LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY | In the next few days, they will gather at their golf club in the bucolic Oxfordshire countryside 25 miles northwest of London and will be laughing and joking after their own rounds of golf. On the table in front of them will be a pot or two of tea and a slice of ginger cake, perhaps a beer, or maybe a burly red wine or a chilled white. They will want to hear about the 106th PGA Championship, and this is what I will tell them: It was roughly the 170th major championship I have covered, and it was the most extraordinary of all. I could write a column about it without touching on the golf. In fact, here goes.
Shall we begin on Friday? Breakfast had scarcely started when news came of Scottie Scheffler, the world No. 1, being arrested because of a driving offence. He was slammed against the side of his car by a police officer, handcuffed, fingerprinted, photographed in an orange jail T-shirt, put in a cell where he did his stretching exercises and was offered a sandwich by a friendly police officer before being released and playing his 42nd successive round of par or better on the PGA Tour. If you think that wasn’t extraordinary, then you probably think Rory McIlroy is a ho-hum driver of the ball or that Tiger Woods is a golf course in California.
Then after that round, when almost any personality would have cut and run from a media scrum eager to learn what had happened, Scheffler stayed and talked for 13 minutes about his ordeal. He began by displaying gracious concern for the family of the man who was killed on the road just outside the golf club, which led to the traffic chaos that Scheffler was trying to avoid. Then he segued into recounting what had happened in police custody. One spends one’s life listening to golfers talking about birdies but rarely about having been a jail bird.
Scheffler’s performance on and off the golf course on Friday altered the public’s perception of him. ... he went from being admired as a golfer who could do little wrong on a golf course but one to whom it was hard to warm to one who has become embraced for what he said and the way he conducted himself that day.
“My main focus after getting arrested was wondering if I could be able to come back out here and play, and fortunately I was able to do that. It was nice to put together a solid round of golf,” Scheffler said with admirable and remarkable understatement. A solid round of golf, after all that had gone on in the preceding hours? Yes, a 5-under-par 66.
Scheffler’s performance on and off the golf course on Friday altered the public’s perception of him. In less than 18 hours he went from being admired as a golfer who could do little wrong on a golf course but one to whom it was hard to warm to one who has become embraced for what he said and the way he conducted himself that day. He is not the first golfer to go from being admired to being loved. Jack Nicklaus went through a similar transformational process years ago.
The week had begun with the breaking news on Tuesday morning of Rory McIlroy’s filing the day before for divorce from his wife of seven years, Erica. A golfer ending his marriage is hardly front-page news, but this was McIlroy, one of the game’s pin-ups, a player who helped create a welcome upsurge in TV viewing figures in the U.S. with two recent victories on the PGA Tour, and this was three days before the start of a major championship.
Furthermore, there were elements of déjà vu about it. Ten years ago almost to the month, on the eve of the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, McIlroy announced that he was ending his engagement to Danish tennis star Caroline Wozniacki. Then he had appeared teary and pale-faced. Now he was unshaven and terse, and one wondered why he had chosen this week of all weeks to announce the news.
It was, however, all of a piece during a week that seemed determined to deliver events that overshadowed the golf. Overshadowing Shane Lowry’s outward 29 on Saturday that gave him a chance of setting a major-championship record score of 61, which would have been the lowest of nearly 150,000 18-hole rounds in major championship golf so far. Overshadowing a week when there were 64 sub-par rounds on the first day, a major-championship record. Overshadowing a week when no Spaniard reached the third round of a major championship for the first time since the 1998 PGA Championship and one in which Tiger Woods played six of his first 36 holes in 9 over par. Tiger Woods. Remember him?
Nor was that all because rumbling in the background was the continuing dispute that the PGA Tour, the Strategic Sports Group and the DP World Tour are engaged in with LIV Golf, which is financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. This is professional golf’s civil war, and where the game stands now seems to be more, not less, clouded than ever. It is puzzling spectators, creating rifts among players, worrying traditionalists who fear for the future of the game.
“It’s messy and it seems to get messier every week,” said Seth Waugh, the PGA of America’s CEO. “I hope there’s a deal, and what I would say I hope there’s urgency because I do think it is doing damage to the tour, to the game…. I don’t think it’s a healthy situation right now.”
It is pitting Woods against McIlroy, two men who are united in establishing a virtual golf league expected to launch early in 2025. McIlroy repeatedly has said he thinks a united game would be better while Woods, who has joined the PGA Tour Policy Board and is one of two voting player members on the committee negotiating with PIF, is said to be against a resolution, as are Jordan Spieth and Patrick Cantlay.
Woods is at the vortex of all this toing and froing with other key figures. “We just don’t sleep much,” he said. “There’s a lot of late nights and Zoom calls at odd hours of the night, all throughout the night, and lots of emails to read.” All this unexpected detail for him goes some way to explaining why he has not committed to the captaincy of next year’s U.S. Ryder Cup team, for which he once was the favourite.
“He’s got a lot on his plate right now,” Waugh said. “He’s very active obviously on the tour side of things. We want to give him and the committee space to decide … how it plays out.” Meanwhile, Stewart Cink is in the frame to lead his country’s team at Bethpage Black.
So, gentlemen, fellow members, that’s the latest from Louisville. It was, as I said earlier, some week. Oh, yes, and Xander Schauffele won. Did I forget to tell you that?
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: Scottie Scheffler
Andrew Redington, getty images