LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Nothing fazes Scottie Scheffler.
Not. A. Damn. Thing.
Not even the birth of his first child, Bennett, coming on the eve of a major championship week.
Scheffler’s ability to remain unaffected by everything that goes on around him — not the least of which is the hype around him maintaining his No. 1 world ranking for more than 80 weeks and winning golf tournaments at a rate Tiger Woods once did in his prime — is his superpower.
That, coupled with a golf game that doesn’t appear to have even the slightest of cracks in it, very well might lead to Scheffler winning the PGA Championship this week at Valhalla and ramping up conversations about a “Scottie Slam.’’
Scheffler is fresh off winning his second Masters green jacket last month and he’s won four of his last five starts. So, a win this week might well set the golf world ablaze.
Scheffler skipped last week’s Wells Fargo Championship to be at home in Dallas with his wife, Meredith, while she gave birth on Saturday and hasn’t played a tournament in three weeks.
If you think that’ll have an adverse effect on him, you haven’t been paying a lot of attention, because nothing fazes Scheffler.
“I can’t really describe the feeling,’’ Scheffler said Tuesday about the fairytale state of his life at the moment. “At home it was a nice time to reflect a little bit on my career so far and where my life has gone. I married my high school sweetheart and I always wanted to play professional golf, and now I’m here. I was sitting there with a newborn in my arms and the green jacket in the closet. A pretty insane feeling.’’
While he was home, Scheffler found his mind wandering, he said, about his life on and off the golf course.
“I think throughout my career I’ve learned a little bit of how to compartmentalize things, and I think as my career has gone on, I’ve been able to do a better job of that,’’ Scheffler said. “I try to do my best to keep my personal life out of kind of the public eye. I think that’s something that my wife and I … we like having almost two separate lives.’’
Scheffler was positively aglow describing his first days of fatherhood.
“It’s just wild watching Meredith go through that, it’s just nuts,’’ he said. “I don’t really know how to describe it, watching the little dude come out of Meredith. We waited … it was a surprise for us whether it was going to be a boy or girl, so being able to tell my wife that it was a boy, yeah, it was a wild ride.’’
As Scheffler waxed on about Meredith and the baby, he would occasionally snap back to competitor mode. There is, after all, a major championship to win this week.
“I think the human heart is always striving for more, and the competitiveness in me, it doesn’t really allow me to reflect really that much,’’ he said. “This is a major championship week, and this is what I practice and prepare for is to play my best at these events, and hopefully that trend will continue.’’
There’s been little evidence that it won’t. One of the greatest players of all, Woods, doesn’t see the Scheffler train slowing down anytime soon. And if anyone has the credentials to recognize greatness, it’s Tiger Woods.
“If he putts awful, then he finishes in top 10,’’ Woods said Tuesday. “If he putts decent, he wins. He putts great, he runs away. He’s just that good a ball-striker and that good an all-around player.’’
Because the world we live in is obsessed with projecting more greatness from those who are already great, everyone wonders how long this Scheffler run is going to continue, and whether he’ll one day rival what the likes of Woods accomplished.
Scheffler has zero time for that.
“I don’t really try to look that far ahead,’’ he said. “If I listen to the narratives around myself, if it was two months ago it would probably look significantly different than it does now. I’m sure that wasn’t a conversation y’all were having two months ago and all of a sudden now it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s going to win this many tournaments or do that and do this.’
“I don’t really pay attention to it. I may win a lot of major championships [or] I may be stuck at two the rest of my career. It doesn’t really concern me in the moment. I’m just trying to prepare as best as possible for this week.’’
