After consecutive weeks of gloomy TV ratings as NFL counter-programming, a PGA Tour shot in the arm is on the way.
His name is Scottie Scheffler.
On Friday afternoon, the World No. 1 announced he would return to golf at next week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, marking his first start of 2025 a little more than a month following a Christmas cooking accident that required surgery.
Scheffler long-targeted the Pebble Beach Pro-Am as the staging site for his return to competitive golf after a longer-than-expected offseason. The two-time major champ has been sidelined after cutting himself with a broken glass while making ravioli over the Christmas holiday, an injury that required surgery to have the glass removed. Scheffler has been away from his golf clubs for one of the longest stretches of his adult life in the four weeks since that injury, his last public start coming at the Crypto.com Showdown in Vegas in December.
“I’ve never been big on reflecting and stuff like that,” Scheffler said in a press conference on Monday. “But as I’ve been sitting around post-surgery, I did take a little bit of time to go back and watch some stuff from the last year, mostly just to help jog my memory.”
Scheffler enters the field at Pebble Beach fresh off the best pro season of the past 25 years, a nine-win year that featured a second Masters victory and an Olympic gold medal. The 28-year-old established himself as one of the sports world’s most dominant figures in ’24, and the Tour is counting on him to produce another season of similar magnitude in ’25 to help fend off lagging TV ratings throughout the sport.
Scheffler’s announcement comes as the Tour prepares for its second “Signature Event” of the 2025 season at Pebble Beach. The Tour’s return to Monterey marks an important guidepost for the 2025 season, and not only for those competing in the strongest early season field of 2025. Pebble is a major testing ground for the Tour’s high-paying, limited-field Signature Events series. The new stretch of eight annual events aims to provide fans with a series of reliably high-wattage events each season, recruiting the best players on Tour to compete under one roof.
Last year, dreadful weather forced the event to end after just 54 holes, a major ratings loss for CBS and a hit to the Tour’s hopes for the first full season of Signature Events. The Tour is hopeful this year’s event will feature better weather (the forecast looks promising) and bigger star power come Sunday afternoon, another issue lacking in the first year of the series.
If nothing else, Scheffler’s entrance into Pebble marks a notable uptick in field strength. The World No. 1 will be joined by a fellow Texan, Jordan Spieth, in returning to golf on the cliffs of Monterey Peninsula. Spieth is returning from a far more complex offseason surgery to fix a tendon issue in his wrist that has plagued him for the past several seasons.
It is hard to overstate the Tour’s hopes for both players in 2025, a year that could have tremendous ramifications for the future of pro golf. The PGA Tour remains deadlocked in negotiations with the Saudi PIF on a deal to secure peace in pro golf. While there is optimism an agreement will arrive soon, the residual effects of pro golf’s fracture have shown cracks in the sport’s foundation. Fans have turned away from golf in droves, with nearly one-fifth of the Tour’s average weekend audience departing the sport in 2024, and last weekend’s American Express drawing less than half of the event’s 2024 audience.
Context helps understand the audience data: The Tour’s numbers are not being helped by cord-cutting across the cable world, and the Amex was not helped by a six-hour final round devoid of stars. Still, the underlying truth remains grim: The PGA Tour has never needed its superstars more than right now.
The good news? Scottie Scheffler is next on the tee.
