SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. – Rory McIlroy was so wholly focused on his future in professional golf that as a 9-year-old, he stood in front of a BBC camera and informed the world, “I want to win all the majors.”
If there’s a difference between the most recent player to capture the career grand slam and the one who could be the next, it lies in the former’s long-stated goals of tangible results and the latter’s unceasing focus on performance.
With a victory at this week’s 126th U.S. Open Championship, Scottie Scheffler has an opportunity to join McIlroy and become the seventh player to enter professional golf’s most exclusive club.
That’s never been a spoken desire, either as a young child or a grizzled veteran. He appears more focused on small-picture issues like solving the current wind pattern and making the proper club selection than any sort of long-term considerations toward writing his name into the history books.
Again, it’s about performance, not result.
Of course, you knew that already – just as you knew his first chance at history will take place on Father’s Day, which also happens to be his 30th birthday.
This will be Scheffler’s initial attempt at the career slam following his first Open Championship win last summer, which certainly pales in comparison to McIlroy’s decade-long efforts at the Masters that ended in victory last year. The chase to finally claim the elusive green jacket was such an odyssey that in the immediate aftermath, he appeared unburdened for perhaps the first time.
“Look, it was a heavy weight to carry,” he explained. “Thankfully, now I don’t have to carry it and it frees me up.”
It was only in the months afterwards that McIlroy realized climbing this mountaintop only led to more mountains, a constant journey with infinite destinations.
Scheffler sounds like he’s figured all of this out ahead of time, that he understands winning at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club this week won’t relieve him from the weight of future expectations, whether they’re more external or internal.
“It’s kind of a funny thing,” he said this week. “It’s like, yeah, if I win this tournament, that would be amazing, but I think then I show up the next week, and it’s like, OK, now Scottie’s won the grand slam, he’s won all these golf tournaments. Now where do we go from here? So, no matter what, I think as a player and as a professional athlete, you’re never going to live up to the expectations of people. I think sometimes that’s a little bit of the fallacy in our sport is like, if I win the U.S. Open, then I’m going to be satisfied.”
Perhaps some philosopher – or at least a sports psychologist – would suggest that the biggest key to achieving one’s goals is to not have any, which exists as some roundabout way to explain that Scheffler might be better equipped to claim the career slam than McIlroy, if only because he never really cared that much about it in the first place.
Check that: It’s not as if Scheffler doesn’t care. It’s not like he’s shown up to Shinnecock this week, shrugged his shoulders and said it doesn’t matter if he wins. That shouldn’t be the takeaway.
The difference, though – and let’s all agree, it’s a subtle one – is that whereas McIlroy outwardly aspired to gain admission into the career slam club, Scheffler’s concern is more centered around hitting the best shot to his ability, then walking after his ball and attempting to his the next shot to the best of his ability, too.
His idea that winning this week won’t remove any expectations is a professional golfer’s version of “mo’ money, mo’ problems.”
“Would it be a dream to win the U.S. Open? Of course,” Scheffler explained. “But at the end of the day, the grand slam has never been a motivating factor for me. I always just wanted to be the best version of myself, and that got me this far. So when it comes to this golf tournament, like I said, I’m going to step on the first tee and remind myself I’ve done everything I possibly could in order to play well, and now it’s just a matter of going out there and trying to execute and kind of going back to enjoying the competition versus feeling like you have to win for some reason.”
Knowing he doesn’t have to win, in some illogical way, just might be THE secret formula for Scheffler in trying to win this week.
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