Inside the Mind of Scottie

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Watch someone closely enough and you might see behind the curtain, agog at the very thing you are not supposed to see.

The ingenue without makeup.

The superhero without a cape.

In the case of Scottie Scheffler, who has a chance to complete the career Grand Slam in the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, it was his out-of-character slip-up on the 72nd hole of the 2022 Masters.

With Scheffler leading by five strokes as he approached the final green, his caddie, Ted Scott, told his man to look up and take it all in before putting out. “And you saw the results of that,” Scheffler said with a laugh after he four-putted. “I’ve never been a guy that likes to look too far into the future,” he added. Staying present works best.

This all comes up now because Scheffler, whose 30th birthday falls on June 21 (which happens to be U.S. Open Sunday), has put himself on the precipice of a big moment by redefining what it means to be present for every small one. If – when? – he wins a U.S. Open title, he would join the Mount Rushmore of golf, becoming just the seventh man to complete the career Grand Slam, following Rory McIlroy at the 2025 Masters.

“You look at his game, and you would have said a few years ago that the putting was a weakness, but you wouldn’t say that now,” McIlroy said at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March. “You look at all the other aspects of his game and you don’t see a weakness, from a physical standpoint, from a mental standpoint. And he seems like he has a good mindset of, last week’s done, I’ll move on … forget about whatever happened. He operates in the present so well, and that’s one of his super strengths.” 

You could pinpoint many factors in his meteoric rise, most notably his laser-like iron play, but what truly sets Scheffler apart is what he has cultivated internally. His quiet strength and vise-like grip on the present moment have elevated him not just to No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking, but far beyond No. 2 McIlroy. Scheffler has won on all types of courses in all types of weather while hitting all types of shots, including some terrible ones, even the occasional shank.

Public reaction has centered on his footwork (all over the place) and his shot placement (anything but). Mostly, though, the Age of Scheffler has been met with a lot of head-scratching. What, exactly, is this guy doing so much better than everyone else?    

Not too long ago, he was stopped in his tracks by an offhand, well-meaning comment. Scheffler might consider playing the upcoming WM Phoenix Open, a seasoned PGA Tour caddie advised, because TPC Scottsdale would be a good course for him. 

Scheffler smiled. It had been a good course for him – he’d won the tournament the year before.

“That was his first win, and he was defending champ!” said Paul Tesori, the caddie in question.

“What an idiot I am. Then he won again that next week, so we’ve kept the joke running that Phoenix is a good course for him.”

This anecdote illustrates two immutable truths about Scheffler.

The first is that Scheffler is defying conventional measures of time. Although that 2022 WM Phoenix Open was indeed his first PGA Tour victory, he notched his 20th at The American Express to open the 2026 season. His fourth win in six starts made him just the third player, with Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, to reach 20 wins in his 20s.

But the greats are always precocious; Scheffler is no different. 

The second truth is unique to Scheffler, who is doing this in the most under-the-radar, Schefflerian way possible, becoming one of the most ordinary extraordinary golfers in modern history. We’ll never know what Scheffler was thinking when Tesori forgot about his first win in Phoenix, but it was probably something like: The plan is working.  

Last October, after hearing of the engagement of his sister Molly, who works for the PGA Tour, Scheffler flew to Jacksonville, Fla., along with the rest of his family to celebrate. Everyone went out to eat by the beach, and a splinter group wound up at Pete’s Bar, a local institution, where Scheffler celebrated his sister’s big news even as he kept one eye on his Texas Longhorns football team playing Kentucky on TV. His crew formed a makeshift blockade around him, thwarting any would-be autograph-seekers or selfie-takers, but for a sports deity it was as normal a night as one could ever hope for. Ordinary won the day; Scheffler could tap into extraordinary later, and of course he would.

“I’m always searching to be more present where I am,” he said in a PGA Tour-produced docuseries in 2024. Present with his family. Present with his clubs.

At the Players Championship in March, Scheffler shed some light on the difference between how the outside world views his performance versus how he lives it.

“Your expectations of me are living week by week,” he said to the assembled media. “My expectations of myself are almost more shot by shot. The media is always trying to create a story, which can be a great thing. But my expectations are based around what I want for me mentally on the golf course as being committed to what I can do and controlling that aspect.”

Whereas Woods attained near-mythic status, not so Scheffler, for whom blending humanity with super-humanity is a defining characteristic. He admitted he was overwhelmed with self-doubt and cried before winning his first Masters. He also cried on the podium after winning gold at the Paris Olympics. After losing a playoff at the 2022 Charles Schwab Challenge, he won the day by making it to his sister-in-law’s wedding.

He achieves greatness while holding on to an enviable presence – to himself; to his wife, Meredith; to their 2-year-old son Bennett and new arrival Remy, who was born on March 27; to his faith; and to whomever else he has kept in his heart.

Years ago, five-time PGA Tour winner Ben Crane made a jokey video about being “in the now,” but he knows that Scheffler is truly living that maxim.

“I’ve heard him talk on the College Golf Fellowship website about exactly that presence,” said Crane. “He and Meredith are serious about what does it look like for the gospel to sustain us in this crazy life. He’s doing a great job at it.

“He’s also doing a great job of separating from the results,” Crane added. “He doesn’t have to have it.” 

True, but he’d really, really like to have it. Even on the ultra-competitive PGA Tour, Scheffler’s iron will and distaste for losing are legendary. At last year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational, he regaled the press with a story about losing to a friend who is “not a very good golfer” at Royal Oaks, his club in Dallas, and how much it pained him.

“He holed a bunker shot on 18 to win,” Scheffler said. “I moved out of the way because I thought he could potentially shank it, and he ended up holing it. I don’t like losing, and I handed him the money and then I was like, ‘Thanks, man. Now I got to go play a golf tournament next week, so appreciate the confidence boost that I just lost to a 10-handicap.’”

He was laughing as he said this last part, but he wasn’t laughing at The Open Championship last summer, when he said, of losing, “It sucks. I hate it, I really do.” 

What one gleans upon studying Scheffler, is that, yes, he is an elite ball-striker. “His ball doesn’t move,” Woods has noted approvingly. And, yes, Scheffler has all the shots. “One of the coolest things I learned today was just how underrated his short game is,” teenager Blades Brown said after playing with, and losing to, Scheffler at The American Express.

More importantly, though, few modern athletes have been better at being where their feet are than Scheffler. He is not big on press conferences, especially the 54-hole variety, a flow-disrupter that not so subtly asks the leader to project forward to what it would mean to win. And he hates questions about legacy, forever insisting that he is not yet worthy of such sports-talk-radio blather.

“There’s not necessarily assigned seats,” he said earlier this year, when asked about seating at the Masters champions’ dinner. “But I’m definitely not going to go sit in the area where Tiger and Jack sit.”  

And yet the parallels between Scheffler and Woods can be hard to miss. At the 2000 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Woods was seemingly too far behind the lead but came storming back to win in a Monday finish. At the same event earlier this year, Scheffler, who’d scuffed it around in a first-round 72, very nearly did the same thing on the same course. He made three final-round eagles – a PGA Tour first for him – en route to a 63 that left him two behind winner Collin Morikawa in a tie for fourth.

Three-time U.S. Mid-Amateur champion Stewart Hagestad, who played on the 2017 Walker Cup Team with Scheffler, sat in rapt attention, bug-eyed at his old teammate’s sensational finish.

“Watching Pebble – I don’t really watch much golf, unless it’s a major,” Hagestad said. “But when he hit that second shot to a foot and a half on 18, I texted friends: That was Tigeresque.”   

Paradoxically, to get a peek into the mind of this golf Megatron, it can be more illuminating to look at Scheffler’s non-victories.

At February’s Genesis Invitational, where there are only 72 players but still a cut, he occupied last place after an opening 74 on bumpy greens and in a stiff wind. Three days later, after rounds of 68-66-65, Scheffler had not only made the cut on the number (fist pump), but he’d finished T12. Only a birdie by Cameron Young on the 72nd hole kept him from continuing his run of 18 finishes of 10th or better that dated to the 2025 Players Championship, the longest such streak in 90 years (Byron Nelson’s jaw-dropping 65).    

“I've never been one to quit,” Scheffler said, “I’d feel pretty silly to quit in a PGA Tour event. Overall, being out here and competing, that’s what I love to do.”

This dogged refusal to give up on a tournament or even a single shot is one of many parallels between Scheffler and Woods. “Tiger was obviously the best at it,” Scheffler said at last year’s PGA Championship. “But every shot he hit was the most important shot that he’s ever hit.”

They are living examples of an argument put forth by author Brad Stulberg in the new book “The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World.” Taking inspiration from Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Stulberg writes that greatness in its healthiest form is about values-aligned, sustainable effort rather than just hustle and perfection, and that the real reward of excellence is that you become a better version of yourself. What fuels it all, Stulberg writes, is an intimacy with one’s craft.

“It is a sense of familiarity, respect and attention that helps you feel connected to what you are doing and to yourself,” he writes. “It requires minimizing distractions and getting as close as possible to your pursuit. It’s being in the pocket of a deadlift, song, or painting; it’s being immersed in developing an idea, leading a team, or learning a new skill.” He goes on to argue, “The intimacy of excellence is a powerful antidote to modern alienation and its associated feelings of disconnection, disassociation and numbness.” 

Granted, excellence does not necessarily equal happiness, and burnout is real. Scheffler seemed to have a reckoning, of sorts, when he openly questioned the meaning of his accomplishments in his pre-tournament presser at The Open Championship at Royal Portrush last summer. “What’s the point?” Scheffler asked rhetorically.

“Sometimes the feeling only lasts about two minutes, it seems like, when you’re celebrating,” he said of winning, “and then it’s like, OK, now you’ve got to go do all this other stuff, which is great, but sometimes the feeling of winning only lasts a few seconds. It’s pretty exciting and fun, but it just doesn’t last that long.”

It was good column fodder, but as it turned out, Scheffler was not burnt out or in the throes of an existential crisis. He won The Open to set up his first attempt at the career Grand Slam at this year’s U.S. Open. And if you go back and check the transcript, it’s clear that he was misunderstood – he was trying to say that there is no finish line, and that no matter whether he won or lost, he would go into the start of the FedExCup playoffs in Memphis at even par. He’d still be himself, still a man of faith, a husband, a dad, a Texas Longhorns fan.

Here is author Stulberg on excellence and meaning: “What are we here to do? Each and every one of us asks ourselves this question. I’ve made the case that the answer is to strive for excellence, to figure out our values and goals and go after them with as much vigor and intimacy as we can. Another fitting answer is that we are here to love. But then again, what is excellence – what is caring deeply and paying attention and repeated practice and learning from failure and staying curious and steadfast dedication and getting really close and feeling deeply and showing up over and over again – if not love?”

Now go back to Scheffler’s Open press conference and forget the headline quote. Look at the answer right before that:

“I don't look at wins and losses or stuff like that,” Scheffler said. “I don’t sit down at the beginning of the year and say I want to win X number of times, I want to win this many majors. … What works best for me is just to stay present, continue to put in the work, which I would argue that’s the most fun part for me. I love being able to practice ... and just try to get the most out of myself each day.”

Presence. Love. Practice.

There, before an audience of scribes in Northern Ireland, Scheffler had spoken to not just The Open and golf but also the entire human condition. Onward. Upward. Let it fly.