It’s been going on three years now that Scottie Scheffler has made golf look really easy, even when it can be really hard. The latest example came Friday and involved one of the game’s most picturesque holes, the par-5 18th at Pebble Beach.

Scheffler was two under on the day and seven under overall heading to the last hole of his second round at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am when he got a little quick with his swing off the tee. As the ball soared toward the rocks and beach left of the fairway, Scheffler, making his first start on the PGA Tour in 2025 after cutting his hand with a wine glass while making homemade ravioli at Christmas, needed a little bit of good fortune to avoid a big number. If he couldn’t find his ball amid the rocks, he would have to go back to just 40 yards shy of the tee marker (where the ball crossed the penalty area), take a penalty stroke and play his third shot.

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But Scheffler thought he saw a ball and so he hoofed it down a rocky path to the beach, amazingly finding his drive amid a pile of rocks. And if he hadn’t already caught a break by having his ball avoid splashing in the water, he got a second one by knowing that the Rules of Golf could help him have a reasonable second shot despite the precarious position of his ball.

In 2019, when the USGA and R&A underwent their modernization of the Rules of Golf, officials updated Rule 15.1, allowing players to move loose impediments anywhere on the golf course instead of only in certain areas. So it was that Scheffler was free to move the rocks that were in his way to play a second shot, so long as he didn’t cause his ball to move. That allowed him to get rid of several big ones behind his ball and cleared the way for him to safely hit a wedge over the seawall and get the ball back into the fairway.

“[If I hadn’t been able to remove the rocks], I don’t know if I would have been able to get my ball up over the rocks in front of me,” Scheffler said. “I didn’t really take that good of a look at it. I would have assumed I probably wouldn’t have been able to get it up over the top. I think I would have probably tried to not hit it [if I hadn’t been able to move the rocks], because if I mess it up, I’m back still on the tee box hitting like my fourth shot.”

You can see it all play out here in this video:

“With the old rules I think I probably would have gone back to the tee just because of the way the rocks were around my ball and the unpredictability of not being able to get it up over the top,” he said. “But to be able to move some rocks definitely made the shot easier.”

From the fairway, Scheffler had 179 yards to the hole and then hit his approach to 40 feet. He two-putted for his par to close out the two-under 70, leaving him seven shots back of 36-hole leader Sepp Straka.

Insert your favorite get out of jail pun here.

“I’ve made good pars,” he said. “That one was more lucky than anything.”

Suffice it to say, it was another amazing example of Scheffler avoiding a round-wrecking number, something he’s become a wizard at as he has ascended to World No. 1 and which Rory McIlroy noted earlier in the week.

“I’ve never — and this is anyone, this is Tiger, this is in the history of golf,” McIlroy said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a golfer play as many bogey-free rounds as Scottie. He just doesn’t make mistakes. It’s so impressive.”

Impressive indeed.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com