cottie Scheffler’s numbers, the ones you can access via a click, bear out his bag-wide abilities.
Tee balls? He’s fourth on the PGA Tour this season in strokes gained: off the tee.
Iron shots? He’s first in SG: approach the green.
Around the green? Eighth in that metric.
Putting? He’s 90th, but the work there has been well documented.
All of it pops the eyes, and Max Homa seemingly wouldn’t argue. But there’s something somewhat under the hood, he says, that is truthfully Scheffler’s best skill. So great is it that he says he’s jealous.
That Tiger guy does it, too, Homa said.
The popular pro was talking this week on the No Laying Up podcast — and you can (and should) listen to the entire podcast in full here — and the Scheffler subject came up. Along with the stats, he’s won six times this season, including at the Masters, though host Chris Solomon noted that he thought Scheffler “is truly released from the result and is focused on the process.”
Homa jumped on that.
He called it impossibly hard to do.
He called it Scheffler’s greatest skill.
Then he told a story about Tiger Woods. At this year’s Masters, Homa and Jason Day were paired with Woods over the first two rounds, and Day and Homa spotted something unique from the 15-time major winner on day one on the par-5 13th hole, which was their day’s final hole after storms delayed the tournament’s start.
“Tiger hit a bad drive on 13,” Homa started on the podcast, “and it’s windy, and I mean, Tiger’s the best iron player I’ve ever seen — Scottie’s up there, but Tiger, just I don’t know how to explain it. And maybe he just — maybe it’s just our fondness of him, but like, he works it a little bit different. It’s just really fascinating to watch him hit golf shots.
“And he hit a bad drive on 13, was our last hole, it’s cold, sun’s going down, it’s windy, and he had to lay up on 13 way back. He had like a 6-iron in maybe to that right pin. And it’s not like he hit it close. It was just a really hard golf shot and he hit it right to the middle of the green, right below the hole, probably 30 feet or so. And I’m walking with Jason, and Jason goes, it is just amazing to me how committed he is to hitting the golf shot because those shots, your brain gets fogged with a lot of what could happen, good and bad.”
On the podcast, Homa said Scheffler’s approach was similar.
“And it just seems like those two guys,” he said, “from what I hear in their interviews and what I’ve seen, I guess with Tiger, it’s just they just pick the shot and they are absolutely into that. And that is such a hard thing to do over and over and over again. And it is as great a skill as whatever Scottie is the best at.
