TULSA — Golf, the catty beast dressed in pristine land, finally had enough of Scottie Scheffler’s recent mirth. It took the Masters champion by the scruff and tossed him out of the 104th PGA Championship on Friday, sending him away with four bogeys and a closing double bogey in his last nine holes just for the memories.
The PGA cut claims Scottie Scheffler but can’t quite catch Tiger Woods
Scheffler, with his whopping four wins since Feb. 13, his other gaudy finishes this season and his runaway world ranking of No. 1, did sit at a stable 1 over par Friday after playing holes Nos. 10-18 with nine pars. That followed on his 1-over 71 of Thursday. He wasn’t contending, but he wasn’t collapsing. He was handling the wind like a Texan.
Only at the turn did his scorecard begin to take on the ugliness upon which golf can insist for all humans except Tiger Woods circa 2000s. Scheffler bogeyed No. 1 from the primary rough, No. 2 from a green-side bunker, the par-5 No. 5 with some inconvenience around the green and No. 7 from the primary rough.
He double-bogeyed No. 9 via a fairway bunker and a three-putt from 14½ feet.
The 40 on his closing nine, the front nine, took him to 75, which took him to 6 over par, which took him home to Dallas. In the combination of major win (Masters) followed by a missed cut (PGA), Scheffler does have ample company in recent years: Woods (2019 Masters-PGA), Gary Woodland (2019 U.S. Open-British Open), Collin Morikawa (2020 PGA-U.S. Open) and Dustin Johnson (2020 Masters-2021 Masters, when those events followed upon one another because of how the pandemic disrupted the calendar).
Oddly, in the run-up, Scheffler had said of Southern Hills: “I’m pretty familiar. I played two college events here [for the University of Texas] and one amateur event, and I came out a couple of weeks ago and played a practice round.”
Asked whether he ranked the course his favorite, he said, “Everyone has their favorites, and Southern Hills is definitely one of mine.”
Golf can dislike hearing such sunniness, especially from someone who won in Phoenix on Feb. 13, in Orlando on March 6, in Austin on March 27 (match play) and at Augusta National on April 10. From there, Scheffler recorded finishes of 15th and 18th at the Zurich Classic (pairs) and Byron Nelson, which again looked pretty dandy heading here.
Instead, he joined the legions of the cut, below the line of 4 over par here on the 7,556-yard torture chamber. Those included Johnson whose 6 over was built on two 73s; Patrick Cantlay, the No. 5 player in the world whose 21 majors include two top-10 finishes, and who concluded at 11 over; as well as Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia and Adam Scott.
As the day wore on toward evening here, the cut appeared to be below 4 over par and tried to snare Woods, who hovered right around it where making it would be another stunning turn of will to follow upon making it at the Masters, which came 14 months after his harrowing car crash of February 2021. He got to No. 11 at 3 over par, a sweet 1 under for the day after his opening 74 of Thursday and his descriptions of ample pain in his rebuilt right lower leg.
Then the par-3 No. 11 hit, and Woods’s 8-iron off the tee went grossly left into some areas nobody wants to visit, including one of those drawn hazard lines that decorate golf courses. From beside a creek there, he chipped onto the green but into a green-side bunker. From the bunker, he knocked it to eight feet. From eight feet, he barely missed, then tapped in for a double bogey, which threw him to 5 over par and left the rest of the round as a fight.
He punched well two holes later on No. 13, the par 5 that saw him stay in the fairway through three shots that got him eight feet away, from which he made a birdie to reach 4 over. Having bobbed to the surface, he went further at No. 16, sending a dream of a shot from 209 yards to four feet and making that birdie.
A quick review came from nearby, from Rory McIlroy, who played alongside Woods and Jordan Spieth the first two days and who described Woods as “just incredibly resilient and mentally tough,” before saying: “Yeah, look, he’s the ultimate pro. Looking at him yesterday, I wouldn’t have — if that would have been me, I would have been considering pulling out and just going home, but Tiger is different, and he’s proved he’s different, and, yeah, it was just a monumental effort.”
From an even closer view, Woods said, “I’ve had a great [physical therapy] staff that have put Humpty Dumpty back together, and we’ll go out there tomorrow, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll go out there and do something like what Bubba [Watson] did today.”
That comment provides a perfect glimpse of how Woods’s mind works even when his body doesn’t necessarily, seeing as how Watson shot a PGA Championship record-tying 63.
Source: WP
