PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — Scottie Scheffler arrived at this year’s British Open with an existential crisis. Well, it was a long flight.
“Why do I want to win this tournament?” he said Tuesday. “It’s something I wrestle with on a daily basis. Sometimes, I just don’t understand the point.”
It is a good question, though an odd one to ask a room full of sportswriters, for if Scottie’s professional life is meaningless, what does that say about those who chronicle it? The answer, as you might suspect, often involves alcohol. But anyway, back to Aristotle Scheffler.
“We work so hard for such little moments.” he said.
“You can have such great accomplishments, but the show goes on,” he said.
“It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a golf tournament for a few minutes,” he said.
You can certainly understand why Nike made Scheffler the centerpiece of its latest marketing campaign: “Just Do It, Or Don’t, Who Really Cares?” But I challenge you to find another athlete who so openly questions the purpose of what s(he) does better than anybody else on the planet. Poor Noah Lyles is constantly selling the importance of running fast to people who know they can just Uber. Yet here comes Scheffler, whispering in our ears: Psst! The difference between the fairway and rough is just the length of the grass. Scheffler was laughing as he said most of this, but as we all know, laughter is just a way of masking the fact that SOMEDAY WE WILL ALL DIE DIE DIE.
What Scheffler did not say, and may not even realize, is that for the past four years, he has been riding an emotional wave that cannot last.
He drove himself to become the best player in the world. He has stayed in that mental space long enough to win two Masters and a PGA Championship. But at some point, something will jar him into a different place. It could be a life event, a realization, a blown tournament, or just the aging process. He will experience at least a mild career downturn. He will never return to the exact mental space he has occupied since 2022. If he wants to win more majors, he will have to get to a different space that allows him to do so.
Nobody spends 20 years pursuing the exact same goals for the exact same reasons with the exact same mental approach.
Scheffler is one of the fastest talkers in sports, in part because he does not carefully select every word. He is comfortable enough with himself to just say what he thinks—frequently peppering his conversation with “at the end of the day”—and those thoughts are benign enough to keep him out of trouble. He said something Tuesday that revealed more about himself than it might seem:
He said that no matter how he plays this week, when he arrives at the PGA Tour stop in Memphis next month, all anybody will ask is how he will play there.
It was revealing because it isn’t really true. Golf fans, reporters, and other golfers care much more about how he plays this week than how he will play in Memphis.
The only person who is obsessed with what Scheffler does next is Scheffler.
He is a competitive beast. In golf, perspective can lead to a condition that psychologists call “bogey acceptance,” but Scheffler has not succumbed to it because competition is what drives him. Trophies are nice, money is awesome, achieving childhood dreams is cool. But what he really wants to dominate is whatever is next.
How would he define a successful season?
“It doesn’t really change year by year,” Scheffler said. “I don’t look at wins and losses or stuff like that. I don’t sit down at the beginning of the year and say ‘I want to win X number of times. I want to win this many majors.’ That’s not something that works for me. I have some dreams and aspirations that I’m always striving towards. But at the end of the day I try to stay present. I try to practice hard ...
“For me, when I start looking too far into the future .. I think I’m a bit of a procrastinator. That’s how I always was in school. Sometimes, when you’re a human, you just have that invincibility:; ‘I’m just going to play professional golf my whole life. This stage is never going to end.’ I’m only going to be doing this for a finite amount of time. What works best for me is just to stay present and continue to put in the work, which I would argue is probably the most fun for me.”
This is why, after the game or life or both knock Scheffler around for a bit, he will find a new mental place that allows him to win majors. He will put aside the question of why he wants to win golf tournaments and just accept that he does. Trophies sit on shelves and celebrations are fleeting. When Scheffler gets up the next morning, he is driven by what he can accomplish by the end of the day.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Scottie Scheffler May Contemplate the Meaning of Stardom, But He's Already Mastered It.
