PGA Champions Dinner offered window into Scottie Scheffler’s greatness

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Scottie Scheffler doesn’t like to talk about himself or his accomplishments. He talks about his faith and his family and how he always dreamed of competing on the PGA Tour and winning majors. But even after his major triumphs, Scheffler very rarely reveals his secrets.

You can analyze his Chipotle order or his existential dissertation before last year’s Open Championship about the “fleeting” nature of success, but you’re going to be doing most of the work. As Jordan Spieth would tell it, Scottie Scheffler is great because his focus is just on golf, his family and his faith. He’s uninterested in everything else that comes with being the world’s best player. It is more plausible that there is no grand secret that Scheffler is holding back.

Scheffler’s peers have an understanding of his greatness. It would be impossible not to. But knowing someone is great, and understanding how they became that way — what makes them tick — is different.

On Tuesday night at Aronimink Golf Club, some of Scottie Scheffler’s contemporaries got a deeper understanding of how he became golf’s dominant force. It was there that Scheffler, who won the Wanamaker Trophy last year at Quail Hollow, hosted the PGA Champions Dinner. Aronimink’s Executive Chef John Ferguson crafted a menu with chicken parm and three flavors of gelato. There was also steak, which 2016 champion Jimmy Walker called “tremendous.” Xander Schauffele, who won the 2024 PGA at Valhalla, sampled everything. “It was all really, really good. The steak, the parm, the homemade gelato was … I need to get some more,” Schauffele told GOLF. Stewart Cink, who won the Senior PGA this year, called the menu “perfect. “They couldn’t go wrong,” Cink told GOLF.

But the food was secondary to the main event of the evening: two speeches — one by 1996 PGA Championship winner Mark Brooks and one by Scheffler.

Scheffler talked about his deep ties to the PGA of America and his coach, Randy Smith, while Brooks went over Scheffler’s journey from a kid asking questions at Royal Oaks to a dominant junior career. As Scheffler and Brooks spoke, everyone listened and got a better view of the guy on top of the golf world

“It’s nice to be in a room full of highly successful people in our profession,” 2015 champion Jason Day told GOLF. “It’s so great to hear Scottie talk about his career and his accomplishments, and how humble he is for how much he has accomplished in this game in such a short period of time. Then, Mark Brooks came up and talked about Scottie’s accomplishments. Then you really can grasp how much he’s accomplished and how he’s done it. Because Scottie will never do that, Scottie never talks about it.”

As Brooks went over Scheffler’s rise, including a dominant junior career that saw him win 90 of 136 tournaments in the Northern Texas PGA junior circuit, Day and others grasped how Scottie Scheffler became Scottie Scheffler.

“The level of competitiveness and the nature of what he had around him – he talked about paying to go and play in these mini PGA tournaments and how meaningful it was for him,” Day said. “From a really early beginning, he was taught to be very competitive, and that’s why he is the way he is today. You get a window into how he became the guy he is.”

Schauffele feels like he knows Scheffler pretty well. The two have been on Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup teams together, are good friends and have been two of the best golfers in the world for most of this decade.

But even Schauffele learned some things about the man he’ll try to beat this week at Aronimink.

“It’s definitely more process-oriented with Scottie,” Schauffele told GOLF. “It’s really for the love of the game. I think that really applies to someone like Scott, and most of the guys out here but not all. You really see that when he talks about his connection to the PGA and playing those junior tournaments and how they helped him out. The competitive side is something I always get from Scott but you see where it comes from and how it got there.”

A year ago at Quail Hollow, Scheffler sat next to the Wanamaker Trophy and fielded questions about his greatness, about how he has brought the golf world to its knees. As Schauffele noted, if you want to understand Scottie Scheffler, you have to start with the process, not the man.

“I love the pursuit of trying to figure something out,” Scheffler said that day in Charlotte. “That’s what I love about this game. I feel like you’re always battling yourself, and you’re always trying to figure things out. And you’re never going to perfect it. I can be kind of a crazy person sometimes when it comes to putting my mind to something. In golf, there’s always something you can figure out, there’s always something you can do better.”

He has done almost everything better than everyone else for the last four years. On Tuesday night, outside of Philadelphia, Schauffele, Day and others whose names are engraved next to Scheffler got a peek at a different process: the one that molded Scottie Scheffler into the man they are all chasing.