PGA Championship most-mortem

In which we measure Scottie Scheffler for immortality

Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash

Scottie Scheffler is boring, I guess, if you’re looking for an after-dinner speaker or a corporate salesperson.

I’m not. If you think crazy brilliance and ordinary, mainstream American decency living inside the same body is interesting, which I do, the dude is fascinating.

After dominating the PGA Championship last weekend in Charlotte, Scheffler is now the best golfer in the world as clearly, if not by the same margin, as Tiger ever was.

It’s Scheffler’s third major, at age 28¹. It seems like he has more than that, which is an odd compliment.

In strokes gained, a now universally valued metric that compares a tour player to the average performance of his colleagues on every shot, Scheffler is currently at 93.4 for the 2025 season. In strokes gained tee-to-green, he’s at 76.7.

World No. 2 Rory McIlroy, in the midst of a brilliant season in which he’s won three times including a major, is at 55.26 and 37.7.

No, those numbers aren’t as good as absolute peak Tiger², but it says here no one ever, in any sport, has been as good as peak Tiger.

However, peak Tiger didn’t last nearly as long as it should’ve. He tore down and redid his golf swing, multiple times, for no good reason³. He physically trained for what should have been a 30-year golf career as if he was a cross between a Navy SEAL and an NFL edge rusher. There were, infamously, off-course issues.

If he’d made better choices, it says here, he’d be looking back on, conservatively, 25 majors and 100 tour wins.