Scottie Scheffler and Ted Scott in July at the Open Championship.
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Ted Scott, when asked to dish on his biggest caddie blunders, starts with a joke. There’s a saying in the looping business, he says.
“And that is, we made five birdies and then he bogeyed the last.
“So that’s how I like to caddie.”
Talking on a recent episode of The Sweet Spot podcast — which you can and should listen to in full here — Scott then laughed. Yeah, Scottie Scheffler’s looper said, he’s errored. One mistake, specifically, he remembers well. It’s “hilarious” to him — even after it led to a pair of outbursts from his pro.
To set things up, Scott said it came in June of 2023, around the time when Scheffler’s ball-striking was considered other-worldly, and his putting a bit pedestrian. At the Memorial, Scott said, player and caddie worked on the shortcoming.
“And literally on Wednesday, he’s doing the putting drill and he’s making everything,” Scott said on the podcast. “He’s just killing it. And he’s beating it by a lot. We’re doing putts over 10 feet, and he’s making 50 percent of them. I’m going, ‘What’s going on? You’re rolling everything in.’ And I said to him, I said, ‘Hey, you notice something?’
“And he stopped for a minute, and Scottie is very bright. I don’t know if you all know that, but he’s got a super-high IQ. He’s so smart. And he goes, ‘You’re right — you’re fired.’ He already knew what I was talking about. I didn’t read a putt and he’s making everything. I was like, ‘OK, you got it.’”
Thursday’s first round came. Scott stayed away.
The woes persisted, though.
“Well, Friday morning — we’re going to play in the afternoon on Friday — so Friday morning I’m watching the coverage trying to get some insight, maybe see the way a ball bounces or a putt rolls or something,” Scott said on the podcast. “And sure enough, on hole 12, the hardest par-3, you know it’s brutal. They had the pin on the front right, that everybody’s going to pull it as a right-hander and go in the back bunker, and the back bunker, you can’t get it close, so you dump it out and it goes to 10 feet and it’s like a funnel — everybody’s going to have their par putt from the same place.
“And sure enough, as I’m watching the coverage, and I watch four people hit it in that bunker and knock it out to 10 feet and there’s a sprinkler head right behind them on the fringe and they’re all hitting their putt from there and they’re all playing about 4 to 5 inches of break and it’s not breaking an inch. Everybody’s missing it a cup right.”
But remember, Scott wasn’t reading putts.
“So I’m like, OK, I got this information here in case we end up in that back bunker,” he said on the podcast. “Sure enough, we start on 10, we play the first two holes, we get to 12, pull it a little bit, goes in the back bunker, knocks it out to 10 feet. I’m not reading putts and I’m like, I just saw four PGA Tour pros read it the same way, they’re all seeing it the same way, this is not breaking.
“So now I have the two little people — the guy on the right saying, ‘You better say something,’ and the guy on the left going, ‘Don’t say something, you’re not involved here.’ But yeah, you got to say something — you’re going to feel bad if he hits this putt a cup right and it doesn’t break. ‘Come on, don’t be a fool, don’t say anything.’ Kind of just like back and forth. And finally I’m like, ahhhh, I got to say something, you know.
“So literally he’s about to walk in and I go, ‘Scottie.’ He goes, ‘Yeah’ — like I startled him. He goes, ‘Yeah.’ And I go, ‘What do you got this putt doing?’ He goes like, ‘What, what are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I watched this putt on TV this morning, I watched four people hit it and it did not break, everybody’s missing it a cup to the right.’ And he goes, ‘OK, what do you see here?’ And I saw on TV, it was lined up with the sprinkler head. I didn’t even read it. I was like, ‘Right edge.’ How arrogant was I? I didn’t even read it. I was like, ‘Right edge.’ He was like, ‘OK.’”
Scheffler missed. Badly.
“He goes up and hits this putt and I’m not even kidding, he strokes it and by the time his head looks up — it’s a 10-footer — it’s three feet off the putter and it’s breaking like a foot to the left; I mean it’s just, vroooom,” Scott said on the podcast. “It doesn’t even have a chance — it’s already left the hole and breaking left. And he just loses it. He goes, ‘What are we doing out here?’ You know, because I’m not involved in the putting process, right.”
They eventually laughed it off, Scott said on the podcast. Jump ahead two weeks now, to the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club.
“They allowed us to have the greens books for practice. We hadn’t had them in a while,” Scott said on the podcast. “So I was memorizing hole 6, the little driveable hole, on Thursday night in case we hit in there close. I’m like, I’m still not reading putts, but if he asks me, I’m going to have this one in there because we’re probably going to have a close birdie putt. Sure enough, he hits it in there close and as we’re walking up, I say, ‘Hey, I know I’m not reading putts, but I memorized this one in the book — this putt’s not going to break left, OK. You can read it, but just don’t play it to break left. It’s kind of funky looking, but it’s just not going to break left.’ OK.
“So he gets over the putt,” Scott said on the podcast, “and hits it and it’s like a foot away going in the center of the hole — I mean, it’s going in the hole — and it breaks out of the hole to the left. Vrooooom. And he goes, ‘If I hear the word ‘book’ or ‘TV’ one more time, I’m going to lose my mind.’ He goes, ‘Why don’t you just trust yourself, you’re a good green reader?’ And we both had a big laugh over that.
“So yeah, as a caddie, you can certainly mess your guy up. And that was two fun times, back-to-back weeks pretty much that I jacked him. That makes me laugh every time.”
Editor’s note: To listen to the entire The Sweet Spot podcast with Scott, please click here.
Nick Piastowski is a Senior Editor at Golf.com and Golf Magazine. In his role, he is responsible for editing, writing and developing stories across the golf space. And when he’s not writing about ways to hit the golf ball farther and straighter, the Milwaukee native is probably playing the game, hitting the ball left, right and short, and drinking a cold beer to wash away his score. You can reach out to him about any of these topics — his stories, his game or his beers — at nick.piastowski@golf.com.
