David Shefter is covering his 200th USGA championship at the U.S. Senior Open

David Shefter’s encyclopedic memory of United States Golf Association minutiae from his 27-year career as its senior writer and content manager led him one day to count how many USGA championships he had covered.

For those who know the way his brain works, it is totally on brand for him to have figured out that he’s hitting a milestone this week at the U.S. Senior Open at Scioto Country Club in Upper Arlington, Ohio, covering his 200th USGA championship as a staff member.

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“He’s like the Energizer Bunny,” said former USGA staffer Pete Kowalski, who did more than 100 championships during his tenure, many alongside Shefter. “He doesn’t stop.”

It’s not going to be hailed with the likes of Lou Gehrig’s achievement of playing 2,130 baseball games in a row but in this day and age where employees tend to hop from job to job, where layoffs and voluntary retirement packages have become the norm, he’s in rare company.

And no need to apply an asterisk to Shefter’s total given the fact that he only stayed for one day at the 2003 U.S. Amateur Public Links. After all, his wife went into labor five weeks early with their only child and he rushed back home just in the nick of time. But consider this: Roughly seven or eight championships a year, roughly 200 weeks on the road, and nearly four years of Shefter’s life have been spent chronicling USGA championships.

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The tally includes Walker and Curtis Cups and championships that no longer exist such as the USGA State Team Championship, the U.S. Amateur Public Links and Women’s Amateur Public Links, and those that have been added along the way, such as the U.S. Senior Women’s Open, the men’s and women’s U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship and the U.S. Adaptive Championship. It’s impressive no matter how you slice it, and Shefter, 60, isn’t done yet.

After growing up outside of Buffalo, Shefter attended the University of Arizona and wrote for the school paper, where he began on the intramurals beat and rose to cover the baseball team, which won a national title his junior year. Two weeks before graduation, he landed a job at the Glendale (Calif.) Daily earning $6 an hour. From there, he landed at the Santa Clarita Valley Signal, where in the suburb north of Los Angeles he remembers meeting a 14-year-old golfer named Jason Gore, who the staff nicknamed “The Boy Wonder.”

Gore still has a scrapbook that his mother kept with articles that Shefter wrote about him as he was emerging as a promising junior golfer and recalled, “You knew you were doing something right if David Shefter came out to write about you.”

Shefter was hired as a staff writer for the USGA’s Golf Journal in 1999, and made a seamless transition from newspaper to magazine writing. He wrote fast, clean copy and his stories were always deeply researched, loaded with tidbits of a historical perspective and full of on-the-scene observations and details. Brett Avery, formerly editor of Golf Journal, the USGA’s in-house rag, and who originally hired Shefter at the USGA, recalled that he quickly became an expert talent evaluator, too. He recalls sending Shefter to Michelle Wie’s first Women’s Amateur Public Links at Legacy Golf Links in North Carolina when she was 10 and writing the first national story on her.

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“He saw her potential as a player and to be a champion and documented it in a way few people have,” Avery said.

On a local beat, Shefter may have had another Gore or two along the way who really made it, but at the USGA he’s seen hundreds of players reach the summit and he’s had the privilege to be the first to unearth stories about the likes of Wie, Jordan Spieth, Scottie Scheffler and more as they rose through the junior ranks to the pinnacle of the game. Shefter counts watching Gore reach the final group at the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 among the highlights of his career.

“He turned into more of a confidant and friend than a reporter,” said Gore of Shefter, who later became a work colleague during his stint with the USGA as its first senior director of player relations from 2019 to 2022. “I’ve always had great respect for him.”

Respect was a recurring theme mentioned by those who have worked with Shefter, an old-school newsroom journalist – the last of its kinds at the house organ – who loves to craft a witty headline or pun to accompany his stories. His favorite? “These Bears are Golden,” for Aaron Du and Sampson Zheng, playing off the school’s nickname Golden Bears for two University of California teammates who won the 2023 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball at Kiawah Island Club. But his recent play on words for Wyndham Clark’s second U.S. Open title may have topped it: “Second Wynd.”

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Shefter also is a one-of-a-kind character. He’s typically one of the first to arrive at the office and anxiously waits for someone to arrive to talk about last night’s game that he watched or the latest statistical gem he’s uncovered. And everyone loves “Shefty,” as he’s affectionately called, for his lovable quirks: cruises, Las Vegas and the golf course are his three happy places. A lefthander with a handicap of 10 these days but who has been as low as a 5, he travels everywhere with his clubs and his stogies, every bit a fixture as an appendage, which he smokes as he plays. He is quick to acknowledge that he would never have played some of the great cathedrals of the game – Chicago Golf Club, Cypress Point, Merion, National Golf Links of America and Shinnecock Hills just to name a few – were it not for being afforded the privilege to do so as part of covering USGA championships there over the years.

He loves his sushi and working west-coast championships so he can hit up In-n-Out for a double-double with cheese (mustard-ketchup-pickle only). Championship staffers have been known to stock Coke and barrels of pretzels for him as well as Swedish Fish, Peanut M&M’s, Skittles and an assortment of other go-to candies.

“In the end,” said a former colleague, “you can’t help but love him and you’re excited – with fiendish delight – when he’s assigned to one of the smaller championships with you because he’s so highly entertaining.”

It’s a sentiment shared by colleagues past and present.

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“He’s the backbone of the communications team,” said Julia Pine, the USGA’s senior director of communications and content.

“He’s made the USGA better,” added Gored.

Shefter missed one U.S. Open in all his years at the USGA and that was in 2003 after the USGA shuttered Golf Journal and laid off the entire staff. But two months later, the USGA posted for a staff writer position and rehired Shefter, who evolved in the digital era and has spearheaded the USGA’s championship coverage ever since. This year, he said he’s scheduled to do eight championships, and is amid a stretch of four in a span of five weeks (and five of the first six championships of the season overall) because he wanted No. 200 to be at the U.S. Senior Open. There’s a certain symmetry in that feat having hit Nos. 150 and 175 at the U.S. Senior Open too. “Plus, I’m a senior,” he said with a goofy grin.

Truth be told, he’s always had a soft spot for covering the amateur championships over the higher profile Opens. He thrilled in the process of finding and crafting the human-interest stories inherent to so many of those competitors. In recent years, he interviewed Heisman Trophy winner and former NFL No. 1 draft pick Sam Bradford ahead of last year’s U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship; former Buffalo Bills defensive tackle Kyle Williams when he played in the Four-Ball at Bandon Dunes; and could have penned an opus on Mike Mottola, who went into a medically-induced coma for 10 days and managed to qualify for the Four-Ball in Birmingham.

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At those championships that receive less national attention, he is a source of knowledge for less experienced reporters parachuting into the golf beat to tap into if they want to fully comprehend the historical significance of what a golfer has just accomplished. And he’s sought out at the majors too by those in the know because they know he’s got nothing less than a photographic memory.

USGA CEO Mike Whan calls Shefter Rain Man, a playful reference to the autistic character in the 1988 movie played by Dustin Hoffman. While his knowledge of USGA facts and figures is second to none, Kowalski could recall a few occasions where he questioned the accuracy of Shefter’s information and sent him shuffling back to his desk for further confirmation. There was at least one time when Shefter returned back sheepishly to clarify that on further review he had made an error.

“It was like I’d stumped the Schwab,” Kowalski said, referring to the old ESPN sports trivia show where guests tried to beat host Howie Schwab.

But while there’s no official record of how many USGA championships staffers have worked to verify where Shefter ranks on the all-time list, there’s no doubt that covering 200 USGA championships is an impressive round number and we’re all glad to have Rain Man around to celebrate it.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: David Shefter is covering his 200th USGA championship at the U.S. Senior Open