[Photo: Mike Mulholland]
There is nobody quite like Scottie Scheffler for seeing the big picture in a pre-tournament press conference. The same isn’t always true on the course, as we saw with his rant at the Memorial, and it’s not even always true in his media appearances after rounds, where he can get chippy, but seated in a more formal setting, he’s about as thoughtful as professional golfers come. As an example, take his treatise on the fleeting nature of victory (and even happiness) from last year’s British Open; it was a masterclass in perspective and self-reflection.
Related: The art of whining: Scottie Scheffler and the upside of a good excuse
We got a little bit of that, albeit less pronounced, on Tuesday at Shinnecock, where the inevitable topic of discussion at his press conference was the prospect of winning a career Grand Slam. Scheffler has his first chance to complete the legacy-defining achievement at this year’s U.S. Open, but in terms of its meaningfulness to his own life, he was typically insightful and wouldn’t grab at the obvious answer.
“It’s kind of a funny thing,” he began. “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, ‘OK, now Scottie’s won the Grand Slam, he’s won all these golf tournaments. Now, where do we go from here?”
The answer, as always with Scheffler, is about the impossibility of achieving true satisfaction with any result on the golf course, no matter how impressive.
“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,” he said. “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, my career is essentially over, and I’ve accomplished everything I could want to. But I think the goal posts are always just moved further and further.”
As an example, he referenced his own past. He was never the best college player, and when he turned pro, players like Collin Morikawa, Matthew Wolff and Viktor Hovland were better, faster. Viewed through that lens, his career so far represents a massive overachievement, but just as that fact hasn’t made him complacent or happy, so will the career slam.
“At the end of the day,” he went on, “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 … 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.”
[Photo: Cliff Hawkins]
What’s fascinating about Scheffler in these moments is that you never get the sense that he’s trying to say the right thing or putting on an act to seem more Zen than anyone else. He fully admitted that winning the U.S. Open would be a dream, and that he thought it’d bring more eyeballs to golf and be a net good for the sport. But time and again, he wholeheartedly rejects any notion of fulfilment through trophies and it never seems anything but sincere.
Even more so, perhaps, in a year that hasn’t lived up to the extremely high standards of the recent past. When asked how he’d evaluate 2026 so far, he admitted it had been a year of “almost.”
“I feel like I’ve been close most of the year,” he said. “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…maybe I’ve just been a touch dull, because I think statistically I think I’m maybe leading the FedEx Cup (he’s second, behind Matt Fitzpatrick), I think I’m leading the strokes gained statistics (he is), so by no means is it a bad year.”
“Is it up to the play I’ve had the previous couple of years?” he added. “Probably not, but it’s not far off.”
As we’ve seen with visible frustration at various points this year, the competitive drive is certainly not lacking, nor is his preparation. He’s been watching highlights of the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock because he heard the course was playing similarly, and his longest answers related to course setup, he defends the wider fairways because narrowing them turns tournaments into bomb-and-gouge affairs, and thinks the fescue rough and small greens will more than make up for any perceived ease off the teeand he gave a discourse on the difference on the kind of wind you deal with on Long Island vs. Pebble Beach vs. his home in Texas.
But whether his relative struggles this year continue at Shinnecock, or he finds a way to return to top form and win the career slam, the message Tuesday was the same as it’s been throughout his career: Scottie Scheffler will stay Scottie Scheffler.
