The Sports Guru
Scottie Scheffler is the best golfer in the world and he has not won a tournament since January, and both of those things are true at once. He arrives at the Genesis Scottish Open a four-time runner-up this season, a man whose worst results would be most players' career highlights, and yet the question keeps coming and he keeps admitting he has no answer for it. This looks at the strange shape of Scheffler's year, what he said about the frustration of losing tournaments he feels he should have won, and the Open title defence at Royal Birkdale that will define whether the near-misses were a blip or a pattern.
Scottie Scheffler is the number one golfer in the world, a four-time major champion with 20 PGA Tour titles, and he has not won a tournament since January. That sentence should not be possible, and yet it is the honest summary of his season as he arrives at the Renaissance Club for the Genesis Scottish Open, the last competitive week before he defends the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. Since winning The American Express in Palm Springs to open his year, Scheffler has finished second four times and added three further top-fours without once reaching the top of the leaderboard on a Sunday. He is playing well enough to contend almost everywhere and not quite well enough to close, and the gap between those two states is where his whole year has been lived.
The best player, and the question he cannot answer
Scheffler is honest about how it feels, which is the first thing to say about him. Asked again at his pre-tournament press conference why the wins have dried up, he did not reach for a sports psychologist's script. "I feel like I get that question every single week. I haven't had a good answer yet," he said, and the admission was more revealing than any polished deflection would have been. "I think I've been really close to winning some tournaments and that can be frustrating." This is a man who has spent two years redefining what dominance in golf looks like, now spending his weeks explaining why he keeps finishing one place short, and the honesty of it is oddly reassuring. He is not pretending the frustration away.
He is also refusing to let it distort the picture. "At the same time, I've had some good results, a fourth and a second are not bad results by any means," he said, and he is right, in the narrow sense that those are excellent weeks for almost anyone else. "Margins in golf are really small and I just keep trying to do my best." That is the tension Scheffler is living inside. By any normal standard he is having a fine season, contending constantly, banking finishes most players would frame. By his own standard, the one he set by charging into major contention as he did earlier in the year, a season with one win in it by July is a disappointment, and he knows it even as he declines to sulk about it.
Four times a runner-up, and one that stung
The second places have a rhythm to them now. The most recent came at the Travelers Championship, where Scheffler lost a Monday-morning playoff to Viktor Hovland, the kind of defeat that lingers because it is decided by inches after four days of getting everything else right. Four runner-up finishes in a season is not the record of a man out of form. It is the record of a man who is doing almost everything a champion does and then meeting, week after week, an opponent playing the round of his life at exactly the wrong moment. Golf is unusually cruel in that way, because the best player in a field can do nothing about someone else holing a 30-footer on the 72nd hole, and Scheffler has been on the wrong end of that maths more than anyone this year.
His way of carrying it is deliberately unsentimental. "I feel like no matter how the season goes, there's always shots I wish I could have back. There's always tournaments I feel like I should have won and I didn't," he said, and then framed the whole thing in the flat, durable philosophy that has always underpinned his game. "You've got to ride with it, the highs and lows." Pushed on whether the near-misses weigh on him, he was almost dismissive of the premise: "I don't really sit around too much and think about the past, to be honest with you." For a player whose season has handed him plenty of past worth dwelling on, the refusal to dwell is a competitive advantage in itself, the same trait that kept him in contention through the majors even when the wins would not come.
The perspective of a man in the middle of it
What separates Scheffler from the version of this story that would eat a lesser player alive is the length of his view. He does not treat a winless stretch as a crisis because he does not treat any single season as the whole account. "I feel like I'm in the middle of my career and probably the end of my career is more a time to reflect," he said, and the line does more work than it first appears. It reframes the near-misses as chapters rather than verdicts, weeks in a book that is nowhere near finished, and it is exactly the posture a defending Open champion needs the week before he hands the trophy back. A player consumed by four second places would arrive at Birkdale carrying them. Scheffler intends to arrive carrying nothing but a driver and a grievance he has filed away for later.
That is not the same as complacency, and he was careful to say so. The weeks he fell short have clearly landed, the frustration is real and admitted, and a man who says he has no good answer to the winning question is not a man at peace with losing. But he has built a career on the refusal to let the last result set the tone for the next one, and there is no better week than this to test it. The Open does not care what a player did in June. It asks its questions fresh, in wind and on links turf, and Scheffler has already proved once that he can answer them.
Handing back the jug he means to keep
The emotional centre of his week is the trophy. Scheffler won the Open last year at Royal Portrush, four shots clear of Harris English, and the Claret Jug has spent twelve months in his keeping. Now he has to give it back before he can try to win it again. "It was something that is very special to me. It will be very tough to hand it back on Tuesday next week, but I'll be fighting like heck to get it back on Sunday," he said, and the sentence holds the whole strange ritual of major golf in it. The defending champion returns the prize on the Tuesday and then spends four days trying to reclaim the thing he has just surrendered, and few players speak about that oddity as plainly as Scheffler just did.
The stakes are steeper than a normal defence. No golfer has won back-to-back Opens since Padraig Harrington in 2007 and 2008, and Scheffler arrives with the chance to end that wait and the frustration of a season that has told him, four times, that being the best is not the same as being the winner. The Scottish Open this week is the tune-up, a links test at the Renaissance Club to sharpen the game before the 154th Open begins at Birkdale on 16 July. If the second places are a blip, this is the fortnight where he corrects them in the most emphatic way available. If they are a pattern, it is the fortnight where that becomes harder to explain away. Either way, the man himself is not interested in the theorising. He wants the jug back, and he has told everyone exactly how hard he intends to fight for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Scheffler has contended repeatedly but fallen just short, finishing runner-up four times and adding three more top-four results since winning The American Express in January. He has described the margins in golf as very small and admitted the near-misses are frustrating, most recently losing a Monday-morning playoff to Viktor Hovland at the Travelers Championship.
Yes. Scheffler won the Open last year at Royal Portrush, finishing four shots clear of Harris English. He will hand the Claret Jug back on the Tuesday of Open week before attempting to win it again at Royal Birkdale, where the 154th Open begins on 16 July.
The Genesis Scottish Open is played at the Renaissance Club and serves as the final competitive week before the Open Championship, a links tune-up that draws much of the world's top field. Scheffler is using it to sharpen his game before defending his major title the following week.
He can, but it is rare. No golfer has successfully defended the Open since Padraig Harrington won in 2007 and 2008. Scheffler, the world number one and a four-time major champion, would end that 18-year wait if he retained the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale.
Sources: Reporting from Sky Sports, corroborated by Golf.com, CBS Sports and the PGA Tour.
