Across most of the first three days of the 2025 PGA Championship, not much happened. Coming off Rory McIlroy's epochal victory at the Masters last month, the year’s second major was always likely to feel like something of a quieter denouement. And with the top of the leaderboard populated by names like Jhonattan Vegas and Davis Riley—solid players, but hardly the stuff of hair-curling headlines—that prophecy seemed likely to be fulfilled. Then Scottie Scheffler, one of a few marquee names lurking in the wings, decided to essentially call game on the tournament. His finish on the last five holes of Saturday’s moving day—eagle, birdie, par, birdie, birdie—vaulted him to a three-stroke lead going into Sunday. And as Scheffler’s not the sort to blow a three-shot lead very often, there was a prevailing sense that Sunday’s final round would be more coronation than competitive fight.
For a while, that wasn’t the case. Former Masters winner Jon Rahm shook off his poor form from recent majors and briefly pulled even with Scheffler, whose drives suddenly took a turn for the shaky. Meanwhile, defending U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau lurked within striking range. Maybe we were headed for a back nine barn burner after all!
Nope. Calm and deliberate as an anaconda, Scheffler slowly choked the life out of his opponents, carding three bloodless birdies coming home while, all around him, his fellow competitors were melting down in the Carolina sun. Even with a bogey on 18, Scheffler’s final margin of victory was five strokes—a runaway win that netted him his third career major and forced the collective golf-watching public to once again wonder: Just how much is this guy going to win?
Lest Scheffler make us forget, winning golf tournaments is not easy. Like Babe Ruth’s and Wilt Chamberlain’s in their respective sports, Tiger Woods’s career statistics were so outlying that they confused the entire metric. Woods won at a preposterous clip across his career: 82 times, roughly 1 in 5 of his starts, and 15 majors, which is close to the same rate. A better way of thinking about this is: Any golfer who wins 15 times on the PGA Tour is automatically eligible for induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame. And that is appropriate! Winning 15 tournaments is so hard! Well, in 2024, Scheffler won seven times and threw in an Olympic gold medal for good measure. Sunday marked Scheffler’s 15th tour victory. He turns 29 in June.
The only way Scheffler’s competitors could have beaten him Sunday was to have him arrested. (Too soon?) When he’s locked in, there’s no phase of his game that is an obvious weakness. And even when he’s not locked in, in some ways, he’s even better. That was especially clear on Quail Hollow's difficult finishing stretch. Where an obviously enraged Rahm earned a frustrating bogey at the 16th, airmailed his tee shot into the water on 17 for double bogey, and then followed that up with a second double bogey on 18 (Icarus himself would have appreciated that meltdown), Scheffler simply looked at bad shots like they were the puzzling outcome of a science project that didn’t pan out. On the front nine on Sunday, he sprayed his driver left with alarming looseness. A CBS announcer commented that he’d have to fix that on the fly, and that’s usually a death sentence for even the greatest players—trying to fix their swing mid-round, in contention, at a major. But Scheffler was able to do just that.
As Quail Hollow’s cruelly dried-out greens sent one 6-foot putt after another sailing past the hole on Sunday, Scheffler calmly rolled them in. Rahm basically had a full-scale breakdown. DeChambeau had one of his weird rounds—following seismic drives with shaky approach shots, seeming always just one or two good rolls away from making a run at the title. But Scheffler weathered the storm of the PGA Championship, a major that thrives on being a virtual anarchy of randomness. His placid outward demeanor never seemed to change, but inwardly, Scheffler may be the most pathologically obsessed athlete the game has seen since peak Tiger. He is vaguely goofy, in an appealing way, but there is nothing remotely goofy about his results.
So what are we looking at here? Scheffler came up as part of a generation of excellent young American players, a group that includes Jordan Spieth, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, and Xander Schauffele. All of those players have won important tournaments, but Scheffler has clearly separated himself in terms of résumé and consistency. Golf is famously mercurial, and every great player is always just an injury or a weird head trip away from losing a piece of their game. But there is something about Scheffler's game and temperament that seems uniquely sustainable. He has demonstrated the ability to win in all kinds of ways, on all kinds of tracks; his off-the-course life seems largely distraction-free, save for having a young family. And he appears, impossibly, to be getting better and better. We saw a young, dominant McIlroy win his fourth major by the age of 25 and then not win another for 10 years. Strange things happen. But in Scheffler's case, such a drought is almost impossible to imagine. He is, in his genial way, just that physically and psychologically imposing.
Men’s golf is a considerable mess at the moment, but men’s golf is kind of killing it, too. The sport tends to go as the big stars go, and the fact that McIlroy—a desultory T-47 this week—captured the Masters last month and Scheffler, his great rival for supremacy, triumphed on Sunday is a dream scenario for narrative building. Something big is going to take place between the two of them—I just know it. There are some Borg-McEnroe vibes. If McIlroy at the Masters was the Opera of Augusta, Scheffler’s triumph was an act of technocratic problem-solving. Man versus machine. And we’re just 25 days out from the U.S. Open at Oakmont.