– The terrible fact was that John Mills, a 69-year-old man residing in Crestwood, a small town about ten kilometres north of the Valhalla Golf Club, lost his life before dawn on May 17, as he was heading to his post at the PGA Championship (he worked for one of the tournament’s suppliers, apparently in the security area), run over by a vehicle, one of the many shuttle buses at such a large event.
Then, what came next, with the world’s number one involved in an incident in which, as the evidence and common sense suggest, everyone, police officers and player, got tangled in a mess of misunderstandings and confusion. Scheffler did not want to talk about it when he attended to the media after signing that 66-stroke card, a crazy record, let’s be clear, under such circumstances. He didn’t want to, but he ended up recounting the whole grim experience and his exposure turned out to be an example of sensitivity towards Mills and his family, first, and also of honesty and simplicity.
Alejandro Rodríguez, special correspondent for Tengolf in Louisville, hit the nail on the head in his chronicle when referring to Scheffler and finally going one step further: “We’ll see, however, if it’s not tomorrow when the drop in all the adrenaline and tension accumulated comes,” he wrote. The heavy digestion of the incident, of the whole chain of events, would have actually started after leaving Valhalla with his 66 in his pocket and it’s no nonsense to consider that it might be this Saturday when he really pays for it…
Scheffler described last Tuesday that feeling of peace and satisfaction that invaded him: there he was, on the porch of his beautiful house mulling over the fact of having married his high school girlfriend and having started a happy and healthy fatherhood, with the green jacket in the closet… Suddenly, the same life, which was temperate and complete a few seconds ago, turns around and hits you in any way like a wounded beast. Lessons that never stop being learned. And, seen what has been seen, the least of it is that he spent a while in a cell or that today he does a little worse on the golf course…
– Tiger is not up to compete with the best in a Major, or probably in any other tournament. But we buy his speech, once it was confirmed that he had missed the cut: he is not as far away as it might seem. Aside from his physical shortcomings, which are obvious, it is more about a certain competitive rust. The problem is that in high competition sport, and indisputably more if we talk about golf, a little bit of something can be a lot. A detail: yesterday Tiger throws away any effort to make the cut in two holes where he signs two triple bogeys for a very simple reason: Woods did what Woods never did, which is to chain one mistake to another. If he had played to make the bogey in both cases, nothing worse than a bogey would have come out of either way, and we might even have seen some par, pure through and if we get stupendous.
Will we see Tiger winning a golf tournament of some weight, that counts for the world ranking again? The answer is still YES… And from this horse, for now, the undersigned does not intend to get off.
– Golf is a fascinating puzzle of a thousand pieces that one assembles and reassembles, because it is not enough to assemble it only once, what can we do. Jon Rahm still has them all, the thousand pieces, which is saying a lot. There are those who do not keep even seven hundred, although they still manage to get by. What is costing him more is to fit them with the naturalness, lucidity and consistency he used to. Let’s be honest: something fails in the whole process since he has gone to LIV Golf. The process that goes from the simplest routine on an anonymous workday, to the moment the winning putt is holed in front of a crowd on any 18th hole. And it is very likely that this something that fails, or does not quite mesh, has very little to do with the purely technical area. Jon does not compete with the same ease, with the same ‘angel’ (and we say ‘compete’ and not ‘play’ with all the intention). Neither in LIV, where his results are at least notable, nor in the Majors, where it is obvious that they have not been.
We take up what was written above: in high-level golf, a little bit of something can be a lot. For better and for worse.
