Scottie Scheffler ambivalent on Grand Slam glory
Scottie Scheffler at Shinnecock Hills on Wednesday – image USGA / Dustin Satloff
It took Rory McIlroy just nearly nine years between his 2014 Open Championship and the 2025 Masters Tournament to complete the Grand Slam of Golf but this week if Scottie Scheffler was able to join six other golfers as Grand Slam Champions then it would have been just under a year since his win at the Open Championship which had him just the US Open short of joining Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlory in completing that feat.
Just over four years ago, in 2022, Scheffler broke through for his first major title when winning the Masters that year. He then won the Masters again in 2024, but he closed in on the Grand Slam when he won the Open and the PGA Championship in 2025, and as the favourite this week at Shinnecock Hills, he could well complete the remarkable milestone in extra quick time.
By his standards, Scheffler is having a lean year, but only by his standards, as a win, three runners-up and two 3rd place finishes would be a dream for any other of the game’s greatest players.
Scheffler spoke earlier this week about the possibility of such a career milestone by the age of 30 (he is actually 30 on Sunday) and had this to say.
“It’s kind of a funny thing. It’s like, yeah, if I win this tournament, that would be amazing, but I think then I show up the next week, and it’s like, okay, now Scottie’s won the grand slam, he’s won all these golf tournaments. Now, where do we go from here?
“So no matter what, I think as a player and as a professional athlete, you’re never going to live up to the expectations of people. I think sometimes that’s a little bit of the fallacy in our sport is like, if I win the U.S. Open, then I’m going to be satisfied. I’ve won all the tournaments, and my career is essentially over, and I’ve accomplished everything I could want to accomplish. But I think the goal posts are always just moved further and further.
“If you took my career from where I was as a college player, I would have extremely overachieved being in this position. I wasn’t the best college player. I had a decent college career, but by no means was I a can’t-miss type of prospect.
“The guys who turned pro at the time were better than me. There were guys, you look at Collin Morikawa and Hovland and Matt Wolff, those guys were winning tournaments immediately when they turned pro, and I had a little bit of a slower burn in terms of the development of my career.
“For me, would it be a dream to win the U.S. Open? Of course. But at the end of the day, like I — the grand slam has never been a motivating factor for me. I always just wanted to be the best version of myself, and that got me this far.
“So when it comes to this golf tournament, like I said, I’m going to step on the first tee and remind myself I’ve done everything I possibly could in order to play well, and now it’s just a matter of going out there and trying to execute and kind of going back to enjoying the competition versus feeling like you have to win for some reason.”
The comments resembled earlier comments on the impact of winning last year’s Open Championship as he tried to keep a lid on expectations, or perhaps he sees golf is only part of his life, along with family and faith and not the be-all and end-all, although I guess it is easy to say that when in his position.
“I always felt like The Open (British) would be one of the hardest ones for me to win because, as I said earlier, I didn’t have a lot of experience playing over there in the UK.
“Growing up, I played a lot of golf here in the States. I didn’t really play much internationally at all. For me, not having the experience on links golf, I would have said that would probably be the most difficult for me to win.
“I always had self-belief. I always believed that I could win golf tournaments out here. I always had that belief in myself that I could accomplish some nice things in the game of golf.”
So how does the world number one (by some margin) rate his game this season?
“I’d say I feel like I’ve been close most of the year. I feel like I just haven’t been as sharp as I needed to be. I think the margins in this game are so small. For me to be winning a lot of tournaments, you’ve got to just be really, really sharp.
“I feel like maybe I’ve just been a touch dull, because I think statistically I think I’m maybe leading the FedExCup, I think I’m leading the strokes gained statistics, so by no means is it a bad year. Is it up to the play I’ve had the previous couple of years? Probably not, but it’s not far off.
“I would say a lot of it is just the sharpness, and that can come from a variety of things. But sometimes, like, I’m either not making the momentum putt, or I make a sloppy bogey somewhere, or I hit an iron shot a touch thin instead of really solid, and all of a sudden it ends up in the bunker, and I make bogey instead of hitting a really good shot and making birdie.
“The margins are just so small, I think in this game. I feel like this year I’ve been what I would describe as close.”
Scheffler outlined his thoughts on Shinnecock Hills, which he is playing competitively for the first occasion, having not qualified for the event in 2018. This will be his 9th US Open Championship with a best of runner-up to Matthew Fitzpatrick in 2022. He was also 3rd in 2023.
“It may look like a links course. I don’t think it really plays like one. Links golf is really interesting in the sense that once you get the ball onto the green, most of the greens are pretty flat and they’re fairly slow compared to these greens, just because you have so many elements. Those golf courses are naturally always firmer as well.
Links golf is one of those things where once you get the ball on the green, it’s actually fairly easy. There’s not a ton of slope on the greens. These, you can be in the middle of the green and be like, ” Wow”, I don’t know how I’m going to two-putt from here. I think it may look like links golf, but doesn’t necessarily play like it.
In all of these shots here, there’s a lot of false fronts on the greens, and it’s not really easy to run it up. On this golf course, the challenge is you still have to play a lot of shots into the air and then control your spin in the wind as well. That’s really the challenge here.
I think links, a lot of times, you can hit just really, really low shots and kind of run it around everywhere. Around this golf course, I’m not really sure that necessarily works. It may, on a couple of holes, but for most of the holes, you’ve still got to be hitting the ball up in the air in order to hold the greens.
