THE SOCRATIC SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER
THE 2025 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP
AS THE 153RD OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP PREPARES TO TEE-OFF AT ROYAL PORTRUSH, THE GOLFING WORLD WILL BE TRANSFIXED. AND IF SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER’S PRE-TOURNAMENT MEDIA CONFERENCE IS ANYTHING TO GO BY, EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED.
Initially, it was about as unremarkable as it gets; not dull, you understand, but definitely workaday fare. “How are your preparations?’ (‘Yeah, going well’.) ‘How’s the course looking?’ (‘It’s in good shape’.) ‘How about links’ golf?’ (‘It suits my strengths.’) 'Jet lag?’ (‘I just try to ride it out’) ‘What books are you reading?’ (‘My Bible’s pretty much it’). And so on. Don’t get me wrong, he was engaging, affable, thoughtful but it was mundane stuff. Put it this way, no one was holding the front-page.
But Scheffler was then asked what was the longest time he’d celebrated a success or contemplated a crushing loss, not in itself an obviously provocative or philosophical question but one which, out of absolutely nowhere, prompted the best golfer on the planet to take off his clothes, lie down on the couch and lay bare his existentialist soul. It was, if you like, the inverse equivalent of Søren Kierkegaard plonking himself down in the Royal Portrush Media Centre to talk about his long irons.
‘ I think it's kind of funny,’ Scheffler said. ‘It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling. And you win it, you celebrate. You get to hug your family. It's such an amazing moment. And then it's like, okay, now what are we going to eat for dinner?’
‘This is not a fulfilling life,’ he went on. ‘It's fulfilling from a sense of accomplishment but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart. There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life. And then you get there, then all of a sudden you get to number one in the world, and they're, like, what's the point? I really do believe that because, you know, what is the point?’
Finally, wonderfully, here was a golfer - and not just any old, cack-handed, Tin Cup golfer but a three-times Major Champion with $65 million in prize-money under his mattress - speaking not just to me but for me. Indeed, how many times have inveterate, hopeless hackers such as myself missed a three-footer for a quadruple-bogey eight or carved a driver out of bounds into a cow’s backside and thought; ‘what’s the point?’ Or words to that effect. Certainly, for those of us who’ve always felt that the sole purpose of golf is to offer a better understanding of the utter futility of life, here was Scottie Scheffler, no less, confirming it.
At least, that would be the superficial takeaway. Except that Scheffler wasn’t disrespecting his sport or diminishing his achievements, rather trying to put both into some kind of perspective. ‘I'm blessed to be able play golf,’ he said. ‘But if my golf ever started affecting my home life or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or my son, that's going to be the last day that I play out here for a living. This is not the be-all and end-all. This is not the most important thing in my life. That's what I wrestle with, why is this so important to me? Because I'd much rather be a great father than I would be a great golfer. That's what's more important.’
Scheffler, of course, is a man of deep faith - a mainstay of the Park Cities Presbyterian Church back home in Dallas and a tireless worker for charity - who attends Bible Study on tour with his caddy, Ted Scott, whom he hired because ‘I really want to work with a Christian. That’s how I try to live my life’. Raised in a bustling household with a stay-at-home Dad, you can understand why faith, family and fatherhood is such a staple of his life.
But for all that, there’ll be those out there - and there are always ‘those out there’ - who’ll be twisting their wet towels and snapping them in Scheffler’s direction: ‘Seriously, a world-famous, Olympic gold medal-winning, multi-millionaire golfer bemoaning his lack of professional fulfilment? Well, boo-hoo. Come and work with me down the baked bean factory and I’ll show you what a lack of professional fulfilment feels like.’
And there’ll doubtless be others, too, questioning his continuing motivation for the game. Is he burning out? If, as he says, he turns up at the US Masters or The Open each year thinking to himself; ‘why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? I don’t know,’ then why does he do it? More accurately, how does he do it? But - flip that on its head - maybe that inner existentialism is his secret sauce; it’s what keeps him so famously unflustered when all around him are flapping about a fatter pay-check or their place in golfing history.
Certainly, he insists the competitive juices are still there and always have been. As he once said, he revels in beating his wife at board games and only reluctantly accepts the fact that whenever he tees up a golf ball then, statistically, he is more likely to lose than to win. ‘It sucks. I hate it, I really do,’ he says. ‘I'm kind of sicko; I love putting in the work, I love getting to practice, I love getting to live out my dreams. But at the end of the day, sometimes I just don't understand the point.’
No question, it was an extraordinary media conference, punctuated by the nervous laughter of seasoned sportswriters struggling to believe their own ears and, perhaps, wishing they’d spent less time on the plane to Belfast brushing up on the latest PGA Tour putting statistics and rather more time reading Satre or Nietzsche. Just how many g’s are there in existentialism?
No question, Scheffler’s thoughts were uplifting in the sense that he was, effectively, saying that the day job doesn’t define him; if you like, whose dying whisper to their loved ones is going to be: ‘hey, guys, you know what; I just wish I’d spent more time at the office.’ But it was also somewhat disquieting. I mean, if you can be as riotously successful as Scottie Scheffler and still not feel fulfilled - ‘does it … [golf] … fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart? Absolutely not’ - then what hope is there for the rest of us?
Maybe what Scheffler needs - maybe what we all need - is a better work/life balance. The upside is he can afford it; the downside is it ain’t easy to strike in his peripatetic profession. But if you win big one week and all the next week promises is another airport, another hotel, another city and another set of questions - ‘hey, Scottie, you’ve won two Majors but how about the Fed-Ex’ - then it’s scarcely surprising you’ve no time to smell the roses. Get off the treadmill and take a breather. Make time to celebrate success and to share it with those who make it possible. At the very least, make it last more than ‘two minutes’. There’s a lesson there for all of us.
Will Scheffler come to regret his refreshing, almost eye-popping candour? Hopefully, not, although having thrown the media seagulls a juicy sardine, you can now guarantee they’ll come back honking for more and while he may have the beard of a true philosopher - it’s as compulsory as a curate’s bicycle clips - perhaps, in public at least, he’ll restrict his further thoughts to five irons and false-fronted greens. But as Socrates said; ’the unexamined life is not worth living’; so fair play to the Socratic Scottie for at least taking a look and - who knows - encouraging the rest of us to do the same.
