SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU D3
The Masters
search of a tour win.
“To be picked for that team as
a rookie, it has to give you
confidence,” Leonard said. “The
captain has to want you, but
other players have to, too. They
agree on those things, and I
think the players wanted him on
that team.”
Once on the team, Stricker
felt comfortable putting the
steady Scheffler with the bizarre
Bryson DeChambeau — and all
that entails. The pair halved
with Jon Rahm and Tyrrell
Hatton on Friday, then beat
Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor
Hovland on Saturday. In singles,
he dismantled Rahm, then the
top-ranked player in the world,
by birdieing five of the first six
holes.
There is peril in drawing a
direct line between Scheffler’s
inclusion on and success with
the Ryder Cup team and what’s
happening here. Who cares?
Draw that line.
“When I go home and I
practice and prepare, I’m
preparing knowing exactly what
it feels like to be on kind of the
biggest stage in golf with
cameras and whatnot on you,”
Scheffler said. “It’s a lot
different when you’re actually
preparing knowing what it feels
like for you because you can
hear somebody describe it, and
Tiger [Woods] can talk about
being in the moment, but you
don’t really know what it feels
like for you until you actually do
it.”
He did it at the Ryder Cup. He
is doing it at the Masters. At the
18th hole Saturday, he could
have lost both his ball and his
mind. Instead, he found the first
and settled the second.
“It’s nice to be in control of
the golf tournament,” he said.
In the short term, that might
yield a green jacket. In the long
term, it will be more important
that he’s in control of his
emotions. He has the game and
the attitude. What that brings
Sunday, at this point, is merely
possibility.doesn’t even gain him any
standing back home.
“My friends are still making
fun of me,” Scheffler said. “I’ve
still got to do my chores at
home. Nothing really changes.”
That’s an apt way to describe
how Scheffler attacks his golf:
Nothing really changes. Friday
and Saturday at the Masters
were unusually blustery, with
down puffer jackets far more
appropriate than wicking
polyester golf shirts. Scheffler
built a lead as large as six shots
not by bombing it by everybody,
not by hitting iron after iron
stiff, not by rolling in 30 footers
— but with a little of everything.
“Nothing he really does blows
you away statistically or
anything,” Leonard said by
phone Saturday. “He has a way
to get the ball in the hole. And
it’s like none of this success is
affecting him in any way
negatively — or, really,
positively.
“I knew he was a great junior
golfer. That rarely translates
into success at this level. I’d love
to sit here and sound really
smart and say I saw this coming.
I didn’t.”
Except it has been building.
In September, U.S. Ryder Cup
captain Steve Stricker had one
remaining wild-card pick for his
side. Scheffler had no PGA Tour
wins and only four top-10
finishes in his previous 16
tournaments. But those top 10s
revealed something about
Scheffler’s affinity for more
significant moments: a narrow
loss in the final at the World
Golf Match Play; top-eight
finishes at the PGA
Championship, the U.S. Open
and the British Open; and a
third place at the Memorial.
Stricker could have selected
Patrick Reed, a Masters champ
and Ryder Cup hero from years
gone by. He instead chose
Scheffler, who had no such
standing. It was both revelatory
about what peers saw in
Scheffler’s game and life-
changing for a player still inbeers. His plan for a nervy
Saturday night: kick back and
watch a few episodes of “The
Office” with his wife.
“He isn’t necessarily defined
by golf, so I think that will serve
him well because obviously golf
is very difficult and you’re going
to have great stretches and
you’re going to have some bad
stretches,” said Sam Burns,
another 25-year-old who
probably is Scheffler’s best
friend on tour. “At the end of the
day, he knows that golf isn’t
everything. It’s not who he is.
It’s what he does.”
It’s what he’s doing better
than anyone in the world at the
moment. The No. 1 position in
the Official World Golf Ranking
not only doesn’t beget a green
jacket or even get you
recognized on the street. Itstay in the moment,” Scheffler
said earlier in the week,
“because I don’t know how long
I’m going to be able to play golf
out here.”
That sounds like something
uttered by someone at 45,
wondering how long he can
hang on. Scheffler is 25 and
decidedly on the rise — at the
moment the top-ranked player
in the world. Two months ago,
he hadn’t won an event on the
PGA Tour. Now he has won
three of his past five.
Yet understanding that such
status could be fleeting has to be
grounded in those days learning
how very good golfers become
elite professionals, both in work
and humility. He is married to
his high school sweetheart and
passes the time between rounds
here with board games, notHe just kind of took things in.
But he wouldn’t just sit there all
day long, either. He was working
a lot on his own stuff.”
If Scheffler was the sponge as
a kid, he is wringing out every
drop of what he learned all
around Augusta this week. His
lead headed into Sunday’s final
round is three shots over
Australian Cam Smith, five
shots over South Korean
Sungjae Im and seven shots
over Irishman Shane Lowry and
South African Charl Schwartzel.
It is not the blowout Saturday
seemed destined to produce.
What it is: an opportunity for
Scheffler to show those who
don’t know him — read: non-
golf nerds — the game he built
and the mind that allows him to
put it on display.
“For me, it’s best to probablyaugusta, ga. —
At times on a
frigid and fraught
Saturday, Scottie
Scheffler
appeared in the
process of
strangling
Augusta National
Golf Club, a Masters assault that
might seem built on the Texan’s
pulse, which may not register on
an oximeter. It seemed that way
when he was rolling along with
a six-shot lead. It seemed that
way at 18, when an army of
people was foraging for his golf
ball in a thicket.
Once found, a reasoned
discussion began.
“I really feel like I’m allowed
to move the pine straw,”
Scheffler flatly said to a rules
official, a moment before asking,
“Am I allowed to replace that?”
His heart rate, in all of that?
“It went up when I saw that
they couldn’t find the ball,”
Scheffler said afterward. “But
then it went back down when
they found it.”
This could have been a
calamity. He handled it calmly
— and then unleashed a
blistering 3-iron of some 240
yards that served as a
tourniquet. He finished with a
bogey. He staved off much
worse.
What Scheffler is doing —
leading the Masters at 9 under
par after a mostly steady 71 in
which he courted disaster but
coolly staved it off — would
appear to be a continuation of
the golf he has played over the
past two months. What it is,
really, is merely an unveiling of
the foundation Scheffler built at
Royal Oaks Country Club in
Dallas. It is a place where pros
roam. Even at 9 or 10, Scheffler
would settle in on the range. He
would watch. And he would
work.
“He was pretty quiet, as he is
now,” said one of those pros,
Justin Leonard, a major
champion and Ryder Cup hero.
“He didn’t ask a lot of questions.
After wayward shot, front-runner stays calm, and that may carry him to a title
Barry
Svrluga
MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS
Top-ranked Scottie Scheffler, who has won three of his past five events, is taking aim at a green jacket.so this is cold for me.”
The Texan weathered all of it
unflappably at a tournament Tex-
ans often have weathered well,
until his round went deeply into
the trees. Then he reemerged and
weathered the day some more
and said, “Outside a couple holes
on the back nine, I could have had
a great round, but I had a really
good round today.” He had kept
his head toward Sunday and an
ultimate chance to try to keep his
head.“Obviously your body doesn’t
move as well,” Kisner said, “and
the ball feels like you’re hitting
concrete there. You just have no
feel. It’s a place you need a lot of
feel around the greens. So 50, 55
[degrees] and blowing 20 [mph]
is not a lot of fun.”
“I had hand warmers all day,
but I don’t think they helped, to
be honest,” Smith said.
“Four hand warmers,” McIlroy
said. “I’m getting soft. I’ve been
living in Florida for too long now,“He’s got a five-shot lead,” Kev-
in Kisner said at one point. “I
mean, as long as he keeps his wits
about him, he’ll walk with it.”
And: “He’s making all the mo-
mentum putts right now.”
Where players raved, they also
had suffered.
“The ball wasn’t going very far,”
Woods said.
“Yeah, I think it’s just the
gusts,” Rory McIlroy said.
“It was just so cold,” said Thom-
as, who shot a fine 72.“The golf he’s played the last
couple of months, it’s nuts,” Justin
Thomas said. “It seems effortless,
at least when I’ve watched. It’s not
like anything he’s doing is like,
‘Oh, my gosh, that’s unbelievable.’
It’s just he gets it around so well
and he’s so mature in his golf age,
if that makes sense. He just seems
like he’s been out here for a long
time. People joke he’s got the look
to him like he’s been out here a
long time as well, and I think he’s
proving it right now.”Players finished rounds and
raved about Scheffler.
“We all wish we had that two-,
three-month window when we
get hot,” Woods said of Scheffler’s
bolt from No. 15 in the world in
mid-February to No. 1 by late
March, with three tournament
wins in five previous events, “and
hopefully majors fall somewhere
along in that window. We take
care of it in those windows. Scot-
tie seems to be in that window
right now.”Scheffler knocked it back to two
feet for one of those commend-
able bogeys in life, his lead would
hold at three.
He would have that over
2 8-year-old Australian and reign-
ing Players champion Cameron
Smith, 9 under par to 6 under par,
with promising 24-year-old Ko-
rean Sungjae Im not so far away
at 4 under par. After a day of
biting cold that left only seven of
the remaining 52 players under
par — Shane Lowry and Charl
Schwartzel at 2 under, Justin
Thomas and Corey Conners at
1 under — Scheffler made his 71
and remained the only player in
the field to shoot in the red all
three days.
Told that Dottie Pepper had
commented on CBS about his
tranquil approach to the hiking,
Scheffler said, “I think that’s defi-
nitely something I’ve learned
over time.”
“Knowing that bad things are
going to happen and responding
in a positive way is really impor-
tant,” he also said, speaking of golf
and maybe even life.
It was hard for any outsider to
spot any bad things coming his
way through recent days. He got
all the way to No. 15 on Saturday
before he so much as frowned. He
did have a carnival of a back nine,
but recovery helped define it. He
bogeyed the par-3 No. 12 but
birdied the par-5 No. 13 (his sev-
enth birdie in a row on par-5s
since Friday), bogeyed Nos. 14 and
15 (thus the frown at that three-
putt on a par-5) but birdied No. 17
on an approach to five feet that
looked like some form of bliss.
For one thing, he had his cad-
die, Ted Scott, who carried for
Bubba Watson during Watson’s
two Masters wins in 2012 and
- “He doesn’t really miss
much out there,” Scheffler said,
and also, “He doesn’t really react
to much.”
All the long and football-cold
afternoon before that, in weather
that seemed suitable for maybe
Georgia and Clemson to play over
yonder, the question had gone,
basically: How big could Schef-
fler’s lead get? Might he wake
Sunday with a five-shot lead like
champions Jack Nicklaus in 1965,
Arnold Palmer in 1964, Herman
Keiser in 1946? Might it get to six
like — gulp — Greg Norman, who
wound up distant runner-up in
1996? What about seven, like Seve
Ballesteros in 1980? Surely not
eight (Raymond Floyd, 1976) or
nine (Tiger Woods, 1997 ).
MASTERS FROM D1
Sche±er goes into the pines, but he emerges looking okay
MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS
“The golf he’s played the last couple of months, it’s nuts,” Justin Thomas said of Scottie Scheffler, here putting o n the 11th green in his r ound of 1-under 71. He leads by three.