SOUTHAMPTON, NEW YORK | So there was no storybook ending for Scottie Scheffler out at the far end of Long Island on Sunday. He could not celebrate his 30th birthday and Father’s Day with victory in the 126th U.S. Open, though he did return to the top of the FedEx Cup standings. Had Scheffler won it would have been a joyful conjunction of a magnificent achievement at a venue worthy of it, Shinnecock Hills.
Sentimentalists will say this was a shame. Scheffler has been ranked No. 1 in the world for 196 weeks starting in March 2022 and since May 22, 2023, for the past 161 consecutive weeks. Consistent golf such as his perhaps deserved to be capped by his completing the career Grand Slam, becoming the seventh man to accomplish this immense achievement after Rory McIlroy had become the sixth 14 months earlier.
Was it sad therefore that he didn’t quite bring it off? Yes.
Was it a disappointment? Yes.
But did he play well enough to deserve it? No.
Scheffler was off key for the first nine holes of the final round, which was when he needed to eat into Wyndham Clark’s six-stroke lead as Nick Faldo had done to Greg Norman’s identical lead in the fourth round of the 1996 Masters, eventually going on to win by five strokes.
Scheffler did not want for incentive or encouragement. After being swept down the first fairway on a chorus of raucous support and birthday greetings, he hit his approach shot 20 yards over the first green, which led to a bogey.
On the short seventh, the Redan hole and the nemesis for so many, he misjudged his tee shot so that it ran into that bunker situated at the front left of the green. He was lucky that his second attempt to get his ball out didn’t roll back into the sand as had his first. He had to hole from 13 feet for a bogey.
Scheffler, a street fighter and a man with as great a determination to win as anyone in the modern game, fought and fought to catch Clark, as did Sam Burns and Keith Mitchell, Tom Kim and J.T. Poston, but when he three-putted the 14th his race was run. He has been centre stage in so many championships for so many years now it was unusual to see him not in the lead but just out of it. He finished in a tie for fourth place, four strokes behind Clark.
Scottie Scheffler didn’t have the game on Sunday at Shinnecock to dig himself out of a six-shot deficit.
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What do we make of Scottie Scheffler? To pluck a comparison from the English Civil War, he is a Roundhead to Phil Mickelson’s Cavalier. He is Ben Hogan to the cavalier Arnold Palmer, who was never known to refuse a challenge.
He is tall, well-built, powerful and talkative, and for those who grew up watching spaghetti Westerns on television, he is a very likeness of the gravel-voiced American hero, the man who rides into town to quell disorder and see off wrongdoers. But what do we really make of his comments about how quickly triumph fades?
“Sometimes the feeling only lasts about two minutes, it seems like, when you’re celebrating,” he said at Royal Portrush where he won the 2025 Open Championship, his fourth major championship. “It’s pretty exciting and fun but it just doesn’t last that long.”
Some players live on their successes for weeks if not months. Darren Clarke’s celebrations were legendary. Shane Lowry won the 2019 Open on a damp Sunday evening in Northern Ireland and was still celebrating in the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday. Is it a burden for Scheffler that he is unable to let his hair down occasionally?
It would appear not to be. He seems to personify the virtues displayed in the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, the Englishman, words that are placed in the men’s dressing room at Wimbledon, aka the All England Lawn Tennis Club. They concern a man who urges his son to go through life demonstrating emotional control, honesty and resilience and “if you can treat these twin impostors with disdain,” and “if you can handle both victories and failures calmly, trust yourself and keep going through hard times, you will become a mature person.”
“If I win this tournament that would be amazing’” Scheffler said on Tuesday “but then I show up the next week and it’s like OK, now Scottie’s won the Grand Slam, he’s won all these tournaments. Now where do we go from here?”
Where indeed? One longs for him to let his hair down, indulge himself in foolishness or post-victory celebrations but one might as well want pigs to fly.
And what do we make of his swing, with the way he jiggles his feet as if he is dancing on ice? This is in complete contradiction to one of the game’s shibboleths, namely that you need a firm base as you swing and try to hit a golf ball. How many times have we heard a teaching professional say to a wobbling student, “You can’t hit a cannon from a canoe.”
Scheffler can and does so every time. He is a man to admire for his personality as much as his golf skills. It was of a piece with his being such a strong family man that as he was about to sign his card late Sunday afternoon he was ruffling the hair of Bennett, his 2-year-old son. He is both a man and a golfer of note. He is quite capable of winning the national championship of his country several times.
It was Father’s Day. It was his birthday. It’s just that it wasn’t his day.
Top: Scottie Scheffler couldn’t muster any magic on Sunday despite being the crowd favorite.
DAVID CANNON, GETTY IMAGES
