he won again<\/a>.<\/p>\nOf course, professional golfers want to win tournaments, and Scheffler has now won 18 of them in his PGA Tour career, all in the past four years.<\/p>\n
But given his exploits this season\u2014major championship victories at the PGA Championship and British Open, points-leading bonuses at the end of the season\u2014he might be excused if he had let up last week. Human nature is a strong pull. Players many times do not put all their effort in, for various reasons. Nobody would have been bothered if Scheffler had, say, finished 12th.<\/p>\n
Instead he turned a four-shot 54-hole deficit into another victory.<\/p>\n
He invoked Woods when asked about that type of fortitude. And he told a story about the 2020 Masters\u2014one he has mentioned previously.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy biggest takeaway from playing with Tiger was the amount of intensity that he took to every shot, and that\u2019s something I\u2019ve talked to a lot of guys about,\u201d Scheffler said of the final round at Augusta National that year, the first time he was paired with Woods, who was the defending champion and well out of contention especially after making a 10 at the par-3 12th\u2014his highest score ever in pro competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cTiger was just different in the sense of the way he approached each shot, it was like the last shot he was ever going to hit,\u201d Scheffler said. \u201cI think he birdied five of the last six, and it was like, what\u2019s this guy still playing for? He\u2019s won the Masters five times. Best finish he\u2019s going to have is like 20th place at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Woods seemed on his way to shooting 80 or worse, but finished with a 76, which was one better than his then-worst score of 77 shot during the third round of the 1995 Masters\u2014when he was 19 years old and playing the event for the first time. He shot scores of 68-71-72 and that 76 to finish in a tie for 38th.<\/p>\n
But Scheffler, who spoke about this same round three years ago, was impressed.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe hit some of the best iron shots I think I\u2019ve ever seen, still to this day. It was really cool for me to see him just kind of flip the switch. He hit one really nice shot into 13 and all of a sudden it\u2019s game on. I knew he was frustrated. I didn\u2019t know him well enough at the time to kind of rib him about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was actually joking with him [at a tournament in 2022] about that round. And he was like, \u2018yeah, that really pissed me off\u2019 about No. 12. That\u2019s one of those special things that makes Tiger, Tiger. A lot of guys would have thrown in the towel there for sure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe shot he hit into 16 was probably the best iron shot I\u2019ve ever seen. The wind was blowing hard. Pin was on top right. Greens were soft. He hit this no-spinning cut 7-iron. No matter what direction the wind was going to go, I felt he was going to hit that ball to a foot. It was just so purely struck. Not a lot of spin. Fading toward the pin. It was pretty amazing.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
And that one round\u2014the only time they\u2019ve played together\u2014stuck with Scheffler. Don\u2019t give up. Don\u2019t mail it in. Woods made a career of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI admired the intensity that he brought to each round, and that\u2019s something that I try to emulate,\u201d Scheffler said this week at East Lake. \u201cIf I\u2019m going to take time to come out here each week\u2014like it\u2019s not an easy thing to play a golf tournament. If I\u2019m going to take a week off, I might as well just stay home. I\u2019m not going to come out here to take a week off. If I\u2019m playing in a tournament, I\u2019m going to give it my all. That\u2019s really all it boils down to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scheffler\u2019s victory at the BMW gave him five in a year for the second time, a first since Woods did it in back-to-back years in 2006-07.<\/p>\n
Of course, Woods won five times or more in 10 different seasons and made back-to-back five-win seasons routine.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Scheffler was hitting the brakes on Tiger talk.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think in the simplest form, I think it\u2019s very silly to be compared to Tiger Woods,\u201d he said. \u201cI think Tiger is a guy that stands alone in the game of golf, and I think he always will. Tiger inspired a whole generation of golfers. You\u2019ve grown up watching that guy do what he did week in, week out, it was pretty amazing to see.<\/p>\n
\u201cI talk about a mental change I made because I played one round of golf with him in a tournament. I\u2019ve only played one round of tournament golf with Tiger Woods, and it completely changed the way I look at how I play tournaments.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t tell you the look on his face when we got to the first green, and I look over, and we\u2019re in 20th place, kind of playing, yada, yada, yada, and I look over and this guy is just locked in, and I was taken aback. I was like, holy smokes. Then we got to the second hole, and he had this chip shot and he looked at it like it was an up-and-down to win the tournament. I\u2019m like, this is incredible. I\u2019ve never seen anything like this before in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scheffler apparently took good notes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA \u2014 Scottie Scheffler is clearly uncomfortable with any comparisons to Tiger Woods and again this week did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-100964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}