Long before Scottie Scheffler raised the claret jug Sunday evening — marking his fourth major win in his last 13 attempts — Jordan Spieth knew Scheffler had game. Spieth, who is 31, is nearly three years older than Scheffler, but as teens on the Dallas-area junior golf scene, they still bumped up against one another. (Will Zalatoris, too.) In those days, Scheffler has said, he emulated Spieth, who won a pair of U.S. Junior Amateurs, in 2009 and ’11. Two years after the second of those wins, Scheffler, dutiful mentee that he was, picked up a Junior Am title of his own.
Spieth turned pro at the end of 2012, midway through his sophomore year at the University of Texas. Scheffler also was a Longhorn. He stayed all four years and graduated in the spring of 2018, by which point Spieth had already won three majors and 11 PGA Tour events in all. Scheffler, who joined the PGA Tour in the 2019-20 season, wouldn’t pick up his first PGA Tour win until February 2022.
Still, Spieth saw signs of what was coming.
Take the 2021 Ryder Cup. That was the week, at Whistling Straits, when Scheffler squared off with then world No. 1 Jon Rahm, and clinically dispatched him 4 and 3. “Now he knows he didn’t have to do anything different,” Spieth said Sunday at Portrush. In other words, Scottie simply being Scottie was plenty good enough. Rahm himself also identified that singles match as a turning point for Scheffler. “I firsthand got a taste of how good he can be,” Rahm said Sunday. “I didn’t necessarily play bad. I just never really had a chance to win.”
You know what happened next: the spigot burst. In early 2022, Scheffler picked up his maiden PGA Tour title, in a playoff in Phoenix. Then came two more wins in March of that year, followed by his first major victory, at the Masters. In the three years since, Scheffler has added 13 more Tour wins to his c.v., including three more majors and two Players Championship titles, and established himself as [cue Michael Buffer] the undisputed heavyweight champion of the golf world.
Scheffler’s otherworldly play, though, isn’t the only thing that has distinguished him. Also separating Scheffler, Spieth will tell you, is his ability — or, more to the point, desire — to plug in and out. When Scheffler is between the ropes, the blinders are on, the mission clear. When he’s home, he’s just another guy. A husband. A dad. A churchgoer. A Chipotle lover. A ravioli-maker.
“He has that unique ability to, from best I can tell, to separate,” Spieth said, adding, “It’s more so the difference in personality from any other superstar that you’ve seen in the modern era and maybe in any sport. I don’t think anybody is like him.”
Here, a reporter offered Roger Federer, the smooth-operating tennis great, as a potential comp.
“He’s maybe the same kind of demeanor and person,” Spieth said. “But he made more off the court than he did on all the time, and he cared, too. When Scottie is done playing, he’s not going to show back up at tournaments. I can promise you that.”
Scheffler, Spieth continued, has no interest in being a superstar. No interest in building a shoe empire, like Michael Jordan did. No interest in hawking his name and likeness, like Shaq and Peyton Manning have. No interest in racking up views and likes on YouTube, like Bryson DeChambeau does.
“He doesn’t care,” Spieth said. “He’s not transcending the game like Tiger did. He’s not bringing it to a non-golf audience necessarily. He doesn’t want to go do the stuff that a lot of us go do, corporately, anything like that.”
Shane Lowry played with Scheffler in the first two rounds at Portrush and said he thought Scheffler was “going to birdie every hole. It was incredible to watch.” But Lowry also posited that whatever Scheffler achieves, no matter how many birdies he makes, he’ll never fully grasp the public’s imagination in ways other mega-athletes have and do — although Lowry cited a different reason for this phenomenon than Spieth did. “If Scottie’s feet stayed stable and his swing looked like Adam Scott’s, we’d be talking about him in the same words as Tiger Woods,” Lowry said. “I just think because it doesn’t look so perfect, we don’t talk about him like that.”
Asked to react to Lowry’s take, Spieth demurred.
“I wouldn’t necessarily think that the golf swing makes as much of a difference as the personality match,” Spieth said. “I’m thinking about so many other sports, and [NBA star] Nikola Jokic is the only guy I can think of that’s a superstar that’s equally unassuming in any sport in the modern era.
“I’m happy if anybody else can find another example, but it’s very rare. Most people lean into it and take advantage of it.”
Scheffler just wants to win. And then go home.
