PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — There is a universal truth in this game: Golf can never be fully mastered. Rarified excellence can be achieved, but to see all the pillars of the game firing at once, coupled with the glue that is the golfer’s mind, is the exception, not the norm. A player can feel complete, but that state is fleeting, even for the best.
On Sunday at Royal Portrush, Scottie Scheffler won the Open Championship by four shots to capture his fourth major overall and second of 2025. What the Texan did in County Antrim, and what he has done consistently over his four-year run of dominance, represents the type of golf that can begin to cause slivers of doubt about that universal belief. Only Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player have won the Open, Masters and PGA Championship before age 30. On Sunday, Scheffler joined them.
“I never thought I’d see a player as close to Tiger as this man currently is,” Jim “Bones” Mackay, who caddied for Phil Mickelson for 25 years, said on NBC’s broadcast of the Open on Saturday.
There were 1,197 days between Woods’ first and fourth major wins. There were 1,197 for Scheffler as well.
As Scheffler stormed to his four-shot 54-hole lead by making almost every putt within 10 feet and salvaging pars from places others would consider jail, he made the championship feel like it was already over. It was. Few players have had that effect on a leaderboard in the history of this sport. Scheffler, now three-quarters of the way to his career Grand Slam, is one of them.
“I grew up waking up early to watch this tournament on TV, just hoping and dreaming I’d get a chance to come play in this championship,” Scheffler told Sky Sports afterward. “It’s pretty cool to be sitting here with the trophy. It’s hard to put it into words.”
Scheffler began the championship by hitting just three fairways and still posting a 3-under 68. He followed it up with a links golf masterclass: a 7-under 64 on Friday in intermittent rain, complete with eight birdies, to take a one-shot lead over Matt Fitzpatrick. However, it was during Saturday’s round, an unusually calm day at the seaside Royal Portrush, that Scheffler’s otherworldly play made the outcome of the championship all too predictable. Scheffler shot a third-round 67 to lead the tournament by four shots over China’s Haotong Li. It gave Scheffler an 81.1 percent win probability, according to DataGolf.com. A jarring statistic began to circulate: Scheffler had converted his last nine consecutive 54-hole leads to victory.
On Sunday, he came out of the gates exactly how he was supposed to, with a birdie on the opening par 4. Another one came at the short par-4 5th. When Scheffler got to the eighth, he showed himself to be human, failing to escape a pot bunker and walking away with a double bogey. Of course, he picked himself back up with an immediate birdie at No. 9 to post a front-nine 34, reaching 16 under for the tournament. At the turn, he led by five.
Scheffler’s double-bogey on No. 8 gave his competitors fleeting hope. (Warren Little / Getty Images)
Scheffler’s chasers did what they could to make up ground. The entire course and country pulled for Rory McIlroy, their hometown hero, one pairing ahead. Chants for McIlroy echoed throughout the Royal Portrush property, several directed at Scheffler himself, but they did not propel the Northern Irishman as he would have liked. McIlroy shot 69, and finished seven strokes behind Scheffler. American Ryder Cup hopeful Harris English, for the second time this year, finished second to Scheffler in a major, behind by six strokes at the PGA and four here.
Scheffler’s back nine was just as steady as his front, so much so that his two-putt pars almost felt like bogeys. After a birdie on No. 12, Scheffler finished six pars for a round of 68. He shot in the 60s for all four rounds at a major for the first time.
“Playing this game is a battle within yourself all the time to try and get the most out of your game and yourself and this week, I did a really good job hanging in there mentally and playing some good golf,” Scheffler said.
Coming into the 2025 season, Scheffler, 29, was expected to continue his crusade, which is why the opening months of the calendar year posed a new challenge. In 2024, he won seven PGA Tour tournaments, including the Masters, Players Championship, Tour Championship and four signature events. Scheffler also claimed the Olympic gold medal in Paris. The predictions rolled in. Could Scheffler win eight this year, even nine?
Perhaps that’s why Scheffler’s restless and defensive edge revealed itself this winter, when a hand injury stalled his return to the PGA Tour and his intended results weren’t transpiring. He missed all of January and went without a win in February, March or April. His frustrations boiled over at the Players, and when asked about those emotions becoming visible, Scheffler retorted: “You’ve played golf before, right?”
“It’s just one of those things,” Scheffler said. “I’m a competitive guy.”
If the rest of us were antsy about Scheffler’s early-season performance, imagine how he felt. It didn’t take very long for the tone in Scheffler’s voice to subside with three victories in four starts in May and June, including Scheffler’s third major victory at the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow and a hometown win at the Byron Nelson by eight shots.
Scheffler now has four majors before his 30th birthday. (Mike Frey / USA Today Sports)
The intensity of Scheffler’s competitive fire is one of his more underreported attributes. Watch the 6-foot-3 Dallas native walk the fairways at any tournament, and you’ll notice that unless he’s hitting a golf shot or conversing with his caddie, his gaze is consistently directed downward. He commits to his task by maintaining an elite level of focus, but he uses his surroundings as fuel — even though it might not look like it.
“The bigger the moment, the more it really means something, the more his juices get flowing,” his coach Randy Smith said in a conversation with The Athletic ahead of the Masters. “A lot of people will sit there and get nervous and skittish. But Scottie doesn’t get that way. He looks forward to it. He embraces it. It’s like he runs to it.”
That’s the piece that makes Scheffler a constant threat. If Scheffler isn’t hitting the ball how he wants to, he figures out a way to get it into the hole. If he’s missing putts, his ball-striking makes up for it. He always finds a way, and his competitors know that.
“Look, Scottie Scheffler is inevitable,” McIlroy said. “Even when he doesn’t have his best stuff, he’s become a complete player.”
Scheffler has been cementing himself in the game’s history for some time, but those records, all the results — that’s not what motivates the world No. 1. Scheffler began the week sitting down for a press conference and creating a five-minute-long viral moment in which he stated that his accomplishments on the golf course are unsatisfying. Scheffler finds fulfillment elsewhere, in his role as a family man and in his religious faith. The disposition that Scheffler displayed with that soliloquy was just another explanation for why and how he has seen so much success: The game isn’t attached to his identity. That perspective makes handling golf’s constant mental turmoil a lot easier. Even Scheffler loses a lot more than he wins.
“Yeah, this is amazing to win the Open Championship, but at the end of the day, having success in life, whether it be in golf, work, whatever it is, that’s not what fulfills the deepest desires of your heart,” Scheffler said on Sunday evening. “Am I grateful for it? Do I enjoy it? Oh, my gosh, yes, this is a cool feeling. I can’t wait to get home and celebrate this championship with the people that have helped me along the way. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t fulfill the deepest desires of my heart.”
The truth is, we already knew all of this about Scheffler. This is not the first time Scheffler’s mentality has proven to be uniquely beneficial. It’s not the first time his peers have spoken about his baffling ability to never go away. It is especially unsurprising to see Scheffler blow away the field, strolling into the clubhouse with a lead that was never going to be challenged.
Scheffler’s trendline has made itself apparent for quite some time. Royal Portrush just provided the stage for him to continue rising.
(Top photo: Andrew Redington / Getty Images)
