Scheffler slam and Koepka return hot PGA topics for new season
Four days after Rory McIlroy won the Masters to become the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam—and first one in 25 years—Scottie Scheffler was asked: “Who’s next?”
“I’ve only won one, technically,” he said of his two Masters titles. “I’ve been playing some pretty good golf and I’m not even close.”
Now he is. Scheffler won the PGA Championship (by five shots) and the British Open (by four shots) and suddenly looks more equipped to get the final leg than McIlroy did for a decade. His first opportunity comes in the US Open at Shinnecock Hills, the only US Open for which Scheffler did not qualify in the last 10 years.
He has already had one close call. Scheffler had the lead going to the back nine at The Country Club in 2022, missed a 25-foot putt on the 18th and finished one shot back.
Meanwhile, the chatter at the Saudi International last November was whether Brooks Koepka would be part of the LIV Golf League or if he would look at a schedule of some European tour events to go with the four majors.
Now that he is no longer part of LIV, the focus is on his path back to the PGA Tour.
In his favor is letting his PGA Tour membership expire when he joined the Saudi-funded league in 2022 and he was not among the LIV players listed on the antitrust lawsuit against the tour.
The PGA Tour bringing him back this season—before the one-year period since his last LIV appearance—could lead to a precedent that causes division among the loyalists, even though his return would only benefit the tour.
The European tour schedule is not appealing in the weeks leading up to three of the majors—South Africa and Asia ahead of the Masters, Turkey and Spain before the PGA Championship and the Dutch Open two weeks before the US Open.
Nelly Korda will be coming off a year as the first player since Tiger Woods in 2010 to go from seven victories one year to none the next, extremely peculiar considering Korda was without significant injury or personal drama except for getting engaged at the end of the year.
She was runner-up by two shots at the US Women’s Open, which seemed to take a lot of momentum away.
Perhaps most alarming is how few chances Korda had to win after that.
Korda is not the first No. 1 women’s golfer who went from looking unbeatable to searching. Lydia Ko went through such a spell. Yani Tseng and Ariya Jutanugarn practically disappeared a year after they were No. 1.
