An unusually chippy Scottie Scheffler taught us a lesson about the U.S. team

MONTREAL — Shortly after 3 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley looked out at the assembled audience and gushed.

“What I’ve learned about Scottie is how friendly he is, how quick he is to sit with the new guy on the bus, how quick he is to tell a joke, [to] just be a good teammate,” Bradley said. “I think that’s tough to do as the No. 1 player in the world.”

Shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, Scottie Scheffler looked out at the assembled audience and screamed.

“WHAT WAS THAT?!” He bellowed in the direction of the day’s playing partner, fellow PGA Tour good guy Tom Kim.

Most days, the men are two of the closest friends on the PGA Tour. On Thursday, though, Scheffler looked like he wouldn’t have lent his buddy water in the middle of the desert. He stalked in Kim’s direction on the 8th green, taking two aggressive steps before he turned back toward the hole, unleashing another scream.

“HUH?!?”

This version of Scottie Scheffler was, charitably, terrifying. At times mean-mugging, snarling, and generally peeved, Scheffler looked like the Spiderman 3 version of the guy who has managed to become far and away the best golfer in the world on the back of an arsenal of chuckles and Scripture. But the most terrifying part of Scheffler’s game was not the big (and entirely unsurprising) reveal that his competitive fire burns hot, it was the revelation that his competitive fire can run this hot … and his game can travel with it.

On a day when the rain never arrived, Team USA’s newest dominant force spearheaded a downpour for the Americans. Scheffler shot six under on his own ball in just 16 holes alongside partner Russell Henley to vanquish Kim and Sungjae Im 3 and 2. It would have been the biggest blowout of the Presidents Cup’s opening day, if not for the team’s collective blowout: the U.S. has the home team in a 5-0 hole one session in. The Americans, who entered the week heavy favorites, looked like heavy favorites behind Scheffler’s play on Thursday. They left the course in the early evening after pitching a shutout — and with the air of an early victory celebration.

And with Scheffler on their team, who could blame them? Scheffler, who entered the week with a preposterous 2024 record but faced lingering questions about his struggles in the Presidents Cup in ’22 and Ryder Cup in ’23, looked every bit the kind of guy looking to silence any questions with a fury. He sucked the life out of the Internationals every chance he got, unafraid to raise the temperature even further after Kim holed long birdies and even longer celebrations in his face, or more generally, look like the most dominant player the game has seen this side of Tiger Woods.

“I think I had four or five birdies,” Kim said after his round, dejected. “That’s just what Scottie does.”

Scheffler, for his part, seemed unmoved by the sudden burst of competitive energy, or by how his game responded to it.

“It’s the same thing I would have done at home if he had made a putt and we were playing Wolf and he celebrated like that,” Scheffler said Thursday. “It’s fun to compete and fun to represent our country, and at the end of the match you take your hat off and shake hands.”

He paused.

“We’re friends after, we’re not friends during, I guess.”

The good news for Team USA is that if Scheffler keeps playing like this, there won’t be much during. The lesson of Scheffler’s chippy Thursday at the Ryder Cup was not the subsequent chippiness that came during Kim and Im’s early jaunt to the 8th tee box, or the downright feistiness between jawing assistant captains Kevin Kisner and Camilo Villegas (“If you wanna piss off the No. 1 player in the world, good luck,” Kisner said). The lesson was that the United States might finally have the piece that has been missing in the era of Ryder and Presidents Cup golf following Woods’ last start in either event in 2019: a dominant force. And with a force as dominant as Scottie at the helm, a close Presidents Cup might be no contest at all.

“It’s a lot different dynamic,” said Stewart Cink, a U.S. assistant captain, echoing Bradley’s words. “Tiger, you’re talking about one of the most formidable type personalities in sports for quite a long time at the time, and Scottie is just really an open, welcoming, kind person. He’s just easy to just sort of pal around with.”

In the end, the only irony of Scheffler’s loud Thursday at the Presidents Cup was that his teammate, Xander Schauffele, said it best.

“It looked to me,” Schauffele said, wearing a mile-wide grin. “…like they poked the bear.”