Scottie Scheffler is part philosopher, part championship golfer. And part of him is still the kid who just likes to get better at golf. But he did have some opinions about the host site for this year's PGA Championship, Aronimink Golf Club.
Scheffler also answered the question everyone has been wondering about lately: Why three straight seconds and not a win?
But first, here is the course condition report.
“The fairways are hard to hold, and the greens have a lot of slope and a lot of pitch to them. So, it's going to be challenging,” Scheffler said about Aronimink. “If you're looking at this golf course when it's soft, I think there's a lot of stuff you can kind of get away with in terms of, like, you can hit it pretty far offline. There's not many things to block you.”
Of course, really off line, out in the crowd, where the grass is trampled, the lies are always cleaner. It makes a person wonder how many shots that was worth to Arnold Palmer over the years. He never played without a massive gallery.
If the greens are soft, Scheffler noted, he could play bomb-and-gouge golf.
“When you have greens that have a ton of pitch back to front and they're really soft, it's easier to take off spin when you're in the rough. So, the reward for hitting the fairway is not that great,” he explained.
However, if the course is firm, it’s another story.
“When it's firm, the fairways are hard to hit,” Scheffler explained. “Then, if you want to get the ball close to a lot of these pins, you have to control your spin and control your distance really well, which is not that easy to do out of the rough,” he said. “It's easy to take off spin, but it's not easy to control the spin, if that makes sense.”
In other words, in that case, it’s important to be in the fairway. And one way or another, distance control is significant. And there’s another factor and that has to do with the superintendent and the grounds committee.
“If they decide to water the greens, it's going to be a completely different setup than it is if the greens are quite firm,” he said. But he added that it wasn’t just majors that have hard set-ups, firm conditions, and firm greens. Many PGA Tour events have that.
One word of caution was offered to me once upon a time by a longtime friend in golf. There are 20 PGA Professionals in the field. While they are better than the average club pro, they are not Tour players. The PGA of America does not want to embarrass them with conditions that are so difficult that they cannot play the course. So, there might be a bit of water on the course before the first two rounds, just so no one looks like a 15-handicapper.
Now, shockingly, coming into the PGA, Scheffler has had three second-place finishes, which people keep reminding him about. Even his wife mentioned it.
“Finishing second hurts, but I think when you reflect and you're looking at things to work on, there's a lot less to clean up when you're finishing second than there is when you're finishing 30th,” he pointed out.
It’s not difficult for him to answer questions about why he finished second, in fact, he said it was pretty easy to answer.
“Why didn't you win Cadillac? Well, I played with Cameron (Young) three out of the four days, and he putted really good, and I putted really bad. That's how you lose by six or seven shots,” Scheffler recapped.
“Then you look at the week before that; it's like, well, Fitzy (Matt Fitzpatrick) played some really nice golf and hit an incredible 4-iron, and I kind of pushed my 6-iron out there to the right, and that's how I lost that one.”
And finally at Augusta National, “I spotted Rory like a dozen shots at The Masters and gave him the best shot that I could, and he still clipped me.”
He said answering those kinds of questions were just part of the job. And from there he took us on a trip down memory lane to explain how he got to this point in life and in golf.
Scheffler was lucky in that his golf pro, Randy Smith, started off by telling his parents how it would work.
“One of the first things Randy taught my dad is when Scottie gets to the golf course, he takes his own bag off the golf cart, he sets up his own area. He doesn't need you out there. This is his thing,” Scheffler explained.
That eliminated the helicopter parent issue right away, if it existed, but because there were other children in the Scheffler household who had activities, it meant that parents were free to get the others where they needed to go. If you’ve ever shuttled children to different lessons and practices, you can appreciate the problem.
“My mom always did one thing that was interesting,” Scheffler recalled. “She never asked me what I shot. She said, ‘If you want me to know what you shot, you'll tell me. I don't have to ask you what you shot.’”
That’s a good lesson in the idea that you are not your golf score. Even PGA Tour players have sometimes had trouble separating the two. So do regular golfers at their courses and clubs all over the country. It might be the best lesson of all.
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