Golf Isn't Everything, Says the World's Best Golfer

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Scottie Scheffler is a pretty unique athlete. Even as we live in a day and age where sports stars — and everyone else — talk far more openly about mental health, here’s someone who’s talked for years now about the fact that the sport he dominates is really not his priority. What’s more, he appears to mean it.

It should not come as a surprise anymore to hear him say this. And yet, it’s quite striking, and bracingly reflective, and honest, when he gets a softball question about success at a presser and says… this.

I’ll transcribe a few passages for who don’t want to watch:

It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for a few minutes. That euphoric feeling only lasts a few minutes. I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf, to have an opportunity to win (a tournament)… and I win it. You celebrate. Get to hug my family. My sister’s there. It’s such an amazing moment. And then it’s like, okay, now, what are we gonna eat for dinner? Life goes on…

At the end of the day, this is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart. There’s a lot of people who make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life. And then you get there and all of a sudden, you get to number one in the world, and what’s the point?

‘What’s the point?’ puts a particularly fine point on this. What’s the point indeed? You might be confused to hear this come out of the World No. 1’s mouth.

The less charitable take would be that Scheffler almost sounds bored by his success. There’s almost something (Good; Nay, Great!) Will Hunting about it. Here’s Scottie Scheffler, putting for birdie again, saying — not shouting, because he’s Scottie Scheffler — “Do you know how fucking easy this is for me?”

He’s accomplished most of what any pro golfer would set out to accomplish. As Neil Paine wrote yesterday, he’s chasing peaks not seen since prime Tiger Woods.

But what it really made me think about was the Luka trade, and all the conversation around that, the very fortunate outcome for the Dallas Mavericks notwithstanding. Because a lot of the justification for the trade was the idea that Luka, in the eyes of the Mavericks brass — who, lest we forget, cited Shaq as their paragon of ambition — just didn’t ‘want it’ enough.

I wrote about it at the time, and my feelings on the matter remain unchanged. TLDR: there is clearly more than one psychological profile that can produce success in sports, much as the acolytes of Jordan and Kobe seem to insist otherwise.

Scottie Scheffler seems to be on this wavelength. No one’s questioning that he works, but in much the same way that Jokic said, after winning the title and Finals MVP in 2023, that “basketball is not the main thing in [his] life,” Scheffler says there are bigger things than golf. Both cite family. Call me crazy, but I think both might be onto something.

Maybe I’m just overly deferent to my own English major, but in response to the people I’ve met — you know who you are! — who think you can’t learn anything from fiction, I’ve always thought that this is the sort of fundamental truth about life that a novel was uniquely positioned to tell, and in a way that Atomic Habits or some such simply can’t. Many of our greatest works have elements of this — from The Great Gatsby to The Awakening to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary — all led by protagonists who have what should fulfill them, but doesn’t. It’s not hard to imagine any one of them, or a host of other real or fictional people, saying much the same about their circumstances, however nice they seem or feel.

“What’s the point?” is not, in my opinion, as defeatist a question as it seems. If you were a high school coach, and some 16-year-old came up to you and said that, you’d probably scold them for their lack of focus or something. And you can also imagine that the reaction to this would be very different if Scheffler was — no disrespect — Rickie Fowler. Someone who had not succeeded as much as they once seemed destined to. If Fowler said the same thing, you just know that some aggro talking head would be coming out of the woodwork to say “See? He just didn’t want it bad enough.”

I think Scheffler, by comparison, was pretty clear on how bad he wanted it. He was just asking himself the next question, which is why. You hear him say in the same presser that he still loves the grind. He enjoys putting in the work. And he doesn’t seem ungrateful for his success either. I would say he “respects the game” or what have you.

He just sees, with clear-eyed candor, that his family’s more important to him. Hot take, but I think that’s great. Good for him. We have a culture that tends not to lionize that perspective in our best and brightest.

So far, it doesn’t seem to be impacting his short game much. He’s the favorite to win the Open Championship this weekend. (And by the way, point of order? Confusing name.) But what I’m gathering is that Scheffler’s pretty sure he’s already won.

⚾ Cal Raleigh wins the HR Derby, unhampered — no, quite possibly bolstered — by the nickname “Big Dumper.” I have one friend who finds this nickname undignified — his words — and another who says, having just learned of it, Cal Raleigh has instantly become his favorite baseball player. Who’s right? It’s not for me to say. But I will say this. I’m not sure any of the All-Star Games are actually cool or worthwhile, but I have to give it to the MLB for getting the closest.

⚾ Brief Cardinals aside: the pitcher they took from Tennessee at #5, Liam Doyle, seems like a Mad-Max-caliber psycho. In a good way, one would hope. Doesn’t really seem like my type of dude, if I’m being honest, but I guess we’re stuck with him now. Sigh. On the bright side, he does have an 80-grade fastball. I’m told that’s good?

🏀 You guys want to see what Bradley Beal had to say to the Phoenix Suns after officially snagging that buyout we talked about last week? This was his IG post:

The less said about his tenure there, the better. Looks like he agrees!

🎾 Really happy for Jannik Sinner, and for tennis, that he roared back from a devastating loss at Roland Garros with a semi-dominant win at Wimbledon over Carlos Alcaraz. I’ve written about this rivalry all too recently (below), and I think it’s great for the sport that it not become overly one-sided. So, go Jannik.

Also? I’ve heard this match described as un-fun, which I guess is true in the narrowest sense that we didn’t see Alcaraz at the peak of his wizardry. But! I’m sorry, what’s not fun about 110+ mph groundstrokes? It wasn’t like he was hanging out at the baseline either. He came up a lot. I dunno. I had fun.

What really stands out about these two is that they’re both quite clearly very nice dudes. They even seem to like one another. Along the same lines of the Scheffler example, I’m not sure that we need our athletes to hate each other in order for them to want to win a major. Kinda seems like they’re doing fine without.

On a personal note, I got to see Sinner play at the U.S. Open last year in one of the last things I ever got to do with my dad. He dismantled Tommy Paul while the most annoying fan I’ve ever sat next to kept screaming “Tommy!!!” at every opportunity before getting scolded by the crowd. And I mean screaming. It was loud. Anyways, Bob found that pretty funny, and so did I. He would’ve loved watching these last two tournaments.