It seems like every time Scottie Scheffler wins, he’s putting himself in the same conversation as Tiger Woods.
Winning the British Open for his 17th PGA Tour victory and fourth major title in the last three years, it’s a pace that the sport hasn’t seen since Woods’s heyday.
However, despite the dominance, some players feel Scheffler’s name doesn’t carry the weight that Woods once did, and, in some cases, still does.
“If Scottie’s feet stayed stable and his swing looked like Adam Scott’s, we’d be talking about him in the same words as Tiger Woods,” Shane Lowry said after the final round of the British Open. “I just think because it doesn’t look so perfect, we don’t talk about him like that. I think he’s just incredible to watch, and his bad shots are really good. That’s when you know he's really good.”
Jordan Spieth, though, said it isn't Scheffler’s mechanics that keep him under the radar.
“I think more so maybe it’s less the golf swing and maybe more of his personality,” Spieth said. “He doesn’t care to be a superstar. He’s not transcending the game like Tiger did. He’s not bringing it to a non-golf audience necessarily. He doesn't want to go do the stuff that a lot of us go do, corporately, anything like that.
“He just wants to get away from the game and separate the two because I know that he—at one time, he felt it was too much, that he was taking it with him, and whenever he made that switch, I don’t know what it was, but he has hobbies. He's always with his family. They're always doing stuff.”
In his pre-tournament press conference at Royal Portrush, Scheffler, the world No. 1, answered a question about his success philosophically, admitting, “This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
It’s hard to imagine Woods echoing that sentiment. He always had one goal: exceeding Jack Nicklaus’s 18 major titles (Woods has 15).
Woods’s former swing coach, Hank Haney, was quoted in a Woods biography by Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict, saying: “Tiger never allowed himself to be satisfied, because in his mind, satisfaction is the enemy of success. His whole approach was to delay gratification and somehow stay hungry. It’s the way of the superachiever.”
Since Scheffler doesn’t necessarily emulate that mindset, Spieth has another comparison for his fellow Dallas native.
“I wouldn’t necessarily think that the golf swing makes as much of a difference as the personality match,” he said. “I’m thinking about so many other sports, and [Denver Nuggets center] Nikola Jokic is the only guy I can think of that’s a superstar that’s equally unassuming in any sport in the modern era, and I’m happy if anybody else can find another example, but it’s very rare. Most people lean into it and take advantage of it.”
Then, a reporter suggested that 20-time Grand Slam champion Roger Federer might be Scheffler-esque.
“Federer, he went very—he’s maybe the same kind of demeanor and person; that doesn’t mean—as a person he’s different,” Spieth said, “but he made more off the court than he did on all the time, and he cared to. When Scottie is done playing, he’s not going to show back up at tournaments. I can promise you that.”
Maybe Spieth and Lowry find dissimilarities between Scheffler and Woods, but other Tour pros are willing to put the two in the same sentence.
“Scottie is the closest thing to Tiger I think any of us have seen,” Wyndham Clark said at the Players Championship in March, before Scheffler added another three wins to his resume, including the PGA Championship. “He not only is the No. 1 player in the world, he embraces it, and he shows up every week and almost wins or is in contention or does win. It’s very impressive.”
The more Scheffler does that, the more he’ll join the greats in the record books. And he’ll do it while being himself the entire way, which currently seems to be working just fine.
“I think it’s more so the difference in personality from any other superstar that you’ve seen in the modern era and maybe in any sport. I don’t think anybody is like him.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as PGA Tour Pros Sound Off On Why Scottie Scheffler Is a One-of-a-Kind Superstar.
