There was one thing that Scottie Scheffler did not prepare for when he headed into the first round of the PGA Championship on Thursday outside of Philadelphia.
Among a sizeable and boisterous crowd at Aronimink Golf Club, the World No. 1 said he got chirped at fairly regularly for the native Texan’s love of the Cowboys. Philly’s hatred for its NFC East rivals is visceral, and that Scheffler hadn’t thought there’d be some good-natured needling would be like him not expected to see his jail mugshot on T-shirts two years ago at Valhalla.
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These are fans, after all, infamous for cheering for the “Broad Street Bullies” and throwing snowballs at Santa Claus. At one point in a practice round this week, a guy yelled from the stands, “Dallas sucks, Scottie!” and added with a laugh, “We’re gonna smash you on Thanksgiving!”
Scheffler, thank goodness, was savvy enough to laugh it off.
“I got quite a kick out of it,” he said. “The fans were quite funny today.
“Philly is definitely a sports town,” he added. “I said it a little in the beginning, I haven’t played much golf here and haven’t spent much time in the city, and I certainly won’t this week with it being a golf tournament.
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“… The crowd had some great energy today. There were some really cool spots on the golf course where you can kind of get punch-bowl type of feel and the crowd can get loud.”
Philly fans appreciate an extraordinary athlete when they see one, and Scheffler gave them plenty of reasons to cheer for him. He strung together four birdies in a six-hole stretch in the middle of the round and hung on amid cold and windy afternoon conditions to shoot three-under-par 67.
Not only did the effort put to rest the chatter about Scheffler’s Thursday foibles this year, but it also placed him in the lead with six other players on a tightly bunched leaderboard, with 33 players two shots or closer to the lead. Scheffler was told that this is the first time that he has ever held a solo or co-lead in a major championship after the first day—despite the fact he’s won five already.
He chuckled at the stat, saying, “Yeah, I think the emphasis would be ‘share of the lead,’” Scheffler said. “… It’s a really tight leaderboard. At this moment, it’s anybody’s tournament.”
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Scheffler, 29, is certainly the valedictorian among his current class of seven front-runners, with only 41-year-old German Martin Kaymer having won a major title (he has two—2010 PGA, 2014 U.S. Open).
There are more statistics that will prove that Scheffler should be satisfied and relieved about his first-round performance. His lone victory this year came in his first start, when he opened with a 63 in The American Express and went on to shoot 27 under. Since then, he has three top-five finishes and in only one of those did he start with a round in the 60s. Most notably, in the Masters, Scheffler opened 70-74 and lost to Rory McIlroy by one shot. For the season, Scheffler ranks 77th in first-round scoring average (70.33), and then is a completely different player, being seventh (68.33), first (67.22) and first (67.22) in the other three rounds, respectively.
There is also this notable tidbit: Only two players have ever won a PGA and then led after the first round in event’s following year: Tiger Woods and Brooks Koepka.
“Yeah, definitely the best start I’ve gotten off to this year, maybe besides American Express,” he said. “I felt like, especially going into the weekend when you look at like the Masters and Hilton Head and Cadillac, finishing second was probably not all that bad from where I was starting the weekend.”
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Unlike his top rival, Rory McIlroy, whose wild driving and balky putting led to a 74 that will have the reigning Masters champ battling to make the weekend, Scheffler was strong off the tee in hitting 13 fairways, and he made some lengthy putts, including birdie bombs of 38 and 28 feet at the seventh and 11th.
“It’s always important to get the ball on the fairway,” Scheffler said. “I think around this golf course there’s a lot of run-ups on the greens, and they put the pins on some of the high points. So your scores are definitely going to be lower if you hit the ball on the fairway, but it’s still really, really difficult to make birdies.
“You hit some really nice iron shots in there to 10, 15 feet, and you’ve got putts with a ton of break on them. This golf course, especially on the greens, is quite challenging.”
That slope did fool him on one hole, No. 14, with Scheffler watching Matt Fitzpatrick’s putt on a similar line dive one way, and then, on his four-footer for par, he played for that break and saw his ball move in the opposite direction.
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When the short putt didn’t touch the hole, Scheffler tilted his head back and let out a long, loud chuckle.
“There’s just not much you can do there other than laugh,” he said. “That’s part of the game. Sometimes you get good and bad breaks. I holed a couple of long putts today, and any time you’re able to do something like that, you’ve got to take the good with the bad.”
The same could be said for Philly fans, and happily for Scheffler, by that juncture in his round, they’d already begun laughing not at him, but with him.
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