The third meaning of the word scandal in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language succinctly says: Unrestraint, shamelessness, bad example. But the fourth reads with no less precision: Amazement, astonishment, admiration.
From the third we can still rescue the unrestraint to catalogue the performance of Scottie Scheffler (-15) in the last round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, in which he has played something else and somewhere else: a 66-stroke card without apparently messing up his hair, the best record of the tournament on a day when only four players have been able to go under seventy strokes.
The fourth meaning, in any case, nails it. Scheffler, in weeks like this, when his putter stops nagging, is a walking scandal. Amazement, astonishment, admiration.
As you can’t have everything, the truth is that the exhibition of this extraordinary World Number One has deactivated part of the excitement and drama that was expected. The other candidates, it is true, followed the script to the millimetre: blood, sweat and tears to keep making pars and in the best of cases scratch a meritorious victory against such a demanding field. Scottie, who had started with a birdie on the 1st, then went on to efficiently save some more or less delicate situations (holes 2 and 4, for example), before rolling out the carpet as if it were nothing. Because this man, whose tee to green game is unparalleled right now, has that, he does everything with astonishing naturalness. As if it didn’t cost. As if it had no mystery. As if the bunker shot on hole 13, with the water behind and the ball slightly sunk in the sand, was really that simple (he left the par practically given).
What a way to aim. To measure distances. To get the strategy right. What a way to make the exact shot he has just devised in his head a reality. What a range of resources and abilities around the greens. What an extraordinary player, only 27 years old, capable of standing upright on the world throne for more than seventy weeks without even being one of the hundred best putters in the world, although at this point, today, it is worth making a nuance and even a warning: this Sunday he has nailed it on the Bay Hill greens, to the point of having finished the tournament in fifth position in the SG:Putting statistic; we will have to see if it is a circumstantial situation or if on the contrary it is the beginning of a trend, in which case we can all start crossing ourselves in the face of the avalanche that is coming.
Scheffler is, moreover, an adorable champion precisely because he does not aspire to be one. He will end up stealing all our hearts without intending to. That is the magic of Scottie. A fabulous golfer who does not need any adornment: fourteen clubs, a tempered tone polo, a cap to use, golf shoes from the corner shop, a sixties hairstyle, a seventies beard that he has let grow out of pure laziness, a car like your cousin’s, holidays like your brother-in-law’s, his lifelong girlfriend, a celebration dinner at McDonalds, if you’re not careful… An honest guy (it’s obvious), a humble worker (the facts speak for themselves), a role model (although his swing seems rather inimitable)… And a fierce competitor, let’s not forget, although today his victory in a tournament with a Grand flavour, with a five-stroke lead over Wyndham Clark (-10) and six over Shane Lowry (-9) has seemed like a bucolic walk.
