Scottie Scheffler and the never-ending march to sporting excellence
For just a few minutes in the final round of the British Open at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland last month, Scottie Scheffler showed that he could be vulnerable. That his computer brain, which uses microseconds to crunch multiple variables — wind speed, fairway tilt, green gradient, ball lie — and throw up the best club / direction / swing-meter combos, could indeed malfunction. That the undisputed champion of golf was perhaps human, after all.
It was the eighth hole. The American was seven shots in the lead, towering over the field in the manner that Tiger Woods used to in his prime, and another routine par-4 lay ahead. But Scheffler’s tee shot veered right, landing in an ominous fairway bunker from where the best option was to somehow find safety. Here, Scheffler miscalculated again. He decided to take on the steep sand trap, failed to clear the lip, and spiralled to his first double bogey of the week.
The lead was down to four now, and a buzz went around the course. “Scottie shot a 6 on No. 8, did you hear?” the oh-so-British galleries hummed. Golf majors are famous for final-day meltdowns, and who knew what Scheffler’s suddenly-malfunctioning computer brain might throw up next.
The ninth hole showed, however, that the mistake had only revved up his CPU. A perfect tee shot on the short par-4 was followed by an audacious approach close to the pin, and a simple birdie putt to restore the balance. From there on, right through the back-nine, there would be no mistakes. And a few subtle flexes, when he picked up another birdie on 12 and went close on 16, to show why he is the best.
Scheffler’s inexorable march to greatness – at 29, he is a US Open away from a golf Grand Slam, has won the last two Players Championships, and has an Olympic gold — is making pundits wonder: Is he as good as Woods was in his prime?
The short answer: He’s better.
The long answer…
Sport thrives on a unique blend that combines the dopamine kick of a perfectly crafted film with the unpredictability of real life. It is unscripted and unforgiving, and therefore wondrous and electrifying. At the highest level, it becomes an unadulterated measure of human excellence: never stagnant, constantly pushing boundaries.
This progress is easier to chart in some disciplines than in others. Records are bettered by grammes not kilos in weightlifting, by microseconds in sprints and nanoseconds in Formula 1, and by centimetres rather than inches in the high jump and pole vault.
In most sports, the evolution can’t be measured in hard statistics. And so we wonder: Could a tennis champion in the 2020s have beaten a champion from the 1980s? Would a great fast bowler from the 1970s be hammered all over the park by a modern-day IPL swashbuckler? Could a heavyweight boxing champion from our era hold a candle to Muhammad Ali, George Foreman or Joe Frazier? Is LeBron James better than Michael Jordan?
These are irrelevant questions that reflect the confusion between sporting greatness and pure sporting skill. Icons exist in a time and place as products of history, geography and context. Their legendary status is determined by how they were the first to break barriers (Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile), how they changed the paradigm of their sport (Don Bradman playing from both the front foot and back foot to get a hundred before lunch), how they kept raising the bar for years (Sergey Bubka’s 14-year domination as a world-champion vaulter), or how they achieved the seemingly impossible (Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10 on the uneven bars).
They are not the best there ever will be, but pathbreakers who allow future generations to pick up from where they left off. What use would it be for the quest for excellence if those who followed did not try to push the limits further?
This onward march was best illustrated in 2011. When Tiger Woods made a comeback after his roughly three-year-long hiatus, he found a strange resistance. Younger players who had entered the fray in his absence, such as Jason Day, Rickie Fowler, Martin Kaymer and Dustin Johnson, were not stampeding off the course in fear at the sight of him.
Many had picked golf inspired by his phenomenal first win at the Masters as a 21-year-old, and had learnt to hit like him, train like him, think like him. Tiger was the benchmark; they had stepped out ready to beat him.
Over the next decade, these golfers battled each other — and the likes of Jordan Spieth, Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, and old warhorses Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson — until Scheffler emerged as the dominant face of a new era.
So, just as Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz could have held their own against the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic triumvirate at their peak, Scheffler could have taken on Woods, and even beaten him. He has a long way to go before becoming the legend Woods is, but in pure skill, yes, he’s probably better. For, nostalgia notwithstanding, sport keeps getting faster, higher, stronger.
