The Scheffler paradox: How sportspeople cope when winning is not enough

New York Times

5 days ago

There are certain things we've become accustomed to hearing from sportspeople on the eve of a major competition.
Most are nebulous, designed to give away as little as possible. 'I'm in a good place,' for example, or 'I'm ready to give my all.' So when the world's top-ranked golfer, Scottie Scheffler, arrived in Northern Ireland ahead of the 153rd Open Championship earlier this month and told the world's media that he sometimes wonders what the point of it all is, it made headlines.
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Most of what Scheffler said was not controversial. The 29-year-old American spoke about the importance of faith and family and about how, 14 months after the birth of his son, Bennett, the sport that is his job is not the be-all and end-all of his existence. 'I'm blessed to be able to play golf,' he said, 'but if my golf ever started affecting my home life or the relationship with my wife or son, that's going to be the last day that I play out here for a living.'
In a press conference answer lasting around five minutes, Scheffler also spoke about the fleeting euphoria that accompanies success. There is a sense of accomplishment in winning big tournaments, he said, but not one that is 'fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.'
'You get to number one in the world, and… what's the point?' he added. 'Why do I want to win this tournament so bad?'
Five days later, Scheffler had won yet another tournament, his fourth major in just over three years, and was naturally asked to reflect on those pre-Open comments. 'I've worked my entire life to become good at this game and play for a living,' he said. 'It's one of the great joys of my life. But having success is not what fulfils the deepest desires of your heart.'
Scheffler did acknowledge he was 'pretty excited to celebrate this one', but the week was a rare insight into the mind of a champion athlete that seemed to contradict so much of what is written and spoken about elite sportspeople; that they 'want it' more than their opponents. That they are selfish. That they never switch off. That winning isn't everything to them; it's the only thing.
What, then, can we learn from Scheffler? And how did his comments land with contemporaries in other sports who have also reached the pinnacle?
Though the timing of his remarks, just before one of his sport's most prestigious tournaments and in the middle of a career-high purple patch, was rare, Scheffler isn't the only athlete to have found more questions than answers in success.
In Aaron Rodgers' Netflix documentary series Enigma, the NFL quarterback reflected on his 2011 Super Bowl win with the Green Bay Packers and how accomplishing the one thing he'd always wanted in life at age 27 left him feeling lost.
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'Now what?,' he asked. 'I was like, 'Did I aim at the wrong thing? Did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn't give you true happiness?'.'
When British boxer Tyson Fury ended the nine-year reign of Wladimir Klitschko to become world heavyweight champion in 2015, it was the realisation of a childhood dream. But in his subsequent book, Behind the Mask, Fury writes that though he had 'finally got to the end of the rainbow, the pot of gold seemed to be missing… The world tells of success as such a wonderful story, the pinnacle of happiness. But my experience was that there was just a void, and it felt like everyone was trying to get something from me.'
A number of Olympic athletes have spoken openly about the emotional comedown that can follow triumph at the Games.
American swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time with 23 gold medals, talked to NBC News last year about how he would sink into depression after the conclusion of each four-yearly Games, starting in 2004 when he won six events in the Athens edition. 'You get to like the edge of the cliff and you're like, 'Cool… Now what?,' he said.
While these are all individual cases, experiencing a down period after such a high is a familiar scenario among elite sportspeople.
'I worked with an Olympic athlete who won gold in Paris (last year) and there is a well-known psychological phenomenon about depression after this, because if your life reaches its crescendo in your early twenties, what's left?,' says Gary Bloom, the first psychotherapist to work at an English football club (Oxford United) and who has also assisted a range of top-level athletes. 'How do you motivate yourself to go beyond that?
'That's really an ego-driven concept, based on the idea that somehow your personality and your success are one and the same. Many sportspeople become synonymous with what they do, rather than who they are.'
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Scheffler, though, seems to be the antithesis of the ego-driven athlete.
Bloom says the golfer's assertion that winning is 'fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart' indicates he has 'stepped outside the euphoria of winning in sport and asked himself the existential question of, 'What's all this for?' If it's about winning a cup or a gold medal, I think that says a lot about the ego of the individual which needs feeding.
'Succeeding is very ego-driven. But something that's spirituality-driven is much harder to achieve. Also, for his age, it's pretty unusual. For someone so young, I would strongly suspect there's an element of religious observance going on.'
Scheffler is, indeed, a devout Christian who, after putting on his first champion's green jacket at The Masters in 2022, told reporters that his identity was 'not a golf score. All I'm trying to do is glorify God, and that's why I'm here.'
Performance psychologist Jamil Qureshi says that finding the sweet spot where an athlete's sport doesn't define them – where they can also be a partner, parent, sibling, businessperson or something else entirely – can lead to both happiness and success.
'Happiness is when you lose yourself to something which is bigger than you,' says Qureshi. 'This is why those people whose vocation turns into their vacation, who chase their passion more than their pension, are the ones who are happily successful.'
Qureshi draws a distinction between having a purpose and having a goal. A sportsperson who has a target of winning three tournaments in a year or shooting in the 60s on all four days of a golf tournament might believe that's their purpose, but it's actually a goal.
'It's why Tiger Woods keeps working,' says Qureshi. 'Why Richard Branson keeps working. Why Cristiano Ronaldo keeps working. Because purpose is never achieved, it's fulfilled on a daily basis.'
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That is something Britain's two-time Olympic rowing champion Helen Glover discovered as she went through a career that saw her return from five years in retirement and after having three children to reach another two finals at the Games — finishing fourth in the coxless pairs with team-mate Polly Swann in Tokyo, then winning a silver medal in the coxless fours in Paris last year at age 38.
Initially though, Glover believed that achieving her goal of Olympic gold was all she needed to be happy. She recalls going for a walk in the weeks before her first Games, London 2012, and being confronted by a 'really clear thought that if I can just win the Olympics, I will never be sad again.'
Speaking to The Athletic now, she says, 'winning in London was a great moment, but not for the reasons I thought it would be. When I was 12, I thought you cross the finish line, punch the air and feel this rush of success and excitement. But I crossed the line and felt nothing but relief for the fact that we had not mucked up. I felt a total dissociation with the moment. It was too big for me.'
Glover knew very quickly after those Olympics that she wanted to do it again four years later at the next Games in Rio de Janeiro — not just the winning part, but the whole process. The motivation, she says, was waking up every day and training alongside coxless-pairs partner Heather Stanning and their coach Robin Williams to find out the answer to one question: How good can we be?
'It was just us versus us,' she says. 'They say you race how you train, and we trained every day with that mentality of, 'How good can we be?', not just, 'Can we win?'.'
Part of the problem, says Qureshi, is that sport is judged on outcomes. That, he adds, is 'why people feel euphoria and happiness if they've achieved something, but it's almost like it's a monkey off their back more than an achievement.'
There is also a kind of mismatch, says Qureshi, between the time, dedication and sacrifice it has taken to reach that moment of glory and the fact it is, by nature, fleeting.
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'When a boxer wins in the first round and people say it's £10million for two minutes' work, it's not. They've been training all their lives. Everything goes towards being good enough to win, so you almost want there to be a proportionate reward to effort. You want to achieve something and feel as though it's been worth it.'
That's certainly a feeling that resonates with British double Olympic triathlon champion Alistair Brownlee. He believes Scheffler's comments cut to the heart of why the best athletes are motivated to do what they do.
'It's obvious to me,' he tells The Athletic, 'that when something means so much to you, when you've trained for 50 weeks a year, 35 hours a week, put in all that hard work and had sleepless nights with injuries over many years, standing on the podium for five minutes is never going to provide the satisfaction you need to make up for all of that.'
Brownlee, who took Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016, then went on to race in Ironman events before retiring from professional sport last year, says that if trying to win at the Olympics had been his only motivation, it wouldn't have been enough.
'I had to have other forms of motivation and inspiration. It sounds clichéd, but it's very true; I found you really do have to find satisfaction and real joy in the everyday journey of getting better.
'The vast majority of athletes who are successful at anything start as young kids, doing it for fun — for some kind of intrinsic motivation. But sometimes the reasons why you do it can get lost along the way.'
Brownlee's realisation of his 'why' came one morning in the period after London 2012, when he got up one morning and had no real reason to go to training. Regardless, he went along, got into the pool and started swimming up and down.
'After 20 minutes of swimming as hard as I could for no reason at all, it hit me — 'This is just what I do. It's who I am. I'm not here to train for races or for any particular reason, this is just fundamentally who I am'. Even now, I'm out cycling and running pretty much every day. It's very much part of my DNA.'
For Qureshi, 'consistency of mind gives consistency of play', and athletes whose mood does not fluctuate wildly depending on their results may get better ones.
Former England cricketer Ian Bell identifies with the sentiment. 'I felt that as a young player, sometimes my mood or how I could act would be determined by my outcome, and that shouldn't really be the case,' he tells The Athletic. 'As you mature and come through things, you realise that, actually, even though in sport we live in an outcome-focused world, as a person and as an athlete you can't live in that.'
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Bell, who played in 118 Test matches between 2004 and 2015, says that as he went through his career, becoming a husband and father, he came to understand the importance of consistent behaviour and understanding that having a good day on the field 'doesn't necessarily mean you're the best guy in the world. It's trying to stay in that level emotional state where you're consistent in how you are with people around you and how you train.'
When he heard Scheffler's comments before The Open, Bell says they resonated with the part of him that remembers how quickly life moves on. He looks back on multiple victories — particularly those against Australia, the arch-enemy for an English cricketer — as amazing experiences he would love to re-live but also recalls how 'everyone talks about it for 48 hours, then life carries on. All that work you put in as a young sportsperson to get there and you have this feeling that life will be so different or a certain way, and sometimes it doesn't feel like that.'
For Bell, it means Scheffler has the perfect mindset to succeed.
'He wasn't putting any pressure on himself or on an outcome, even though he still got that outcome,' he says. 'It's a nice place to be as an athlete when you're not living or dying on your results and realise there's a bigger picture.'
It all seems so contradictory to the rhetoric we often hear about success requiring an 'all-in' attitude.
In reality, says Qureshi, 'it's about finding the right state. Some people (in professional golf) perform much better when they have an intensity which goes from Tuesday (when they arrive for a tournament) to Sunday (the final round). Others perform better when they do a small amount on the range, then come back and play with their kids. You find what works for you.
'Intensity really is in the impact moment; when you find yourself in the rough, when you're deciding on your course management, that's when we need to react with intensity, commitment and execution.'
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Glover had success with both approaches during her rowing career. In her twenties, the sport was her everything. Later, after getting married and starting a family, that changed. While she maintained her aggression in her racing and training, she also came to realise 'there are aspects of life which I would drop rowing for in a heartbeat'.
She would look at her team-mates, who were largely still in their twenties, and recognise that they felt differently.
'And that was cool, because it had been the same for me,' Glover says. 'Our definition of success will change. It's exciting that you'll find different things in your life that give you a massive sense of satisfaction. It doesn't always have to be finishing first.'
Even taking this individual approach into account, Scheffler's closing sentiment in his pre-Open press conference was perhaps the one that raised most eyebrows: 'I love to put in the work. I love getting to practice. I love getting to live out my dreams. But at the end of the day, sometimes I just don't understand the point.'
This sentiment is all about perspective, says Qureshi, and recognising that where you are in your life will create a new way of seeing what you do, how you do it and why. And the impact of that is hard to predict.
'If Scheffler is now seeing golf in a different manner to 10 years ago, he might be questioning it in a way that takes him away from performance or towards better performance,' says Qureshi.
'Would you be surprised if, in the next few years, he says, 'I'm giving up the game, I've achieved what I want to'? Or would you be surprised if he goes on and does even more and plays longer because he's found a state of mind and compartmentalised it in regard to the other elements of his life?'.
It could be either. For Qureshi, what's most important is to understand that for athletes who do reach the very top of their sport, the outcome is often not the only thing that matters.
He was working with another golfer, Paul McGinley, in 2005 when the Irishman was in contention to win the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational tournament in the United States going into its fourth and final day. 'Tiger Woods had barely hit a fairway for three days but ended up winning,' recalls Qureshi. 'In his interview afterwards, you could see that his excitement and exhilaration had come from the manner in which he'd played golf, not necessarily from the outcome.
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'He was pleased with how he responded and reacted to the mistakes he made. He was robust, resilient, committed. Players at this level get a lot out of understanding how they're playing the game as much as what they're achieving.'
Ultimately, Scheffler is showing that there is more than one route to success. And his words have clearly resonated with athletes from a variety of sports.
Before Formula One's Belgian Grand Prix last weekend, McLaren driver Lando Norris — a huge golf fan who plays off an eight handicap — said he related to the American's words. But his main takeaway is a pertinent one: 'Just let the person be whatever they want to be. They don't have to live the exact life that you think they should, or say what you think they should.
'He lives very much his own way, and I think it's quite cool to see someone like that achieving what he is. You have to respect that.'
Additional reporting: Luke Smith