After an epic season in 2024, Scottie Scheffler will start the new year on the sidelines.
On Friday, word broke that the World No. 1 and reigning Fed-Ex Cup champ has withdrawn from the PGA Tour’s 2025 season-opening tournament, The Sentry, on The Plantation Course, in Kapalua in Maui, Hawaii, as a result of a kitchen accident he suffered on Christmas Day.
“On Christmas Day while preparing dinner, Scottie sustained a puncture wound to the palm of his right hand from a broken glass,” Scheffler’s manager, Blake Smith, said in a statement released by the PGA Tour. “Small glass fragments remained in the palm which required surgery. He has been told that he should be to 100% in three to four weeks.”
Scheffler’s injury deprives The Sentry, an event formerly known as the “Tournament of Champions” for a field that once featured only winners from the previous season, of the golfer who won more than any other last year. Over the course of his torrid 2024 campaign, Scheffler won seven times, including his second Masters title, and captured Olympic gold. He also joined Tiger Woods in rarified company by becoming just the second golfer to be named PGA Tour’s Player of the Year in three consecutive seasons.
As unstoppable as he often was on the course, Scheffler had a headline-making hiccup off it in May, when he was arrested during a traffic incident as he drove to Valhalla Golf Club, in Louisville, before the second round of the PGA Championship. Though charges against Scheffler were soon dropped, photos of the game’s best player in an orange jailhouse jumper ranked among the enduring images from the game in 2024.
As 2024 drew toward a close, Scheffler, 28, showed no signs of slowing. His most recent start, at the Hero World Challenge Challenge earlier this month, was yet another victory, six shots clear of runner-up Tom Kim.
Fans will now have to wait to see Scheffler back in action. His next scheduled start is at the American Express, in La Quinta, Calif., on Jan. 16.
The Sentry, meanwhile, will go on without him, from Jan. 2-5.
