Scottie Scheffler is now an elite putter — a problem for the rest of the U.S. Open field

New York Times

3 days ago

OAKMONT, Pa. — Sitting on a plane from Atlanta to Dallas, Scottie Scheffler and his manager looked at each other, thinking the same thing. It was time.
'You know,' Scheffler said. 'I want to see a putting coach.'
In hindsight, this was the critical moment in golf's future. It was August 2023, and Scheffler left the Tour Championship at risk of becoming golf's great wasted opportunity. The conversations kept building, the scrutiny too. The then-27-year-old world No. 1 was becoming so absurdly good that his fatal flaw could no longer be handled with subtlety. From March to August, he finished in the top five of nine of 13 tournaments — one of the most incredible runs of consistency the sport had seen in years — and won none of them.
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With each close call, the sentiment was the same: If Scheffler could putt at just an average level, he'd be the closest thing to Tiger Woods the sport had seen since Tiger's heyday.
The other tricky element in this conversation? The manager he was looking at, Blake Smith, was the son of Scheffler's lifelong coach. Randy Smith had helped mold Scheffler from a precocious little 7-year-old at Royal Oaks Country Club to one of the best ball strikers in golf history. These dynamics can be tricky.
'I think that's a good idea,' Blake said. 'Let's talk to Randy.'
Soon after, a call went out to a coaching great, Englishman Phil Kenyon. A week after that, Kenyon visited with the Scheffler team in Texas. Less than two years later, there's a quiet little storyline developing in golf. One nobody quite wants to say out loud.
Scheffler hasn't just improved at putting. He's one of the best on the PGA Tour.
The faintest echo can be heard in the Pennsylvania hills this week — the rest of golf admitting, 'All hope is lost.'
No, really. By spring 2024, Scheffler's work with Kenyon and the decision to switch to a mallet putter led to him putting at a marginally above average level all season. The prophecies turned out to be true, as Scheffler won his second Masters, a Players Championship and nine tournaments worldwide in perhaps golf's best season in 20 years.
In 2025, Scheffler is one of the 10 best putters on tour. In 12 starts, he's gained more than half a stroke putting compared to the field in seven tournaments, according to DataGolf. At the Masters, he gained 1.22 strokes putting on a week when he drove it poorly. He gained even more in Houston and at the Byron Nelson.
Let's get to the crazy part. If we can agree that tee-to-green play is the best marker for an elite player, and you list the top players in the approach category (where Scheffler ranks No. 1), you'd have to go 108 names down the list to find somebody putting better than Scheffler. So he's the best iron player, the third best driver and now the best putter among all the other contenders?
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Of all the players we expect to contend this week at Oakmont, he's statistically the best.
'There was times maybe throughout 2023 where I was arguably working too hard on my putting and putting too much pressure on myself to be perfect out there,' Scheffler said last month. 'I'm a pretty competitive guy, and sometimes when I'm not succeeding at something, it makes me even more excited to kind of fix it.
'But golf is not really a game where you can force things. If you are playing a sport like football or basketball, you can force things based on adrenaline or pushing people out of the way or whatever it is. Golf, I feel like it's more letting the scores come to you. And you have to be a lot more patient, I think, in this sport than you do other ones, especially over the course of a 72-hole tournament.'
He found Kenyon, a coach who's done it all, working with a list of major championship-winning clients from Justin Rose, Henrik Stenson and Gary Woodland to Matt Fitzpatrick, Darren Clarke and Francesco Molinari. That wide range of elite clients is part of what drew Scheffler to the Englishman, because he saw how Kenyon coached different styles. Fitzpatrick lines up his putts while Keegan Bradley doesn't use a line on the ball, for example. 'I could tell that he was open-minded, and that's the type of people I like to work with,' Scheffler said.
Much of Kenyon's work with Scheffler has been about freeing Scheffler up to be creative and confident.
During his worst putting stretches, Scheffler leaned on his caddie, Ted Scott, to help with reads. Kenyon, on a podcast with Peter Finch, said Scott is a great green reader, but it had unintended consequences.
'I think it was creating some indecision in some of Scottie's reads,' Kenyon said. 'Intuitively, he builds a really good picture of the green. So we helped him tap into his own intuition more easily in terms of his green reading.'
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Simplifying the process was everything. One of the other early changes in 2024 was to stop lining up his putts with the line of the ball. Most golfers use that little black line on the ball to give them a clear direction to aim. 'I think he was getting very line locked by using that,' Kenyon said. That freed Scheffler up to lean on his natural creativity and athleticism.
Then came the famous mallet switch, before the 2024 Arnold Palmer Invitational, after Rory McIlroy said on a broadcast that he wondered if making the switch would help Scheffler's putting woes. McIlroy's comment was not why he switched, but two weeks later, Scheffler did it. And of course, he won Bay Hill by five shots. A week later, he won the Players. Two starts later? A Masters win.
Kenyon said the mallet gave Scheffler a sight line and configuration that helped him with his line without using the ball line.
'I think one of the biggest things is giving him clarity in what he's doing that is actually relative to the faults he has,' Kenyon continued. 'I think he'd gone down different roads trying to improve things that weren't wrong. And when you're working on the wrong things you're never really getting to the root of the problem, are you?'
Perhaps the most fascinating — and scary for his competitors — element is the constant little changes and evolution since late 2023. First came the change in green reading and the line changes. Then the putter. But before the Hero World Challenge in December, Scheffler debuted a claw grip with his putter. Kenyon said that helped with consistency and stability in release, plus more control of his face.
Scheffler won the Hero by six.
It keeps going. Scheffler is right-eye dominant, which is part of what makes his golf swing so cool and impressive. NBC analyst Smylie Kaufman said: 'When you start thinking about how he swings the golf club. When you look at it from a face on angle, you see how over the ball he is. When you watch his sternum, everything is kind of out in front of the golf ball and his head is kind of staying in there looking at it a long time, and I think that has a lot to do with his eyesight, so his right eye can be on top of the golf ball.' Sometimes, though, it can lead to setup issues with his setup getting too far left.
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But Kenyon told Kaufman at the PGA Championship that the same concept can lead to setup issues with his putting. He was putting well enough not to address it then — and Scheffler still won by five — but they attacked it before the Memorial, where Scheffler won again by four.
So in two years, Scheffler went from the best ball striker of his era, who couldn't putt, to an OK putter to one of the best in the game. We are running out of nitpicks for the world No. 1. There aren't many issues left. Anything Scheffler wants to get better at, he simply does.
It's a good thing Scheffler made that call. It's bad for everyone else.