Scottie Scheffler hasn’t looked like Scottie Scheffler to start the season.
He is still playing incredibly high-level golf. He has three top-11 finishes in five starts, including a T3 at the Genesis Invitational. But when you are coming off a seven-win PGA Tour season and have been the No. 1 player in the world for 96 consecutive weeks, the expectations are bigger, both internally and externally.
Scheffler was visibly frustrated during last week’s Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass. He hung in for the first two rounds of the tournament, but his quest for a three-peat ended Saturday.
Scheffler lost strokes to the field on the greens during three of the four rounds. That uncharacteristic sloppiness has been a theme for Scheffler since he returned at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The two-time Masters winner missed the first month of the season after suffering a puncture wound in his hand while making ravioli on Christmas. The hand injury has healed, but he explained Wednesday during a pre-Masters press conference that it is still impacting his game.
“Just like getting the strength back in the hand and all that stuff,” Scheffler said. “Like I have absolutely no pain in the hand. But getting the full total range of motion out of my hand is a little bit of a different story. Just because you’re not able to use a certain muscle for almost a month’s time, like my hand, I wasn’t able to really use. You have to build back strength in that hand. And not being able to do the exact things that I did in the gym was a challenge as well.
“It was a pretty good chunk of time where I wasn’t able to do the things that I normally did. So when you come back, it takes a little bit of time. … I’m very structured in the way that I do things here at home. So not being able to do those things is definitely an adjustment. So, did it set me back a little bit? Maybe so. But I feel like I’m learning a lot right now, and I definitely did some things really well to start the year. That was nice. I definitely had some things that I could for sure improve on, and like I said, my swing, I feel like is really starting to come around. And I’m definitely excited about the things we kind of figured out when we were [at the Players].”
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Scheffler knows he hasn’t met his lofty standards so far in 2025. While it will be nearly impossible to match what he did in 2024, he feels like the tide is turning for his game as his hand gets back to 100 percent and the rust comes off after an unexpected layoff.
“I think any time you don’t play up to your expectations, it’s frustrating,” Scheffler said. “So with the game of golf, you’re going to be frustrated probably about 95 percent of the time. And this year, my ball-striking hasn’t been as good as it has been the last few years. I felt like that was what was holding me back the last couple of weeks, just not hitting the ball as sharply as I had in previous years. So, a lot of that is kind of getting the body back to where it needs to be.
