Scottie Scheffler walks off the 12th green during the second round of the PGA Championship golf tournament at Valhalla Golf Club, in Louisville, Ky., on May 17.Jon Durr/Reuters
Since the professional/personal diminishment of Tiger Woods, golf has been looking for a legend.
Jordan Spieth had his shot, but couldn’t follow through. Bryson DeChambeau was willing to say things out loud that other people have the sense to just think, but he didn’t have the results. And there has been a weird surplus of men named Justin and Cameron.
But that person may finally have arrived. Meet golf’s new Johnny Cash – Scottie Scheffler.
Scheffler, 27, has the ability and the major titles. What he lacked was personality and/or edge.
He seems nice in a genial, midwestern way (though he’s from New Jersey). The sort of guy you would love to have as a neighbour, but wouldn’t necessarily want to get stuck next to at a barbecue. Not exactly a born raconteur.
But on Friday, Scheffler did something he has never publicly done before – he was interesting.
The PGA Championship is ongoing at Valhalla Golf Club in Kentucky. Early Friday, after a traffic fatality nearby, the road in to the course was temporarily closed.
According to ESPN reporter Jeff Darlington – who was on hand – Scheffler tried to drive around that roadblock on his way to work. He ignored an instruction to halt. A police officer “attached himself to the vehicle” (Darlington’s words).
This Mad Max act lasted 10 or 20 yards (Darlington’s estimate). At that point, Scheffler stopped, was pulled from the car and taken away in cuffs.
ESPN covered this like a presidential assassination, complete with a flustered Darlington in studio, hair akimbo, voice cracking, saying things such as, “To be very clear about the details here, Scottie Scheffler has been detained by police officers …”
Other countries have revolutions. America has an occasional mild upset of the class order.
Scheffler in a mug shot provided by the Louisville Metropolitan Department of Corrections, on May 17.Louisville Metro Police/Reuters
A while later, golf got its payoff – Scheffler’s mugshot was released.
On a mugshot scale from Frank Sinatra to Nick Nolte, this was a David Bowie. Scheffler looks alert, even a little mean. The sort of person whose parking spot you would not want to steal at the garden centre on a Sunday morning.
This is an improvement on golf’s last famous mugshot – Woods, looking sad and bleary after a DUI charge. That was the end of the end of Woods’s long reign over the sport. Since then, even after winning a final Masters, he is the emeritus king.
This major weekend started with another blow to a top man in the executive – the announcement that Rory McIlroy is getting divorced.
It is in the nature of pro sports that marriages bust up, but McIlroy had retrofit his persona from ‘next big thing’ to ‘glamorous family man.’ A very personal announcement became very public news, so much so that reporters have been warned not to ask about it at news conferences. The shadow of Woods’s fall still lingers over golf.
From wives as honorary caddies to toddlers running out on the 18th green to hug dad after he wins, no sport goes in harder on family values. This is the game of the suburbs, where people straighten up and fly right.
Scheffler is emblematic of that tendency toward conformity. He’s been big news for several weeks, not because he just won another Masters, but because he’d promised to leave if his very pregnant wife had gone into labour.
You could hear the yearning in the voices of the CBS announcers as they told that story over and over again all weekend long in Augusta. They wanted so badly for Scheffler to be proved true to his word.
It was the kind of saccharine narrative urge golf leans on too often to be exciting. But new-father-goes-full-Thelma-and-Louise has legs.
What people crave in their star athletes is duality. Killers on the court, sweethearts off it, or vice versa. Think of the legends of our games – Muhammad Ali, Gordie Howe, Ted Williams, Michael Jordan. To varying degrees, the light and dark sides of their personalities were in constant tension. Sometimes, the darkness won.
Because everyone feels this way about themselves, people are drawn to it. No golfer has had it since Woods. On Friday morning, very briefly, Scheffler did.
It helps that his crime – if that’s what this is – is mostly harmless. Maybe he drove through that roadblock because he’s an entitled clod. Maybe he just didn’t understand what was happening. Pros are used to walking through signs that say ‘No admittance.’
One suspects this ends in public apologies and a donation to the Widows and Orphans Fund.
Whatever the case, Scheffler made his 10:08 a.m. tee time. Something tells me that if I was charged with assaulting a police officer, I would not be sitting at my desk at work first thing that morning, or the next. It’s another teachable American moment they don’t teach. You figure it out for yourself.
Scheffler went out on Friday and golfed a stone-cold five-under.
How’d he prep for that? Stretching in a cell.
“That was a first for me,” Scheffler said.
This is golf’s Folsom Prison moment.
From now on. Scheffler is what my grandmother would call a dark horse. Someone who has hidden depth and resources. Maybe the sort you don’t want to fully explore.
It’s going too far to call him golf’s bad boy, but let’s face it – golf could use a little badness to offset the cloying goodness.
It certainly makes Scheffler more interesting than ‘random man who swings club well.’ The smart move would be to lean into it. Laugh at yourself, without seeming to mock the situation.
Handled well, this could be the makings of a genuine star.
Does Scheffler have that in him? We’ll see over the course of this weekend. If he balks, people will assume the worst of his motives. If he embraces the pain, they will empathize.
Golf tries too hard to get this part right. It’s good to remember that there’s never been a legend who made the right choice every time.