Scottie Scheffler isn't the next Tiger Woods
But he's the best golfer since Tiger, and we need to get on board.
Last weekend, Scottie Scheffler won the Memorial Tournament, a signature event where he basically coasted to a four shot win to defend his title after winning it in 2024 as well. In doing so, Scheffler has started to rack up some fairly impressive – and familiar feeling – statistics.
Won for the ninth straight time when holding the 54-hole lead.
Won for the 16th time on the PGA tour, which if you look back over a four-year span would be the 10th most in a four-year span. But … here’s the thing. He didn’t win at all in 2021, so he did this within THREE years. The only guys to win 16 tournaments faster than him are named Tiger Woods and Sam Snead.
Is now the 3rd highest money winning golfer in history, a data point that is inflated largely due to Tiger’s success and the prize money soaring as a result.
Won’t turn 29 until later this month.
There are other stats to back up what we’re feeling, and it’s that Scheffler is starting to establish a level of dominance we haven’t seen since … Tiger Woods.
Like Woods, Scheffler has dominated not just “on tour” but these wins all tend to be “big boy” events. When you hear that someone like Ben Griffin has won twice this year, and then note that the two events are the Zurich Challenge (a team event) and the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial (formerly a big event but no longer the case, sadly) – this ain’t that. Here are the events that Scheffler has won:
Waste Management Phoenix Open (2)
Arnold Palmer Invitational (2)
World Golf Classic – Dell Match Play
The PLAYERS Championship (2)
The Masters Tournament (2)
RBC Heritage
Memorial Tournament (2)
Travelers Championship
Tour Championship
CJ Cup Byron Nelson
PGA Championship
With only a few exceptions, these are events where the fields are deep and the wins mean something. Oh, and the above doesn’t include winning a Gold medal at the Olympics or his two Hero World Challenge wins.
But here’s the thing – while Tiger had plenty of haters, it was mostly from the “old school” folks – they didn’t like how demonstrative he was, or they rooted for guys like Phil Mickelson or Ernie Els who consistently were looking up at Woods as he won tournament after tournament that they otherwise might have claimed. But Tiger’s fans were rabid and loud, swarming the course in a way that made it almost impossible for his playing partners to think straight, and buying anything Tiger related in a way that truly changed the sport forever.
For Scottie? I hear one complaint from numerous folks – he’s so boring.
His swing is anything but boring – his back foot slides away in a way that often looks like he’s slipping. But he literally has every shot in the bag (many PGA players almost always hit a fade, and while Scottie has tendencies, unlike some other top golfers he seems to be able to move the ball at will, when it’s required).
But still, I think a lot of people – golf fans especially – would tense up if you said that Scottie is MAYBE the next Tiger Woods.
In fairness, this label has been misapplied to so many golfers – some who never did a thing on tour (Norman Xiong – who has one top-ten finish in his career in any PGA Tour event), others who had serious hot streaks but faded (Jason Day immediately springs to mind) and others who looked, much like Thanos and Scheffler, inevitable.
Take golfers like Justin Thomas or Jordan Spieth. Thomas also has 16 wins on tour as well as two majors. Spieth has 13 PGA tour wins and three majors. There were moments where both of them looked unstoppable, and golf fans everywhere wondered just how many majors each of them would win. And then, injuries and life and simple reality bucked their heads.
That could all happen with Scheffler – he’s had a weird off-field injury (slicing his hand open making raviolis), had the worlds most preposterous run-in with the law and has a new baby boy. These could easily be distractions or excuses, but yet Scheffler just keeps winning.
Why do we think he’s boring? Because off the course he … sort of is. He’s happily married, very public about how important his faith is to him, and while low key kind of amusing, he isn’t lighting up press conferences. On the course, his demeanor is equally measured and low-key. He doesn’t do the Tiger fist pump, and the “Scottie roar” is considerable but decibels quieter than that for Eldrick.
Being calm on the course is imperative – one of the many things that set Tiger apart was that he could get so hyped up after a great shot and not have all that energy and emotion influence his next swing. Most humans can’t do that – which is why so many PGA golfers can be described as a dial tone.
(Note for you younger readers – a dial tone is something that you used to hear on a phone before you would call someone, which used a dial that went back different lengths for different numbers. Sigh.)
Because 99% of what we see from Scottie is him just hitting what look like simple golf shots, over and over and over, winning by large margins, many of us don’t really grasp the measure of how good he is. At the PGA Championship, everyone around him just folded on Sunday afternoon while he calmly went about his business. The same thing happened over the weekend at the Memorial. This is very much Tiger-esque behavior, where guys would show up for a tournament knowing that if Tiger even had his C game, they’d be playing for second place.
There are very good golfers left on the PGA Tour (LIV folding would really only return Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Joaquin Niemann and maybe 1-2 others who would be in contention in non-majors.) Of the top-25 golfers in the world per OWGR, only four didn’t play last weekend – DeChambeau and Tyrell Hatton (LIV), Billy Horschel (injury) and for reasons unknown, Rory McIlroy.
So, why is it hard to get excited about Scottie like we did about Tiger?
He’s not fist pumping like Tiger. The bonkers shots Tiger often largely involved distance we hadn’t really seen before. Now, Scheffler is 70th on Tour with an average of 303.3 yards off the tee. In the year 2000, that would have been first by a few yards.
Despite what he’s doing on the course, Scottie doesn’t inspire us – we don’t hear announcers asking, “What is he possibly thinking here?” as he’s poised over the cliff at Pebble Beach, or trying to hook a shot around a tree, etc. Because Scottie is almost never in trouble like that. Scottie and his caddie Ted Scott have quiet, brief discussions – unlike Spieth and Michael Greller, or Bryson DeChambeau and whoever his punching bag caddie is at the moment. He doesn’t throw temper tantrums like Jon Rahm or Tyrell Hatton. He never rallies us to root for him through his struggles like Viktor Hovland or Max Homa, because … well, he hasn’t struggled like that (at least not yet). And with Rory McIlroy, we’ve seen his highest highs and lowest lows for a decade and felt it all along with him.
The best proxies for Scottie might be Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay, but even those proxies help illustrate why Scottie is just so good. Historically, both of them are perennial top-10 golfers in the world, Ryder Cup mainstays, etc. Each is incredibly placid on the course, and we rarely see much emotion from them – but they don’t WIN in the way that Scottie is and has. They never have (Xander did win two majors last season, of course, and seemed poised to be in the conversation with Scottie and Rory as one of the best golfers on the planet and then – fighting injuries – hasn’t done a lot since.) Cantlay has fallen to 16th in the world, hasn’t won since 2022 and is perhaps most notable for refusing to wear a Ryder Cup hat as a protest for not getting paid to represent his country. (Meanwhile, Scottie won a Gold medal at the Olympics and broke into tears.)
We root for or against these other guys because of what they show us on and off the course. Scottie doesn’t show much. Except utter dominance on the course and the curse of being seemingly nice, professional and emotionally mature. We need to start accepting that he’s a killer. He’s not the next Tiger Woods because that’s a bizarre comparison. But if he’s not definitively the best golfer SINCE Tiger, he’s on the precipice. And we should probably start collectively appreciating that a bit more than it seems like we do.
I'm a Scottie fan, despite his notorious comment that a 10 handicap isn't a good golfer.