Brandel Chamblee has plenty of reasons to be a fan of Scottie Scheffler.
Scheffler has been the standout player in golf over the past few years, and Chamblee has not shied away from drawing parallels between what he is doing now and what we saw from Tiger Woods more than two decades ago.
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While Chamblee is comfortable putting their names in the same conversation, there is still a significant gap between them. Woods set a standard that remains hard to touch, even with what the Dallas native has accomplished so far.
Scheffler’s 20 PGA Tour wins have all come in the past four years, along with four major titles. It has been an impressive stretch by any measure.
What stands out just as much as his game is how grounded he remains throughout it all.
Chamblee, notably, offers an interesting theory to explain this.
How Scottie Scheffler approaches the game
Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images
At 29, the world number one has sometimes faced criticism for what some see as a ‘boring’ approach in press conferences.
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Speaking before the Genesis Invitational, Scheffler spoke about how he approaches practice and keeps working on his game.
“You never get to a place where you feel like you’ve got it figured out.
“I always like practicing and trying to improve, and creating new shots.
“I think golf is kind of the endless pursuit of trying to figure something out. I’m never going to get there but there’s no harm in trying,” the Dallas native concluded.
Scheffler’s comments speak volumes about his character.
He is widely regarded as one of the hardest-working players on tour, if not the hardest.
Even though he is comfortably ahead at the top of golf’s rankings, he remains grounded enough to recognise that true mastery is probably out of reach.
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Brandel Chamblee sheds light on why Scottie Scheffler says he will never master golf
Speaking on the Golf Channel, Chamblee was asked why Scheffler does not often provide more interesting answers during his press conferences.
“It’s interesting listening there, and obviously, Scottie Scheffler is a very intelligent guy, but listening to the best players in the world, the greatest athletes, try to explain their talent, you are almost always disappointed,” he began by saying.
“One of the best writers, the late David Foster Wallace, wrote three essays about this very topic. One of them was called String Theory. Another was about Tracy Austin, another was on Roger Federer.
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“And in it, he basically says, you know, the best athletes are physical geniuses, but they’re notoriously inarticulate at describing their performances.
“And so to get to the highest skill level, it’s achieved through combining great talent and great repetition to such a degree that the variables are performed unconsciously. They’re not thinking about it.
“Because they’re not thinking about it, they cannot clearly articulate it, and David Foster Wallace argues, and I would agree with him, that it is not a failure of intelligence that they can’t explain what they’re doing, or how they’re doing it, quite the contrary.
“It’s a necessary component to the genius.
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“And so, as we sit there, most of the time, they’ll say, ‘I’m gonna try to play one shot at a time’.
“This is why great writing is so important to sport, and it’s so important to golf.
“I grew up reading all the best writers because they would take out of these responses the little bit they could, and then they would try to tell us what we all want to know about what made Hogan great, what made Jack great, what made Tiger great, and that’s why great writing is so important to sport.”
In fairness to Chamblee, he makes a strong case. When golfers begin overcomplicating things in their heads, their performance usually suffers.
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