PHILADELPHIA — You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you feel it.
The one thing we’re missing.
The one blockbuster event that would truly take us to nirvana.
Sure, we’ve been spoiled with spectacles the last few years in golf, from St. Andrews to Pinehurst to Augusta National.
But…
Somehow…
We’ve still never seen a true battle between Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy. Can this week’s PGA Championship at Aronimink be the one?
For the past four and a half years, Scheffler and McIlroy have been the dominant two forces in golf. They are the buoys. Scheffler has won four majors, and McIlroy two. They’ve racked up 86 combined top fives in that time, 111 top 10s. There have been 114 PGA Tour events with at least one of Scheffler or McIlroy in the field since Jan. 1, 2022. They’ve won 30 of them.
But no major duels. No leaderboard shifting Sundays with both in contention. Somehow, according to The Athletic contributor Justin Ray, there hasn’t been a single final round in which both Scheffler and McIlroy began the day within three shots of the lead since the 2023 BMW Championship. So when Scheffler made a late run at last month’s Masters to get within one shot of McIlroy’s win, it awoke us to the realization of what we’ve been missing.
Four of the last five major championships have been won by these two men, yet they are two commanding dreadnoughts passing each other in the golfing night.
They will be forever intertwined in this era, two Nike-wearing, TaylorMade-swinging all-time greats pushing and prodding to get the best out of the other. McIlroy has called Scheffler the bar everyone is trying to reach, emulating Scheffler’s practice of aiming at conservative targets in the run-up to the 2025 Masters. Scheffler has watched McIlroy’s resilience and longevity with constant admiration.
Scheffler has just one career win with McIlroy in second — the 2022 Masters when McIlroy shot a backdoor 64 to jump from ninth to second.
McIlroy has just two with Scheffler second — the 2022 Tour Championship, as Scheffler collapsed, and last month’s Masters, when Scheffler’s Sunday 68 propelled him from T7 to one back of the lead as McIlroy still had four holes to go.
We didn’t get that playoff Sunday in Augusta, but it made us want it more. It made us realize how rare it’s been to see them contend together, how we don’t even have a proper feeling for how it would go. Who would get into the other’s head? Whose style would benefit most? Who is the true killer?
Even when they finally met for Sunday singles at the Ryder Cup last fall, Europe had a seven-point lead; there were 11 other matches on the course that all counted the same, and it unfortunately felt a little meaningless.
At first, you might say it never happens because of Scheffler’s Tiger-like victory paths. He hardly ever finds himself in “battles.” If he has it, he wins. Simple as that. His two Masters victories in 2022 and 2024 were by three and four shots, respectively. His PGA Championship rout had a five-shot gap. He won the Open Championship by four. In fact, three of those he led by three shots after 54 holes. He runs away with tournaments.
I’d listen to that argument if Scheffler didn’t have nine major top 5s in this window, if he didn’t have 17 major top 10s before he turned 30. Scheffler is always somewhere in the mix.
Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy faced off at the 2025 Ryder Cup, with the former winning 1 up. (Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)
Yet somehow, the lone weeks he doesn’t contend in majors are McIlroy’s juiciest ones. At the 2022 Open at St. Andrews, Scheffler finished just outside the top 20. At the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, Scheffler struggled to a T41. Scheffler finished fourth at the 2025 Masters, but he entered Sunday seven shots back. There was no contention.
Meanwhile, McIlroy exclusively — infamously, perhaps — finds himself in duels in his late-career renaissance era. McIlroy vs. Cameron Smith at St. Andrews. McIlroy vs. Wyndham Clark at LACC. McIlroy vs. Bryson DeChambeau at Pinehurst. McIlroy vs. Bryson again at the Masters, before it turned into McIlroy vs. Justin Rose. Yet outside that Tour Championship comeback, it’s never been with Scheffler. And if we’re being truly honest, the 2022 breakout version of Scheffler was still just a prologue to the historic levels of consistency he’d reach in the four years since.
As strange as this all feels, it’s helpful to remember the primary iconic rivalry of this century: Tiger vs. Phil.
For the better part of 15 years, these two were the faces of the sport — twenty-three majors between them, and 147 total wins. We think of this epic rivalry, yet they faced off so much less than our foggy memories recall.
They played together in the final group of the 2001 Masters as Woods finished off the Tiger Slam. They were together in the 2002 U.S. Open final round, but Woods had a four-shot lead that Mickelson whittled down to two. In the 2002 Masters, Mickelson, Woods and Retief Goosen were in a 54-hole battle until Woods pulled away. And we shouldn’t leave out the 2009 Masters, when Woods and Mickelson were paired in the third-to-last group and went on electric runs on the front nine but failed to get close enough.
In reality, most of the greatest Tiger-Phil duels were at regular-season PGA Tour stops like Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach and Doral. The two only finished top five in the same major five times in their peaks from 1997 to 2013, and really only one or two of those were really head-to-head.
Funny enough, all of Tiger’s greatest Sunday duels were actually with the usurpers. Bob May. Chris DiMarco. Rocco Mediate. Y.E. Yang. Not exactly Ernie Els, Vijay Singh or Phil.
It’s a reminder that golf is a game built on aggregates. It’s 72 holes across four days. It’s 20-something starts and four majors over a year. While calling Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy a rivalry is disingenuous, the need to compare two players is rarely about going at it in one tension-filled round. It’s often about two golfers playing so consistently for years that we think to start analyzing who’s better.
Golf is funny like that. Here are the two heavy favorites to win this week’s PGA Championship. Betting odds give an implied probability that there’s a 30 percent chance one of these two will win at Aronimink. Yet suggesting they should meet in the final group feels like an outlandish unlikelihood.
It’s not really about them facing off with a title on the line.
But … could you imagine?