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It wasn’t a fair fight.
Scottie Scheffler benched his blade putter and showed up with a new mallet to the gun fight that was the 2024 Arnold Palmer Invitational, and it was as if the rest of the field only had water pistols.
Seeing Scheffler leading the field in SG: Off-the-Tee, SG: Tee-to-Green and SG: Around the Green has become old hat on the PGA Tour. But when the 27-year-old Texan ranks as one of the best putters, good luck. In Tiger Woods fashion, Scheffler cleaned up on the par-5s, combining to play those 16 holes at Bay Hill Club & Lodge in 12 under. He played his final 25 holes without a bogey to claim a five-shot win over Wyndham Clark with a 72-hole total of 15-under 273. It was the largest victory at Arnie’s Place since that Tiger guy won by the same margin in 2012.
How dominant was Scheffler? Only three other players broke 70 in the final round when Bay Hill played to a 73.2 scoring average. Scheffler’s final round not only was the low round of the day by two shots and the only bogey-free round of the day but matched the low round of the tournament. Irishman Shane Lowry, who played alongside Scheffler in the final round, could only look on in awe. “There’s probably only a couple of players in the world that can live with him playing like that,” he said. “Not sure I’m one of them.”
Scheffler arrived at Bay Hill as a past champion, having won in 2022, and armed with a TaylorMade Spider Tour X mallet putter. He managed to post 2-under 70 in Thursday’s opening round despite continuing a trend of underwhelming performances on the green.
Through his first five starts heading into the Arnold Palmer Invitational, he ranked 144th in SG: Putting after ranking 162nd the season before, and the struggle continued in the opening round from the get-go; he missed a 6-foot putt on his opening hole of the tournament. Scheffler lost more than 1.5 strokes putting in a round for the seventh time in 20 rounds to that point, according to stats man Rick Gehman. When a reporter questioned him about the putter change, Scheffler didn’t have time to talk; he made a beeline for the putting green.
“When I got to the practice range, the discussion was not what are we going to fix. It was how well that I did,” Scheffler explained. “And that all goes back to the process that we’re working on and it’s not results-based.”
The results backed up Scheffler’s belief on Friday. He posted a second-round 5-under 67 to join a record-setting six-way tie at the top of the leaderboard after 36 holes. The lead group was whittled to two on Saturday – Scheffler and Lowry, the 2019 Open champion who was competing on a sponsor invite in the signature event. They started the final round in a tie for the lead at 9-under par, but it still was shaping up to be a dog fight to determine who slipped into the winner’s red alpaca cardigan. Clark, the winningest top-10 player in the world over the past 12 months, was just one shot back. Hideki Matsuyama trailed by two in his first start since shooting a final-round 62 to win the Genesis Invitational a month before, as was Will Zalatoris, a former Arnold Palmer scholar at Wake Forest who was on the rebound from back surgery. Rory McIlroy was lurking four back after surging into contention by tying Bay Hill’s back-nine scoring record in the third round when he became the first player to drive the green at the dogleg-right, par-4 10th hole.
Scheffler had other ideas. He sucked the drama out of the final round early, rolling in a 13-foot birdie putt at the first and never relinquished the lead. He holed a 6-foot par putt at the next. After Clark pulled within one shot with his birdie at the par-5 sixth hole, Scheffler lobbed a pitch to 7 feet at No. 6 for a birdie of his own and holed another 7-footer on the next hole to save par. Scheffler, the only player who started Sunday in the top 10 to break par on Bay Hill’s front nine, took a three-shot lead to the back nine after Clark’s bogey at No. 9.
Like Palmer before him, Scheffler stayed aggressive and stepped on the pedal, wedging to 8 feet at No. 10 and sticking another short iron to 6 feet at No. 11 to open up a commanding lead. At 15, his early raise of the putter followed by fist-pumping after drilling a 35-foot birdie putt into the heart of the hole was Tigeresque.
The win was especially meaningful for Ted Scott, who has been on Scheffler’s bag for all of his victories and at the time called it his favorite one after seeing what he termed too much emphasis on Scheffler’s shortcomings with the putter and not enough celebration of his other skills. NBC analyst and putting guru Brad Faxon crystallized the overreaction to Scheffler’s putting woes. “We’re examining (Scheffler) like he’s going to the doctor’s office,” he said.
“The noise gets so loud it can distract you,” Scott added.
In his previous caddie role, Scott worked for Bubba Watson and he recalled how after winning the Masters in 2012, Watson struggled to handle his new-found attention and his game suffered. “It was so noisy,” Scott said.
Then, Watson settled down and in 2014 won the Masters again. So did Scheffler a few weeks later at Augusta National along with defending his title at the Players Championship as part of a seven-win season, plus an Olympic gold medal.
“The key for Scottie being at the top of his game is how do you deal with all the noise and play with what’s inside his heart. He’s really special,” Scott said. “Maybe now we can talk about the best golfer in the world and enjoy his skills. He’s going to miss some more putts, but this guy can putt and we saw it today.”
On Sunday, Scheffler one-putted his first two greens to cap a career-long streak of nine consecutive one-putts holed and sank 16 putts he faced from inside 10 feet. Despite the sluggish start to the week with the short stick, he gained strokes on the greens in each of the next three rounds and ranked fifth for the week, finishing in the top five of this metric for just the third time in his career.
“This is the best way to stop questioning to somebody about your putting,” Faxon said. “People are going to ask him next week, ‘Why are you putting so good?’”
And Scheffler saved his best for last: he gained 3.89 strokes on the green, his fourth-best performance in a single round in his career and his top putting round on Tour since the second round of the 2021 Shriners Children’s Open.
“My process was really good this week,” Scheffler said, “and the results so far are pretty tough to argue with, I would say.”
Indeed. His winning score of 15 under was the lowest since McIlroy shot 18 under in 2018. Scheffler also became just the eighth player to win the tournament more than once.
“It’s really special,” Scheffler said. “Mr. Palmer meant a lot to me, meant a lot to us as professional golfers and the game of golf, and so it’s very special to be able to sit here and wear his red sweater again. I’m very proud to be the champion of his tournament.”
In doing so, he moved to the top spot in the FedEx Cup standings, a position he never relinquished on his way to winning the season-long competition for the first time. Scheffler’s victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March kick-started his three-peat as PGA Tour Player of the Year and made Wyndham Clark’s prediction sound quite prescient.
“It would be borderline unfair if he starts putting really good,” Clark said after Scheffler putted lights out at Bay Hill. “I never want to wish ill on anybody, but if he starts putting positive (Strokes Gained: putting) each week it’s going to be really hard to beat him.”
Next up: the sheriff goes for his third win at Bay Hill.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Scottie Scheffler’s brilliant 2024 run began at Arnold Palmer
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