There’s a scarred wall in Texas that tells a truth and kills a myth. The myth is about Scottie Scheffler and the flat lines of a personality who has never knowingly ventured to extremes during his astonishing rise in golf.
He is, by consensus, a gentle assassin. Sort of killer ‘aw shucks’. A man of deep faith who has won five PGA Tour titles and the Masters in the last 14 months, but who doesn’t go straight down his throat with his words.
He is certainly the quietest of the three kings of golf who will start as heavy favorites at Augusta. While Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm breathe fire when the subject is right, Scheffler, the youngest of the trio at 26, brings the ice. And ice goes well with champagne.
Borrowing Brooks Koepka’s exaggerated observation, made as a compliment on Full Swing: “The best player in the world doesn’t have a damn thought in his head.”
So let’s get back to that wall and the origin story of how tranquility was a process rather than a permanent state for the reigning champion from Augusta. The man sharing the story laughs because John Fields, the head golf coach at the University of Texas, has seen other sides of the world as a No. 1 and has a deeper understanding of how the Master was made.
Scottie Scheffler (above) is calmer than his big rivals Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm
“If you want a competitor, he’s your guy,” Fields says, and he’s seen a few, and he’s also put the last coats of polish on Jordan Spieth before going out into the world. Scheffler was a finance student in Fields’ program from the age of 18 until his graduation at 22 in 2018 and left his mark in a number of ways.
“We had holes in the wall in the gym that I’ll tell you about,” says Fields. It was by the ping-pong table. Because of Scottie and a couple of other guys, we decided to put two to three inch thick padding on that wall. They took out their anger or their competitiveness and we got tired of seeing these holes in the wall. Scottie is a guy who just didn’t want to lose. In anything. As a coach, you don’t want to take that away from anyone.
He has other stories to tell and all with great affection. Fields adds: “People talk about Ben Crenshaw [the 1984 and 1995 Masters champion] and his nickname is Gentle Ben, right? It was a joke given to him, because he was anything but nice. He grew up on it, but his father had to drive them off the golf course several times when he was young.
‘Scottie was never taken off the golf course, although his father was very firm with him and a great mentor. But Scotty has turned into this guy you see today. Scottie has this burning fire in him and sometimes it would boil over in high school and sometimes in college.
‘There were a couple of times that stick in my mind. We were at a particular tournament at Pumpkin Ridge. He had a shot that he didn’t like and something came out of his mouth that wasn’t very good and one of the coaches was offended. Scottie apologized at the end of the day. Keep in mind that we are training 18-22 year olds and from a certain point of view there is some immaturity there. Scottie recognized that he had made a mistake and made it his own. That’s important to grow.’
Fields enjoys these memories. They play with an inner drive that made Scheffler a three-time high school state champion at Highland Park in Dallas, tying a record set by Spieth, and the winner of the 2013 USA Junior Amateur Championship. he came. to be a great force in the greenhouse of American college golf despite a series of injuries to his back and elsewhere. Resilience and hunger, Fields believes, are as important as any other weapon in Scheffler’s bag and have been key in his breakthrough into the professional game.
“I remember his freshman year,” Fields says. ‘He had just won two tournaments in a row and we were playing a regional tournament. On the last day, he got really upset with a shot he didn’t like and took a big hit on a bush. Well, that bush contained thorns and a large one embedded all the way into his left thumb.
The American has won five PGA Tour titles and the Masters in the past 14 months.
“The only way to really get that out would be surgery, but we’re going to play again the following week, so he kept it ice cold and had a great tournament.” Tough guy
‘Something with Scottie, he was also a very good basketball player. One day he played basketball with his friends and sprained his ankle a lot, but in his head he had to play the tournament ahead of us. He was put in a protective boot and he went to play the 36 holes in it.’
He won, of course.
“A lot has been reversed over the years,” says Fields. She has had some angels in his life. Meredith, his wife, is one of the ones who really helped him tap into that energy. He also has great parents, and his trainer, Randy Smith, ranks right up there with Butch Harmon as the best in the world. A lot of it has to do with his faith, and among it all, he’s the No. 1 player in the world, but there’s a big major league fire in his heart for competitiveness.
I always say that what makes a guy good is what makes him bad and vice versa, so a coach has to deal with that. If the coach decides to take that away from the guy, you risk taking this amazing talent and putting it in the fridge so he’ll never be seen again. Fire creates this energy that sustains you.’
Those fires are fueling one of the best streaks in golf. They’ve also contributed to a terrific three-way rivalry: if Rahm, McIlroy and Scheffler do their best in Augusta, it would be an unforgettable matchup.
Between them they have 15 world wins since the start of 2022 and, within that dominant group, Scheffler and Rahm appear to have smoother fluctuations in form than McIlroy.
It has at times given way to the view that Scheffler has a more robotic approach, glossing over the quirks of his swing (the movement of his feet is not found in any textbook) and drawing disbelief from Fields.
In his mind, Scheffler’s exceptional short game ingenuity equates to a genius more commonly aligned with a player he once rubbed shoulders with on the European Tour in the 1980s. ‘If you believe in another life, Seve Ballesteros could have jumped into this guy’s body!’ he says.
Scheffler, McIlroy (L) and Rahm (R) have 15 world wins since the start of 2022
‘I used to have a name for Scottie: Balle-Scheffler. I never told him that but he was in my head. The way we got there was anger from him and his competitiveness boiled over, so I did a lot of walking with him. When he got into trouble on the field, I noticed that when he would ask him what type of shot he would take, he would tell me and then about 90 percent of the time, he would not make it. So I decided to keep my mouth shut and just watched.
“I saw him go into this creative mode and then 98 percent of the time he was getting it done. The only person he had actually seen do that was Ballesteros. After that, I took a cold pill and thought: “Okay, it’s time for Balle-Scheffler.” He would do something spectacular.
“He’s blessed with that kind of ability and you can see it with what he did at the Masters last year when he chipped in three in the final round to really get going.” It is pure creativity. Why that is, I don’t know. Why was Michelangelo able to paint the Sistine Chapel?
A robot? It seems that the reigning Master of Augusta is much more than that.