After bid for 59, Scottie Scheffler shared this surprising standout memory from his last sub-60 round

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Scott Scheffler admits that he doesn’t exactly possess the mind of an elephant when it comes to golf. The victories are remembered in bits and pieces, and from what the World No.1 has expressed in the past, he probably dwells more on the losses than wins.

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The old kind of adage in golf is you have to be really smart or really dumb,” Scheffler was saying on Friday at the Travelers Championship. “I don’t want to call myself dumb, but some of that … my long-term memory is not as sharp. Maybe it’s a little bit easier to kind of put some things behind me.”

That would be the case for the only 59 that he’s shot on the PGA Tour. It came in the 2020 Northern Trust at TPC Boston. Scheffler says he remembers the final birdie putt he made to shoot what was then the tour’s 12th sub-60 score, but little else from the round.

What he does remember clearly? Dustin Johson shot 60 in the second round, scored 30-under-par overall and beat Scheffler by a whopping 13 shots.

“That one didn’t work out how I intended to, but it was a nice round,” Scheffler said.

So that was the uber competitive Scheffler’s big takeaway on Friday when he missed a birdie putt on the 18th hole at TPC River Highlands in trying to join Jim Furyk as the only players to shoot two official rounds of sub-60. He ended up with 11 birdies and a bogey in scoring 10-under 60 to take a 16-under clubhouse lead into the weekend of the $US20 million signature event.

Scheffler enjoyed one stretch each on the front and back nines in which he made four straight birdies. The second of those came from the 13th through 16th holes. He needed one birdie in the last two for 59, but missed the green with his approach at the par-4 17th and ultimately needed to make a six-foot par putt to keep his hopes alive. At 18, Scheffler drove into a left fairway bunker, hit his second shot to 26 feet, but saw his putt for 59 miss a couple of inches to the right after not breaking enough.

“After birdieing 15, I was kind of like, oh, yeah, maybe nine-under now. A few more, you could shoot 59,” Scheffler said. “At the end of the day, I was very focused on just my execution out there.”

He did have one funny thought that put the entire round in perspective. Scheffler was well aware that Jim Furyk, who happened to be commentating in the booth for Golf Channel, owned the best score at River Highlands with the all-time best tour score of 58 in the 2016 Travelers.

“It would be cool to shoot 59, but somebody has already shot 58 here, so it’s not even the course record,” Scheffler said. “You know, Jim kind of takes away a little bit of the special 59 when you are losing still.”