Dating back to 2022, no player in golf has been on the kind of run Scottie Scheffler has been on.
The defending PGA Champion and World No. 1 has done the kinds of things since 2022 that even have his fellow competitors wondering, “how does he do it?”
Scheffler won for the first time on the PGA TOUR at the 2022 WM Phoenix Open. At the American Express this past January – less than four years after his maiden victory – he claimed his 20th.
That astounding 20-win total includes four major victories, with two of them (the PGA and Open Championship) coming in 2025. All told, in 26 majors played, he has a top-10 finish in 17 of them.
“You come here and there's a lot of noise and a lot of energy,” Scheffler said about the majors and what makes them different than other tournaments. “That's why you can't treat them quite the same because there's so much energy around the tournament. You come into the press room, there's more people, more fans, more noise. There's just a lot more stuff going on.
“But over the course of my career, I felt like, if I show up to a tournament, I'm there to give that tournament my best. In that sense, I feel like I've done a really good job of approaching a lot of the events with the same mindset, and that's to go out and do my best. If I want a week off, I'm going to stay at home. I'm not going to show up at a tournament to have a week off. Just because it's a lot more restful to be at home.”
He’s not kidding either.
Don’t be fooled by the one victory so far this season. Scheffler is always in the hunt. He hasn’t finished outside the top 25 once in nine starts this year and six of those are of the top-10 variety, including runner-up finishes in each of his last three starts at the Masters, RBC Heritage and the Cadillac Championship.
Players are often asked about form coming into a major. Scheffler is seemingly always in form.
“I think it was last week my wife was like, ‘Hey, Scottie, you're like the first guy in PGA Tour history to have three solo runner-ups in a row,’” he said. “I'm like, ‘yeah, it's probably because the guy that was playing that good figured out a way to win one of those, he didn't come second in all three.’ A little bit of it is bittersweet. Finishing second in a golf tournament is not bad, but, I mean -- especially in the way I did it in a couple of them. I was spotting guys so many strokes going into the weekend, mainly the Masters. Didn't have a very good chance going into the weekend there. Hilton Head, didn't have a very good chance going into the weekend there. Cadillac, I finished solo second, but really didn't have -- didn't really have that good of a chance.
“So just different things,” he said. “Overall, yeah, I'd say a little bit bittersweet. You know you're playing good golf, and you'd love to get some wins. Finishing second hurts, but I think when you reflect and you're looking at things to work on, there's a lot less to clean up when you're finishing 2nd than there is when you're finishing 30th.”
Scheffler has positioned himself as a player people expect to win every time he tees it up – something that just doesn’t happen.
He was asked if he sometimes feels like a victim of his own success when the wins don’t come as easily as he often makes it look and people talk about it.
“Not really. I think if -- I'd much rather it be that way,” he said. “I'd much rather have to sit here and be like, Hey, how come you didn't win last week, versus, he finished 15th, like that was a pretty good start for you, game's starting to turn around. It's a lot better playing good golf. Good golf is always better than bad golf. If you're in a position where you guys feel like I should win every week, and I've got to sit here and answer questions about how come I didn't win, honestly it's pretty easy sometimes to figure out why you didn't win, like there's usually something going wrong. In golf that's a pretty easy question to answer.”
Scheffler begins his title defense at 2:05 Thursday afternoon alongside Matt Fitzpatrick and Justin Rose.