The press conference of Scottie Scheffler at Quail Hollow after being crowned as the new champion of the PGA Championship, the third major of his career following his two victories at the Masters Tournament, left some interesting and at the same time amusing moments. Among them, the confession by the world’s Number One of the ‘stress’ he felt at certain moments of his round due to… the course’s scoreboards!
The famous electronic ‘leaderboards’ of the Charlotte course, in North Carolina, do not only show the top players of the tournament, but also cycle through screens with the rest of the leaderboard. And it so happened that every time the world’s Number One had the chance to stop for a second to look at one of them to see what his lead over Jon Rahm was, it was never on the first screen.
“I didn’t relax until I got the ball over the water on 17. I felt that, after that, I could get to 18 with the lead I had. In this final stretch, you can never be complacent. I saw that Jon and I were tied when I was playing 10, I think. I believe he birdied 10 and 11. I think he was 9 under par. Is that right? Then I was able to birdie 10, which gave me a one-shot lead at that moment,” Scheffler began to explain.
“But the leaderboards from 10 to basically 14 didn’t show me what I expected them to show. They were different from those at Augusta, where the leaderboard is always up there. These boards changed, as if they were from different groups. If I looked, they were around the 25th place. I’d look again and think: ‘Come on, guys, show me what’s happening at the top. If people want to know who’s in 30th place, they can check their phone. I need to know what’s happening at the top’… So I didn’t see much on those holes,” Scottie confessed.
So he had no choice but to prepare for the worst and bring out his best game: “I just prepared for Jon to emerge and play the last nine holes. He’s a great player and a great champion, he knows how to step up in important moments. I was convinced he would also play the last nine holes very well. So I did everything possible to keep executing my shots and stay in my little world.”
Finally, the world’s Number One found calm in that anxious situation… “When I was going down 15, I had just birdied 14 to go 11 under par, and I saw him in the bunker on 16, and he didn’t get it up. So I told myself that if he was at 9 under par… I think I finally saw the leaderboard on the 13th green. And it was like that. He was at 9 under and I was at 10. And he was playing 15. The best he could do was a bogey there, because I didn’t hear any crazy cheers, he was 9 under par; if he birdied here, he was going to go far,” he explained.
From there, the situation was very much in favour of the golfer from Ridgewood to seal his first triumph in the PGA Championship in style: “Then, as I walked down 16, I saw he was eight under par and I was 12, so in my head I said: ‘I can’t control what others do; if I make three pars, the golf tournament is mine,’ and that’s what I focused on.” A mental strategy to avoid disconnecting at the end…
And how does Scottie prevent the atmosphere from affecting him and leading him to make mistakes? “I think it’s inevitable to hear it when they’re shouting at you. It’s a bit strange. I don’t know why people need to shout at you when they’re so close. But at the end of the day, I’m focused on the task at hand and I have to execute it.” A method that worked for him once again to reaffirm his status as the best player in the world, expand his record… and start heading towards the dream of the Grand Slam.
