who followed major wins with what is now a lengthy search? Or will he be like … Rory McIlroy, who’s somewhat of a combo of the two, with his major ascent, descent and recent resurrection.
But maybe we’re seeing something … new.
He’s a dad-joke liker and a submission specialist straight out of the UFC. He’s a funky swinger who seemingly has taken the flukiness out of chip-ins. Does he have competitive fire? “Uh, yeah,” he said Sunday night, then laughed. Does he compartmentalize it, though? Uh, yeah, that, too. That ginormous Wanamaker Trophy? It’ll reside in what he calls his “golf room.” What does it look like in there? “I’d like to say that it’s nicely presented, but it’s not.”
Scottie Scheffler, ladies and gentlemen.
As we look back at the PGA Championship week that was at Quail Hollow Club, let’s make that observation No. 1 then. We’ll try for 49 more, and, to help the mood, we’ll mix in some music from a few of Charlotte’s best musicians.
2. Kyle Porter, who runs the Normal Sport golf website, tweeted this weekend that Scheffler reminds him of Tim Duncan. That’s a good one.
3. On Sunday night on Golf Channel, analyst Paul McGinley touted Scheffler’s rebound ability, though not in the Duncan sense, and that’s a good thought, too. Nowhere was that better seen than Saturday, when Scheffler bogeyed the par-3 13th at Quail Hollow, then finished eagle — with maybe the shot of the tournament — birdie, par, birdie, birdie.
4. There was also Sunday’s bounce back. A bogey on 9 was followed by three-under-par golf over the next eight holes.
5. Credit Ted Scott with the assist on Sunday. (Is he Tony Parker then?) Before the back-nine run, Scheffler had been fighting a left miss off the tee, and he was perplexed, though not frustrated. “Kind of what I reminded myself at the turn is — I had a bite to eat,” Scheffler said. “And I told myself, if I keep making good swings, I’m not going to continue to hit the ball left every time, statistically speaking.”
A short thought from Scott helped, though.
No, athletes don’t have to talk to reporters after wins, losses and all of the results in between — that is, if they don’t want fans to know the who, what, when, where, why and how. Press conferences and such are the forum for that. Granted, some fans are entertained just by the action. But the story adds context.
One session skip is OK. Maybe two. But four is a bad look, especially for someone as popular as McIlroy.
19. Wouldn’t you be curious to know why he struggled this week on a course where he’s won four times? Was it nerves? Was it a Masters hangover? Was it … his driver?
20. OK, let’s talk about Drivergate. (I don’t like using ‘gates,’ but it plays.) We learned that McIlroy was playing a new driver head this week, and the word was his old had failed testing. Testing? According to Kerry Haigh, the PGA of America’s chief championships officer, a third of the drivers in the field were tested, as they are at other events. And why are they tested? For rules conformance. After a while, driver faces can get springy.
Why is this a big deal? Some folks started to wonder how long McIlroy’s potential hot driver was in play, and I’ll let my esteemed colleague Michael Bamberger address that. In a story published on Sunday on this site, he wrote: Nothing here suggests in any way that McIlroy used a nonconforming driver when he won the Masters. It is almost impossible to imagine that a player would willfully use a nonconforming club. It would violate every principle this game is supposed to stand for.”
Bamberger then wrote that he believed a potential solution would be to test the drivers of the top 10 players on Sunday morning, in addition to the testing already in place. I like that.
21. One player did reveal that his driver failed testing.
Scheffler.
Was his new driver head the reason behind his left miss?
“No. I think that was my fault,” he said Sunday, laughing.
22. All of the hot driver talk got me thinking back to my youth baseball days, when I’d see kids pound Easton bats against the supports of the dugout fence to get more spring.
It helped some. Some, meanwhile, couldn’t hit the ball even if it were on a tee. I’ll let you decide which group I was in.
23. Let’s talk Jon Rahm. He could also win at Oakmont.
He also had the quote of the tournament.
“I always like to go back a little bit on something that Charles Barkley likes to remind basketball players all the time. Like, I play golf for a living. It’s incredible. Am I embarrassed a little bit about how I finished today? Yeah. But I just need to get over it, get over myself. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not like I’m a doctor or a first responder, where somebody if they have a bad day, truly bad things happen.
“I’ll get over it. I’ll move on. Again, there’s a lot more positive than negative to think about this week. I’m really happy I put myself in position and hopefully learn from this and give it another go in the U.S. Open.”
24. Let’s talk about the underdogs. Well done on your top-10s, Harris English (150-1 odds before the tournament, according to golfodds.com), Davis Riley (500-1), Jhonattan Vegas (500-1), Ryan Gerard (150-1) and Joe Highsmith (150-1).
25. Let’s talk about the favorites. What happened to Jordan Spieth, Sepp Straka, Shane Lowry, Hideki Matsuyama, Ludvig Aberg, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Jason Day, Cameron Smith, Brooks Koepka and Justin Rose? All missed the cut.
26. Whew, that’s a lot of big names not to see the weekend? Did it diminish the tournament?
No, in my opinion. I like the long shots, or more specifically, their stories. Did their lack of major-contending experience lead to Scheffler’s move? Maybe. Would more stars have made things more compelling? Perhaps.
But it’s not like a bunch of 15-handicaps were playing out there. If anything, the depth of talent was showcased, and that further underscored just how hard it is to win a major — because everyone’s freaking good.
27. Where do I stand on Quail Hollow? I liked it. I liked the strong finish. I liked the drivable par-4s. I liked that the best player was identified.
28. But I thought this Twitter thread, started by GOLF’s Zephyr Melton, was also good.
29. Welcome back to contention, Max Homa. And thanks for letting us listen in to your process. This exchange was good, with the reporter’s question in italics:
I’ve often considered you one of the better explainers of things in this sport, and I’m curious if, as the scores aren’t matching the feels or the feels with your coach are not matching what he’s seeing, has any of this been particularly hard to explain to people?
“Yeah, a lot of it has been,” Homa said. “Especially with my wife. She’ll ask me on days at home, like how was today? I’ll say great, and we’ll leave the next day and shoot a zillion. She doesn’t get it.
“It’s hard to explain because I don’t — I can give you the technical version of all of it, but at the end of the day, it is odd. I’ll play some really good practice rounds. Waste Management in particular was probably the best I’ve ever driven the ball in my life, and even in the first round on Thursday, I think I shot six- or seven-over. It’s just a hard game.
“I heard Matt Fitzpatrick was doing an interview, and he explained it. The week he’s driven the ball well, it seemed like he’s putted awful or he hit his irons awful. And the weeks he’s ironed it great or putted great, he’s driven it awful. It is hard to explain.
“The technical is that it just gets faster when you play. The positions I’ve been in and the club being behind me, I can figure it out here and there and get into grooves, and if a feel gets going, I can repeat it a lot. But you start getting nervous, trees on the left, trees on the right, water, whatever, certain winds, it just — it messes with all — you don’t want a lot of timing in your golf swing. People wonder why Scottie is so amazing. He doesn’t have a lot of timing. He’s incredibly athletic and aware of where the golf club is, and I have not been. So when you get under stress and things, it just doesn’t become as easy as — I call it field practice when you’re on a range where you hit a bad one and rake another one over and just try to time it a little better.
“It has been hard to explain, but at the end of the day, there’s also been bad days at home. So it’s not like it’s completely foreign when I show up to a golf tournament. Didn’t feel mental. It just was a little bit of mental with a lack of confidence mixed with a golf swing that wasn’t super repeatable.”
30. This was good, too:
It’s always been your way to be very transparent and let people in, which is rare for a lot of athletes, professionals. Do you find that that helps you? Is it almost therapeutic to some degree to let people in rather than — you know, with your feelings and stuff like that — rather than shutting everything out and keeping it inside?
“No, it probably doesn’t help me at all, if I’m being honest. I don’t know, I grew up a fan of sports, as so many are, and I always found it really — like interviews and things to be so thought provoking as a fan to get a little insight. Like I said, we are entertainers, and without the fans, we would be just playing golf with some buddies.
“Yeah, I just try to be myself. Yeah, sometimes I wish I would probably keep some things in, but at the end of the day, we owe a lot to them. It’s not so hard to be transparent. It doesn’t hurt me in any way.”
31. Music break! According to ranker.com, the second-best Charlotte musician or music group is … Jodeci. Fans of 1990s R&B, such as potentially the author of this article, know them well. Here’s one of their hits.
32. I think Michael Block is great, and I hope he plays in future PGAs. He’s a showman, and golf needs those. I don’t understand the dislike.
33. Speaking of club pros, this story on Rupe Taylor, written by Golf Digest’s Joel Beall, was good.
