This is getting a bit ridiculous: you can’t really talk about the level of competition – depth of field – on the PGA Tour with a straight face anymore. Not that you’re wrong: there have never been more players on that tour who are capable of having a good week and winning. Except that no matter which player makes a run for it, he almost always comes up short of one guy who can do no wrong, one bloke who is just in a different league from everyone else.
In fact, if Scottie Scheffler is there on the starting grid for the race, then it’s more than likely that he’s going to lap the field. Consider these gobsmacking stats: of the eight Signature Series, events in the recently concluded PGA Tour season, Scheffler teed it up seven times. And the world number one won four of those events: the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the RBC Heritage, the Memorial, and finally, last month’s Travelers Championship. In the three events that he didn’t win, Scheffler finished tied fifth (The Sentry), tied-sixth (AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am), and tied-10th (Genesis Invitational).
In case you missed the memo, the Signature Series is a set of limited-field events on the PGA Tour, which have bigger purses ($20 million) and offer more FedExCup points to the players. The field is limited to 70-80 players and comprises top performers from the previous season and the current season. Four of these events don’t have a cut: no coincidence since the entire raison d’etre for the series’ conception was for the PGA Tour to respond to the challenge posed by the LIV Golf Tour.
But I digress. Scheffler’s win ratio in these events was 57%, and, in case you’re wondering, he had other wins as well. There was a Major: he donned the Green Jacket at the 2024 Masters Tournament and an unofficial Major – the Players’ Championship to boot. That’s Scheffler’s record in just the last four months; it’s more than most of his peers will win in their entire careers and is almost enough to get a player into the Hall of Fame. The last player to win six events before July was Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. You see what I’m getting at…we’re running out of things to say about Scottie Scheffler, the golf media is.
The closest someone got to Scheffler was Tom Kim. Kim and Scheffler beat the field by two strokes at the Travelers Championship, which in itself is rare these days, and Scheffler got the better of Kim on the first playoff hole. The other newsmaker at The Traveler’s Championship was long hitter Cameron Young. On the penultimate day of the event, Young made seven birdies and two eagles at TPC River Highlands to shoot a historic 11-under 59. The ironic bit about Young’s performance was how he wasn’t quite ‘feeling it,’ before he teed off. “Didn’t feel particularly awesome,” Young said of his pre-round warm-up. “I chunked a few less on the range than I did yesterday.” Now pros don’t chunk it, so it’s a fair conjecture that something was badly off with Young’s game. But whatever it was sorted itself out by the time he made his way to the first tee. Young birdied the first two holes and then stuck a pitching wedge for a gimme Eagle on the third and then added another birdie at the 4th to start five under through four holes. And that pretty much set the tone for the day. Young shot a four-under 66 on the final day to finish tied-ninth for the event.
Akshay Bhatia, the Indian-origin player has been on a roll ever since he won the Valero Texas Open in May this year for his second PGA Tour victory in a playoff with Denny McCarthy. Both of Bhatia’s wins have come in playoffs, suggesting that the young player has the mental strength to back up his extraordinary action through the ball. Bhatia is amongst that crop of young players who hold nothing back as they swing through the golf ball. Bhatia finished tied fifth at the Travelers Championship and continued in the same stride at next week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic. Bhatia shot an eight-under to lead the field after the first round and was involved in an exciting tussle with English player Aaron Rai over the weekend. Just when it looked like Bhatia had finally put one past Rai, he missed a putt on the 72nd hole to tie 2021 champion Cam Davis, who had stealthily come out of nowhere to take the clubhouse lead. Davis, who won the event in a three-way playoff in 2021, would not have to go to the trouble on this occasion. The heartbreak for Bhatia will hopefully add to the young player’s mettle, and remind him that on the PGA Tour, it’s not over until it’s over. Even Scheffler would agree.