DOMINANT, CLINICAL AND TIGERESQUE - WELCOME TO THE SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER ERA

IT WAS A finale to make a heresy of the old creed that the Masters only begins with the back nine on Sunday.

It was here the 2024 edition ended, as Scottie Scheffler dawdled at the 11th tee to see his competitors fold and collapse around him like deckchairs. 

Within 20 minutes and across holes 11 and 12 at Amen Corner, Ludvig Aberg, Collin Morikawa and Max Homa each made a double bogey and were the last of the field to stumble and fall as Scheffler was beginning his kick for home. They shouldn’t feel too bad, given everyone else fell off the pace days earlier. 

No sport is as volatile as golf and few of its stages are as capricious as Augusta National, but Scottie Scheffler is inevitable.  And inevitable in a way the game hasn’t seen since Tiger Woods. This year he returned to the Masters, stood tall amid its toughest conditions for years, and – if you’re being very generous to the rest of the mere mortals in the field – had the tournament sewn up with four holes to go.  

His week was a clinic in distance control. Even when he got a little loose with his ball, he held the field at arm’s length, leaning with palm pressed insouciantly against their foreheads, impervious to their windmilling arms.    

Plus, and here’s the most worrying fact for every other professional golfer on earth, Scheffler won it without his A game. The only doubt as to whether he would win this tournament was his putting, and whether it would ruin his divine approach play as it did last year. These feel like quaint anxieties now, because he has it all figured out. 

As it turned out, there were a couple of screws jangling loose in Scheffler’s famously controlled irons across this week -  he started his final round outside of the top-25 in the approach play stats – and he missed his first three greens on Sunday, but his chipping and putting bailed him out when he needed them. 

Having made bogey on four and seven and given the rest of the field a faint kind of hope, he tightened the rivets and brought the ball back under his spell; the greatest flourish coming from the ninth fairway, where he was inches from holing out for eagle. 

A kick-in birdie was still a concussive counter-punch to Ludvig Aberg, who drained a monster putt on the same green moments earlier to briefly vault into a share for the lead. 

This was the moment Scheffler took a look around him and decided, in the purest form of sporting dominance, enough of this nonsense. 

At that point Aberg, on his major debut, looked to be the likeliest contender, ambling calmly about the course with the carefree air of a man who had literally never heard of the Masters before. This is a major? Oh, is it important? 

Alas, Aberg knew all about it on the 11th fairway. The whole of the course slopes down toward the pond to the left of the 11th green: if you were dropped from the sky you would be funnelled through the course and into the first stretch of water on Amen Corner. It also provided the field’s lowest moment of the Masters’ final day. First Aberg hooked his approach into the water, and Collin Morikawa soon followed, punching out a DAMMIT! as his ball went plunk. Both took double bogey, and Max Homa followed suit with a double of his own when he airmailed the 12th green. 

Scheffler took a bogey of his own on 11, but snuck a look at the scoreboard overlooking Amen Corner’s watery grave as he strode away. In the space of 20 minutes he saw his three closes challengers all card double bogeys and fall at his feet in the space of 20 minutes. 

Aberg was the only one of the trio to bounce back, birdieing 13 and 14, and then chucked away all momentum by snapping his tee shot on the par-five 15th way left. His double on 11 sucked that heady, anticipatory energy from the closing hour, but in truth it was immaterial, as Scheffler had his ball back on a string: a stunning approach on 14 left a kick-in birdie to ensure he would not be caught. He also had luck on his side when he went into a front bunker in 15 and found an unplugged lie, allowing him get up and down for par. A birdie on 16 gave him a four-shot buffer that he did not surrender. 

We are now undoubtedly in the Scottie Scheffler era, and it is one of cool and clinical excellence. While his eyes don’t blaze with the red intensity of Tiger Woods’, but he is quietly and brutally persistent all the same. Scheffler carries the deadly calculating air of the Bible Salesman who will call to your door and then have you dunking your head in a local river and renouncing the devil’s works before you realise it. 

The serenity his faith has taught him is widely held up as one of the reasons Scheffler is so damn good at golf, saying that, while golf is something he does, it does not define him. Perhaps that makes it easier for him to bounce back from his vanishingly rare mistakes, though it likely has more to do with the fact he currently does every aspect of the game better than virtually any of his fellow pros. 

Still, watching a golfer who believes in God is a nice change of pace from watching golfers whose faith is centred on their certainty that God believes in them and only them. 

But the world believes in Scottie Scheffler now, who is showing his recent domination of the PGA Tour is not down to LIV’s pilfering of talent. This was the strongest field of the year at the most pressurised event of the year in its most exacting conditions in a long time, and he sauntered home. 

Koepka, Spieth, Rahm and McIlroy have spent the last few years eddying about in their efforts to succeed Tiger Woods as the game’s dominant player.

No need to continue your skirmishes boys, Scottie Scheffler just settled them all for you. 

2024-04-15T05:08:25Z dg43tfdfdgfd