THE FIRST TIME SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER’S COACH saw that he was different was, in fact, the first time he saw Scottie Scheffler.
Randy Smith knows talent; the head pro at Dallas’ Royal Oaks Country Club has mentored more than a handful of players from his club to the pro ranks. But even by his lofty standards, this golfer looked a cut above.
“Every ball he hit was tied to a target,” Smith says, remembering their first range session. “He’d keep switching targets and ballflights. He’d hit one high and one low. He liked to see the ball do different things because he loved creating these shots. And he got really excited when he would pull them off.”
Scheffler was seven years old.
Now, two decades later, at age 28, Scheffler has played his way into rarefied air. He began the 2024 season as World No. 1, then built on his lead, racking up nine worldwide wins, including the Players, the Masters, the Tour Championship and — thanks to a particularly preposterous back-nine charge — Olympic gold. His year was filled with outrageous stats, like the lowest scoring average in PGA Tour history (68.01) and the 41 consecutive rounds of par or better he put together to start the season. Scheffler didn’t just retain his top-dog title. He tripled down.
It isn’t supposed to be this easy. In the decade-plus since Tiger Woods’ last stint atop the game, we’ve seen a revolving door of red-hot World No. 1’s audition for the role of successor. Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm — they’ve all looked unbeatable and then, eventually, beatable. It’s commonly accepted that this is just how golf works. Getting to the mountaintop is one thing, staying there is another. The pressure, expectations, even the complacency, can gnaw at you.
“I’ve never been more stressed in my life than right now,” the then top-ranked Jason Day admitted in the summer of 2016. Once he’d climbed to No. 1, all he felt was the pressure to stay there, which, of course, made the task tougher and tougher. Justin Thomas has ascended to World No. 1 twice, and it was only when he got there that he realized how different it felt.
“I don’t think people understand how difficult it is to win when you’re expected to win,” Thomas said at last year’s Hero World Challenge. “When every single person there expects you to play well, and you expect you to play well, then to still play well? [Those] expectations are something very, very hard to manage.”
So far, Scheffler has managed them better than most. His 2024 was the most dominant Tour season since Woods some 15 years ago. When Scheffler hangs on to World No. 1 through the upcoming Masters — an extreme likelihood — only Woods will have had a longer streak at No. 1 in the ranking’s history.
Entering the heart of the 2025 season, Scheffler remains the best golfer in the world. Even his peers concede that. So how did he get there? And how has he stayed there? The two questions are really one: What makes Scottie Scheffler different?
Scheffler has been asked often to describe himself, and often he has countered that you’d find a better answer by asking someone else. So we did. Can Team Scheffler and friends get us closer to an answer?
THAT SAME SEVEN-YEAR-OLD became a constant, curious presence at Royal Oaks CC, eager to soak up anything and everything from the pros in residence — guys like Colt Knost, Justin Leonard and Anthony Kim. On the range, Scheffler’s targets got smaller with time. Randy Smith remembers him zeroing in on a pole, say, 120 yards away, pulling 4-iron and refusing to move on until he’d rattled it with a piercing stinger. Any conversation about Scheffler’s reign atop the game has to begin with his otherworldly control of the golf ball, and that control began here. In other words, he was different from the start.
The legendary Lee Trevino, a Royal Oaks member who was playing on the Champions tour at the time, remembers Scheffler hanging out around the practice area, hungry for competition.
“He’d want to putt for nickels, but I wouldn’t because I couldn’t beat him,” the six-time major winner says. “And he always had long pants as a little junior. We asked him, ‘Why aren’t you wearing shorts?’ And he said, ‘Because I’m going to be a pro someday, and pros don’t wear shorts.’ I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anybody hit a golf ball like that, even as a little kid.”
Knost, now the cohost of GOLF’s “Subpar” podcast and an CBS course reporter, corroborates Trevino’s account. “I basically saw him every day from the time I was 18 until I moved away a decade later,” he remembers. “He lived on the range. He was a tiny little kid walking out there in his long pants, just hitting the yellow pole time after time, following all the Tour players around, learning from everyone — just like a little sponge. I laugh now when people say he’s a bad putter. I’m like, ‘You should have seen him when he was nine. He couldn’t miss!’”
Why was Smith the right fit to mentor greatness?
“I was at the right street corner when the right bus drove up,” he says, undoubtedly understating his role. “You have to be very fortunate when a talent like that walks up, and then you have to be smart enough to know: Do not screw this up.”
TED SCOTT LIKES TO TELL HIS BOSS that he’s tough to work for. On Monday through Wednesday, that is.
“Those first three days are hard, and then Thursday through Sunday is just fun,” says the veteran caddie. When he strapped on Scheffler’s bag in the fall of 2021, his player had been in contention plenty of times but had yet to win on Tour. Almost immediately the pair clicked, winning their fifth start together — the 2022 WM Phoenix Open — and 12 more Tour events since.
“He has a mindset that people just don’t have,” Scott says. “Everybody wants to get an A on the math test, but not everybody wants to do the homework. Scottie is willing to do the homework day in and day out, to not skip any steps, to get fully prepared. It makes taking the test a lot more fun.”
Scott dismisses the idea that his presence was the difference maker. Instead, he sees Scheffler’s ongoing maturation as the secret to his success. The caddie, who spent over a decade looping for Bubba Watson, made just one request of Scheffler when he came aboard: that he continue working on his mental game. He’d seen Scheffler play and hadn’t a doubt about his abilities. But he’d also seen how tough Scheffler could be on himself, the unforgivingness of a golfer whose tolerance for imperfection had never been high.
“When Scottie was young, he just — he had no concept of nonperformance,” coach Smith says. “If he hit a shot where he thought he did everything right and it didn’t turn out anywhere near what he wanted to? It could be a little rough there for a while.”
With time, Scheffler has become more patient. He’s often said that his results don’t define him. Ted Scott insists that he means it. Of course, another way to dodge the frustration of losing is never to lose. Scheffler’s been pursuing that strategy too.
THE 2023 SEASON HAD BARELY WRAPPED when Phil Kenyon got an interesting message. The renowned short- game coach was on his way home to the UK from the season-ending Tour Championship. He’d just boarded a plane when he saw a text from the World No. 1, who was eager to connect.
Scheffler had put together a remarkable summer, but one part of his game was clearly holding him back. Despite finishing in the top five in nine of his final 14 events, he hadn’t won any of them, having lost strokes on the green in almost every one of those tournaments. The 2023 Tour Championship had proven particularly frustrating. He’d arrived at East Lake as the top seed and started with a two-stroke lead that quickly vanished, leading to a T6 finish — a chasmic 16 shots behind winner Viktor Hovland. Something had to change.
Kenyon didn’t know Scheffler much at all but, afforded a dream opportunity, he flew back to the States a week later. What were his first impressions?
“He was just an animal when it came to his competitiveness and work ethic,” says Kenyon, who admired Scheffler’s willingness to grind but worried that he was trying too hard on the greens and straying from his natural athleticism in the process.
“Through setup, we tried to get him comfortable to release the putter better and trust his instincts,” Kenyon says now. That trust extended to green-reading, where Scheffler had lost faith in what he was seeing. “He’s got amazing instincts in terms of predicting the break, but he needed to trust it and find a way to execute it without overthinking.”
Their progress showed in Scheffler’s next start, the 2023 Hero World Challenge, a December event in which he picked up strokes on the greens — and picked up the win. His improvement wasn’t strictly linear, but the following March, Kenyon and Scheffler made a breakthrough when, after a disappointing putting week at the 2024 Genesis, they showed up at the Arnold Palmer Invitational with a mallet-style TaylorMade Spider in the bag. The new putter came with one important detail: a sight line on the top of the head that meant Scheffler could stop using the line on his ball and agonizing over a perfect roll. He putted like a free man at Bay Hill, winning by four strokes and kicking off an outrageous stretch of four victories in five starts, including his second Masters title.
“People probably don’t appreciate how resilient and mentally tough the guy is,” Kenyon says, “because his game, specifically his putting, had been getting scrutinized to such an unbelievable degree all while he was contending. There’s a strain to waking up every single day either in the lead or near the lead. You get a sense every day of why he does what he does — he’s just the model professional in all aspects of the game.”
THE DAY THAT SCHEFFLER GOT ARRESTED, Brad Payne had a question for his friend. Payne serves as the Tour’s chaplain and is particularly close with Scheffler, whose faith is a cornerstone of his on- and off-course life. So on May 17, 2024, in Louisville, Ky., when the World No. 1 was handcuffed, booked for a traffic misunderstanding (all charges were later dropped) and ultimately sprung from jail just soon enough to make his Friday morning tee time at the PGA Championship, Payne met him in the locker room to check in.
“I said, ‘Okay, buddy, is there anything you need to apologize for? Did you do anything wrong?’”
Payne was hoping to give Scheffler the chance to unload.
“Brad, I didn’t,” said Scheffler, who gave a high-level overview of the morning’s events. He was rattled but comfortable with his actions.
Payne was firm with his feedback. “Let other people fight for you,” he said. “You don’t need to say a word. You can honor the [arresting] police [officer] — this guy who is a human, just like you and I — who is now probably having a really bad day.”
Scheffler went out and shot a five-under 66, which Smith, his coach, calls one of the most impressive rounds in major history. By the time Scheffler had teed off, he’d already won over some fans because of the absurdity of the incident. Noted nice guy Scottie Scheffler in an orange jumpsuit? And he won over many more in the sensitivity with which he handled his post-round presser, paying tribute to a pedestrian who’d tragically been killed that morning, giving grace to the officer who’d arrested him and describing in recognizably human terms the shock he felt throughout the experience, admitting that, at one point in his brief custody, he couldn’t stop shaking.
“Difficult times reveal things in your heart,” Payne says. “There’s this old analogy: If you want to know what something’s like, just squeeze it. Whatever comes out of it is what it is. With Scottie, he just pretty much displayed what was inside of him.”
Though golf fans have been thrilled by Scheffler’s on-course greatness, they’ve connected most to the situations in which he’s been vulnerable — to his putting woes, a struggle any golfer can relate to; to his free-flowing tears, whether in defeat at the 2023 Ryder Cup or on the podium at the 2024 Olympics; and to that post-arrest tee time, where he showed up shaken and uncertain of how fans and other players would greet him. How do you square that vulnerability with the mental fortitude required to be as good as Scheffler is? Payne argues the two are perfectly complementary.
“Say you go to your 10-year high school reunion,” he says, “and you have a guy who rented a Ferrari because he wants to impress. That guy’s not convinced of it himself. Those who pretend are really the most insecure people. Those who show weakness? Who welcome critique? Who are willing to be vulnerable and ask, ‘How can I get better?’ It’s a sign of strength.”
Scheffler isn’t renting Ferraris; he’s only just moved on from his first car, a 2012 Yukon XL with nearly 200,000 miles on the odometer. Nor is he overly concerned with appearances; he recently showed up for a junior golf clinic covered in the vomit of his infant son, Bennett. Scheffler and his wife, Meredith, have built an intentionally simple life in Dallas, Payne says, on a foundation of family, friends and faith, and it’s a life that can withstand complex situations. He does well when squeezed.
HOW LONG CAN SCHEFFLER KEEP THIS UP? That’s the question going into 2025, after, appropriately, he polished off his 2024 campaign by running away with the Tour Championship, taking the FedEx Cup and third consecutive Player of the Year nod. At the year-end Hero, in the Bahamas, he debuted a new putting grip, one he and Kenyon had been discussing for months. No time is a bad time to get better. And he won that, event, too, for the second consecutive year.
Scheffler’s 2025 began in unexpected recovery: the golfer sustained a hand injury while preparing a meal over the holiday break; a puncture wound to his right palm that caused him to sit out all of January. He began his season with a T9 at Pebble Beach; he enters the Players Championship off a T3 at Torrey Pines and a T11 at Bay Hill. That’d be a great start to the year — for just about anybody else.
If Scheffler can keep up his torrid winning pace, it’ll be because of his otherworldly ball striking, honed then and now at Royal Oaks, on the range and in rowdy money matches with his buddies. That iron play is, by far, the game’s best, and it’s accompanied by a driver that’s nearly as good. The consistency means his creativity gets underrated. I ask Smith if Scheffler is more robot or artist. He laughs.
“There are parts that are robotic, I suppose,” he says, “the preparation for the shot, the way he processes so much information. But, no, on that scale he’s probably 99 percent creative savant. He is the epitome of letting the shot shape the golf swing versus the other way around.”
If Scheffler can keep it up, it’ll also be because of his competitiveness. He devotes plenty of off-course time to pickle- ball, where he often teams up with Payne. “I’m a good athlete,” the chaplain says, “but he’s on a different level. Usually we don’t lose, but if it gets close, he starts pushing me farther to the sideline. He goes from taking up 50 percent of the court to 65 to about 90 percent. Then, when we get up by about six points, he’ll let me back in.”
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER that nobody sees, Smith says, but he thinks it’s telling. When they practice at Royal Oaks these days, it’s almost never just the two of them.
“Almost 100 percent of the time there will be at least one and up to six kids there, sitting on the back of my golf cart, laughing, reading TrackMan numbers, doing whatever,” Smith says. “And they don’t just come over because it’s Scottie; they come over because he makes them comfortable. They watch and they absorb, just like he did when he was seven, eight, 10, 12, 14.”
They’ll finish up work and Smith will watch Scheffler head to the putting green for matches with the kids. He’ll still be there an hour later, sometimes more. Because he’s just a big kid, for one thing, but also because he knows the joy of challenging a pro to a putt-off, of betting on yourself, of rolling the rock until you bury them.
The real reason Scheffler can keep it up is because he doesn’t need to. Everyone around him is clear on this point: There’s no trophy-sized hole in his life that he’s desperate to fill.
But that doesn’t mean he won’t find room for more hardware.
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
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