Walking off the par-3 13th hole in the final round of the Memorial Tournament, Scottie Scheffler could have looked up at the leaderboard and exhaled.
He was leading by four.
At that moment, Jack Nicklaus, in the CBS broadcast booth, said he and Tiger Woods claimed a bulk of their victories playing for pars late on Sunday.
And Scheffler has the same mindset as the two GOATs.
“I just asked Scottie if he watched the leaderboard,” Nicklaus said. “He says, ‘Yeah, I do.’ Well, I did, too. I always watched the leaderboard and found out what my competition was and always felt like what level I had to play to fight that competition off. Sometimes you would have to fight it off because you knew they would self-destruct. So, obviously, you just don’t make dumb mistakes, play solid golf, and you win.”
Scheffler did just that. With a final-round 2-under 70, he won back-to-back titles at the Memorial, becoming the only player to accomplish that feat since Woods’s three-peat (1999–2001).
The world No. 1, who won for the third time in the last five weeks, is a perfect 9 for 9 on Tour when holding a 54-hole lead. Trevor Immelman on the telecast called Scheffler the Mariano Rivera of golf.
“It’s really hard to put into words what it’s like sitting up here with arguably the greatest player of all time,” Scheffler said afterward, “and we’re sitting here talking about stuff that I did today on his golf course. It’s a pretty weird feeling.”
Dominance for win No. 16 🏆 pic.twitter.com/g1XtSuN0nh
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) June 1, 2025
On Saturday, though, it looked like Scheffler needed to keep his foot on the gas pedal at Muirfield Village, with any chance of nabbing the lead entering Sunday.
Halfway through the third round, Ben Griffin, who won last week at Colonial, had a six-stroke lead over Scheffler. But that evaporated in a flash—and Scheffler began the final round leading Griffin by a stroke.
Griffin knew he had his work cut out for him Sunday.
“It’s easy to assume what (Scheffler’s) going to do,” Griffin said after a final-round 73. “You know he’s going to hit fairways, you know he’s going to hit greens, he’s not really going to make mistakes.”
Griffin stayed on his tail throughout the front nine, but bogeys on Nos. 12 and 13 put Scheffler on cruise control. Griffin, however, made it interesting with an eagle-birdie stretch on Nos. 15 and 16 and got within two of the three-time major winner.
“I had a four-shot lead standing on 15 tee,” Scheffler said, “and then I birdied 15 and parred 16, which is not bad golf, and all of a sudden it was a two-shot lead. So I did what I was supposed to do. I hit a good putt there on 15 that just grazed the edge and hit another really good putt on 16 that came up just short. I knew if I continued to execute the way that I did that I was going to have a good chance to win the tournament.”
Then, a double on No. 17 by Griffin essentially handed Scheffler the victory, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway—Scheffler was never going to falter. In the end, he finished at 10 under par, four ahead of Griffin.
And for the second straight year, Scheffler exited the par-4 18th to a handshake by Nicklaus, perhaps the most coveted greeting in all of golf.
Now, Scheffler has 16 PGA Tour titles. Since winning his first at the 2022 WM Phoenix Open, the 28-year-old is the fourth-fastest player to 16 wins after their first, behind Woods, Nicklaus and Sam Snead.
Twenty-five years ago, when Woods became the Memorial’s first-ever back-to-back champion, his next start was the U.S. Open, in which he won at Pebble Beach by a historic 15 strokes.
Ironically, Oakmont’s U.S. Open in two weeks is the next time Scheffler will tee it up competitively.
Will he follow in Woods’s footsteps again? It seems every time Scheffler plays, he does.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Scottie Scheffler Wins Memorial Tournament, Joining Tiger Woods in Rare Air.
