Scottie Scheffler enters Tiger territory with fourth win in five starts
Scottie Scheffler looked human as recently as Thursday, when his shank out of a bunker at Harbour Town’s third hole led to a double bogey in the first round of the RBC Heritage. The flub was understandable: Scheffler was only four days removed from his second Masters win, and he spoke openly about his fatigue and lack of preparation entering the RBC Heritage, an elevated event on the PGA Tour schedule that featured a strong, invitation-only field.
After a pedestrian 2-under-par 69 amid favorable scoring conditions in the tournament’s first round, Scheffler sat in a tie for 26th place, six shots behind leader J.T. Poston. At the end of Monday’s weather-delayed final round in Hilton Head Island, S.C., Scheffler stood atop the leaderboard by three strokes, winning his fourth tournament in five starts to continue his Tiger Woods-esque run of dominance.
Woods was the last male golfer to win four times in five starts, in 2007-08. Scheffler’s lone miss in this absurd run? A tie for second at the Houston Open, where he missed a short putt that would have forced a playoff with eventual champion Stephan Jaeger.
In his last 50 starts, Scheffler has 9 wins, 22 finishes in the top 3 and 34 finishes in the top 10.
“Coming into this week, I didn’t have my usual prep work,” Scheffler, who became the first golfer since Bernhard Langer in 1985 to follow up a Masters win with a victory the next week at the Heritage, told CBS Sports after clinching the victory. “Got off to a slow start on Thursday, but I played some real nice golf in the middle of the tournament.
“Yeah, it’s nice to be done.”
Scheffler’s wife, Meredith, is due to give birth to the couple’s first child in the next few weeks, and the world No. 1 has said he would have exited mid-tournament had she gone into labor. But the baby has yet to arrive, which gave Scheffler time to complete the Masters-Heritage double. Scheffler probably will not play again until next month’s PGA Championship at Valhalla in Louisville, where he will attempt to become only the eighth golfer to win the first two major championships of the year (the last was Jordan Spieth in 2015).
That double bogey at the third hole on Thursday would be Scheffler’s last above-par hole until an inconsequential bogey at No. 18 on Monday, when his win was well in hand. He went a combined 14 under in the second and third rounds to take the lead entering Sunday, and his 3-under 68 in the final round cinched the deal.
Sahith Theegala also shot a 68 in the final round to finish alone in second place. Wyndham Clark and Patrick Cantlay were another stroke back in a tie for third.
Sunday’s final round was halted by darkness with a few players left on the course after heavy rain rolled through Hilton Head Island, causing a long delay. The tournament resumed at 8 a.m. Eastern on Monday morning, and Scheffler finished with two pars and the bogey at 18.
If we are to assume that Ted Scott, Scheffler’s caddie, gets paid on the usual 5-7-10 scale (5% of a player’s winnings for making the cut, 7% for a top-10 finish, 10 percent for a victory), he has made somewhere in the vicinity of $1.78 million already this year. If Scott were a golfer, that would rank in the top 50 on the money list.