For almost a year from March 2023 to March 2024, Scottie Scheffler failed to win a PGA Tour tournament, which is a hard thing to imagine as he picked up his fourth Major in as many years at Royal Portrush on Sunday. The American was much the same golfer as he is today tee to green, but he could not get the ball in the hole.
It reared its ugly head at the Memorial tournament in June 2023, when he gained 20.7 strokes over the field tee-to-green, the second-best performance in the PGA Tour era, yet only finished third. It was because he lost 8.5 strokes on the greens. The previous week at the Charles Schwab Challenge, he finished 71st out of the 72 players who made the cut in putting.
Woes on the green continued early in the 2024 season, with no solution in sight, when Rory McIlroy made a rare appearance in the US commentary box at the Genesis Invitational and was asked about Scheffler’s putting.
“We’ve all been through it,” McIlroy said on CBS. “I’ve certainly been through my putting woes during the years, and for me going to a mallet was a big change.
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“The mallet just gives you a little bit more margin for error and that to me gave me confidence I could go forward with that knowing that even if I don’t put a perfect stroke on it, the ball’s not going to go too far off line. I’d love to see Scottie try a mallet, but selfishly for me, you know Scottie does everything else so well.”
In his next event, Scheffler made the move to the mallet, a larger-sized putter head than the average one you get in the shop, and the rest is history. According to No Laying Up podcast, he has made $49 million on the course since the switch, $8 million for the Comcast Top 10, plus $25 million for the Tour Championship, a total of $82 million. With similar bonuses to come at the end of the season and the FedEx Cup which he will be favourite for, the chances are he will have made $100 million in 17 months since the move.
Watching Scheffler warm up on the putting green in Ireland three years apart, at the 2022 JP McManus Pro Am at Adare Manor and the 2025 Open Championship at Portrush, and there was a noticeable difference. In 2022, there was a slight hesitancy and awkwardness, the routine was longer and less comfortable. Before his final round on Sunday, Scheffler took ball after ball under the watchful eye of caddie Ted Scott and putting coach Phil Kenyon and rolled one after the other into the cup.
Scheffler was right to be confident. After all, he was best in the field in putting at the Open, his weakness now a weapon. It is no surprise that the rest of the field was left in awe, deflated and not sure where to go next to beat him.
In the final round, there were two 16-foot putts for par on the sixth and seventh that kept the round going and inspired Tiger-like fist pumps from Scheffler. Not much gets that sort of reaction out of Scheffler but he knows more than anyone, they were the sort of putts he missed a lot two years ago that he is no longer missing.
More than just the change to the mallet was his work with putting coach Kenyon, which started in September 2023, but is only perhaps starting to truly come to fruition this season.
Scheffler reserved special praise for the Englishman, formerly a putting coach of McIlroy, in his press conference, and he was one of the first to embrace Scheffler after winning at Portrush.
“He’s a tremendous coach and a great friend as well,” Scheffler said.
“I had a couple years out here on Tour where I didn’t putt as well as I felt I could have. I knew it was in there. It was a matter of figuring out the right things to go and find it.
“Phil’s been just tremendous for me. Kind of helped me be more athletic, giving me the confidence I need to go out there and just be committed to what I’m doing.”
Kenyon helped with green reading and helped change his grip, but the mallet putter particularly helped him to line up his putts.
Having ranked 162nd in ‘Strokes Gained Putting’ in 2023, losing 0.301 strokes per round, he is 22nd on the PGA Tour now, gaining an average of 0.362 strokes per round. That is almost 2.5 strokes per tournament better on the greens than he was, often the difference between winning and losing.
“You know me, I get asked a question and I give an honest answer. Honest to a fault,” McIlroy said a few weeks later as Scheffler started a run that would lead to 11 PGA Tour victories, three Majors, an Olympic gold medal and an unassailable lead in the world rankings.
On Sunday, he said Scheffler was the bar that the rest were all trying to get to. McIlroy may have helped unleash a beast that he wishes was back in its cage.
