What is Stopping Scottie Scheffler Becoming a Superstar

For this week's View From The Fairway, Golfshake's Derek Clements takes a closer look at the brilliance of Scottie Scheffler and Nelly Korda, but asks what may be stopping them from becoming mainstream stars.

We are seeing a period of domination in the men’s and women’s game that is almost unparalleled. Scottie Scheffler has just won four out of his past five starts while Nelly Korda has reeled off five successive wins.

This time last year, Scheffler was being challenged for the top spot in the world rankings by Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland. 

Rahm has since defected to LIV Golf and will now only be teeing it up alongside Scheffler at the US PGA, US Open and The Open. McIlroy won the Dubai Desert Classic and finished a distant second at the Texas Open. He once again played poorly at The Masters and was way below his best at the RBC Heritage, before partnering Shane Lowry to success at the Zurich Classic in New Orleans.

Hovland finished 2024 in sensational fashion, winning twice as he landed the FedEx Cup. It looked like he could only move forward in 2024. But he has only succeeded in getting in his way own since the start of the new golf season. For reasons that only he fully understands, Hovland decided to tinker with a golf swing that had taken him to green heights.

If you are looking for somebody who is capable of providing some sort of challenge to Scheffler then that man is most likely to be US Open champion Wyndham Clark.

Scheffler is in a class of his own right now. And yet he has failed to capture the imagination of the public. 

Why?

He is a golfer who hits the ball a long way, is a wonderful iron player, has a glorious short game and has started to putt the lights out. Just for the record, apart from those four wins, he also threw in a second place at the Houston Open, where he had a five-foot putt on the final green to force a playoff. And he is not just winning tournaments - he is winning them at a canter, leaving his rivals trailing in the dust. The one bogey he recorded at the RBC Heritage came at his final hole, when the tournament was already safely tucked in his back pocket.

When Tiger Woods was dominating the game, crowds turned up in their droves to see him in the flesh and TV viewers turned on in vast numbers to watch him. 

I have a theory as to why Scheffler has failed to capture the public’s imagination. When Woods was in his prime he used to miss a lot of fairways, which meant that he was called upon to produce one miraculous recovery shot after another, hitting incredible shots from the rough or consistently draining unlikely putts for birdies that never seemed to be on the cards.

Seve Ballesteros was another who thrilled the galleries - and did so from the rough rather than from the middle of fairways. If fans had a choice between watching the metronomic Nick Faldo or Ballesteros, I guarantee that 90% of them would have opted to watch the Spaniard. 

And as great as Jack Nicklaus was, why do you think Arnold Palmer was so popular and always attracted larger galleries when both men were in contention? It was because he had no fear about hitting the ball as hard as he could and then going to find it, no matter where it finished.

Scheffler, on the other hand, is in a run of form that has seen him hit fairways with monotonous regularity. There is no drama. Ever.

Of course he produces incredible shots, seemingly holing chips and pitches for fun. But he does so when he is already in control of golf tournaments, and he doesn’t make mistakes.

And unlike Woods, he takes everything in his stride. There are no temper outbursts, there is no foul language.

Then there are his interviews. Don’t get me wrong, he says the right things but quotable soundbites are few and far between.

Korda has just won five events on the bounce on the LPGA Tour - something had only been achieved twice in the modern era - by legends Nancy Lopez and Annika Sorenstam. 

Like Scheffler, she is currently playing golf on a different level to her rivals, making almost no mistakes as she churns out victories. And as good as she is, Korda has also failed to get the juices flowing among the watching galleries. And there is another more pressing problem - global TV and media coverage of the women’s game is dire. Showing a women’s major on the red button or after coverage of a PGA Tour event has finished is a slap in the face to all concerned.

And Korda was quick to point that out. She said: "We need a stage. We need to be on primetime TV, and we need to showcase the talent we have out here, which is a lot. We need the support from not just the crowds but the television networks."

While I have huge sympathy for Korda, the LPGA needs to step up to the plate and do something about the pace of play in the women’s game. Some of these golfers make Keegan Bradley look like a sprinter. 

I am not advocating that Scheffler and Korda start throwing temper tantrums but it would be nice to see them both missing a few fairways, both to give their rivals a chance and to show us if they have the shots in their locker that we saw from Ballesteros, Woods and Palmer.

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