She said yes! Wie engaged to son of NBA legend

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MCKINNEY, Texas — Scottie Scheffler tied for 47th in last year’s AT&T Byron Nelson at TPC Craig Ranch, a forgettable result for a promising player who at the time did not possess a PGA TOUR win. What a difference a year makes. He returns this year as the No. 1 player in the world, the Masters champion and the clear front-runner in the FedExCup race. He’s a four-time TOUR winner, with all of those victories coming since February. His hometown TOUR stop was the site of his PGA TOUR debut eight years ago (he tied for 22nd, including a hole-in-one), and now it is a homecoming for the newly-minted Masters champ, who this week is playing his first individual tournament since his victory at Augusta National. Scheffler is making his fourth career start in the Nelson, playing Thursday with another local kid who’s had some success in this game, Jordan Spieth, in a 1:06 p.m. group that also includes defending champion K.H. Lee. Scheffler, 25, feels a special kinship to the tournament, which dates to 1968. He met Byron Nelson as a boy, long before he strafed the competition in high school tournaments for Highland Park, long before he won the 2014 U.S. Junior or became an All-American and Walker Cupper at the University of Texas. “I had the pleasure of meeting him a handful of times,” Scheffler said. “Byron Nelson’s always been very gracious with people, and he was gracious with me.” Their connection goes back to New Jersey. Scheffler was born in Ridgewood, a village in Bergen County, north of New York City. Nelson was an assistant professional at Ridgewood Country Club in 1935 and 1936. He minded the golf shop, played with members, gave lessons and adapted his “caddie” swing — flat and rounded, with loose legs and busy feet, fashioned in winds of Fort Worth — into the more upright move that led to 52 PGA TOUR titles in a World Golf Hall of Fame career. Nelson’s first two TOUR wins came during his tenure at Ridgewood, and it was that success that inspired him to continue creating the modern swing, which he is credited with being the father of. With the advent of steel shafts, Nelson was the first to use the “big muscles” of the body to square the clubface instead of rolling the hands. Nelson was known for aggressively driving the legs at the initiation of the downswing. “When I came into the ball, it seemed as though I was driving off my right foot, and in the impact area I felt that I almost gave a shove off that foot,” Nelson once wrote. It’s a defining characteristic of Scheffler’s swing, which was molded not far away at Royal Oaks Country Club, which the Schefflers joined after moving to Dallas from New Jersey when Scottie was 6 years old. Nelson died in 2006. Scheffler was 10, already carving it up with Spieth and Will Zalatoris on the Texas junior tours. Observers suspected he might have a future in the sport. Scheffler worked diligently on his game at Royal Oaks. He was taught by Randy Smith, whose other students include Justin Leonard and Ryan Palmer, Scheffler’s partner at the recent Zurich Classic of New Orleans. Scheffler won three Texas individual high school championships. Only Spieth, who went to Dallas Jesuit, has won that many, which is quite a feat, considering the deep well of golf talent in the state. The AT&T Byron Nelson offered Scheffler a sponsor’s exemption in 2014, back when the festive tournament was at TPC Four Seasons Las Colinas. The high-school senior made the best of his chance. He made the cut, for one. Then he aced the second hole on Saturday with a 5-iron from 221 yards. He beat a lot of good players that week. He even nipped Speith by two. His sister, Callie, caddied. “We had like half our high school watching,” Scheffler said. “We had a ton of fun.” The observers seemed to be right. Scheffler met his wife, Meredith, in geometry class at Highland Park. She went to Texas A&M, but their relationship nonetheless endured. They married in 2020. The rehearsal dinner was at Royal Oaks. Now, two years later, Meredith has rushed the greens in Phoenix, Orlando, Austin, Texas, and Augusta, Georgia, where Scheffler has lifted her off of her feet after his winning putts. “What a gift,” Meredith Scheffler said Wednesday after a charity event. “It just doesn’t feel real.” But it is quite real. He’s played and prevailed on a Ryder Cup team, beating the then-No. 1 Jon Rahm in Singles. It was Rahm who Scheffler supplanted atop the world ranking after winning the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play in the same town where he attended college. He’s earned $18.2 million. Kids stop him when he’s out, blushing when he gives them a fist bump and a smile. Since winning the Masters, Scheffler has thrown the ceremonial first pitch at a Texas Rangers game, dropped the puck at a Dallas Stars game and attended a Dallas Mavericks playoff game. “I enjoyed those a lot,” he said. “Other than that, (I’ve) just been hanging out and practicing.” He neglected to mention a recent Monday, when he and Zalatoris played an outing at Preston Trail, an old-school Dallas course, dripping with Texas golf history, that hosted the Nelson when Nicklaus, Watson and Trevino were the names to watch. Zalatoris shot 66. He felt pretty good. Then Scheffler added his scores. He shot 63. “Good grief, man,” Zalatoris said Wednesday, feigning exasperation. “Like, have an off day.” This week, the Schefflers are hosting Sam Burns, Seth Reeves and their families. The three players prepared steaks Monday night. They conducted the TOUR’s Bible study Tuesday. They’ve played board games to pass the time before Scheffler, the toast of the game since the WM Phoenix Open, makes his first start in Texas. “The beginning of the week was really fun,” Scheffler said, “and the tournament will be a good time too.” “Tomorrow afternoon will be a bit crazy,” said Spieth, “and I think we’ll embrace it.” Scheffler plans to. “It’s good to be at home,” Scheffler said. “I love Texas, I love Dallas and to have an event here is really special. I’m definitely looking forward to this week a lot.”

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Russell Henley knows better than to quit his day job. Even so, he has enjoyed occasionally getting up on stage and playing his guitar with the likes of Keith Urban, Darius Rucker and the alternative rock band, O.A.R. over the years. “I was nervous,” the three-time PGA TOUR champion admits. “But I was excited to play – I probably had some false confidence.” Henley’s first jam session came courtesy of a bet made with Rucker during the pro-am of what is now known as the RSM Classic in 2014. When the TOUR pro won, he soon found himself on stage after the tournament, playing the Hootie & The Blowfish classic “Wagon Wheel.” “I just said, hey, do you want to play a match today, and he said, sure,” Henley recalls. “And by like the 12th hole, he said, you win. And so, I just asked him if I could play a song with him, and he nicely enough said yes.” Then at The Genesis Invitational in 2015, Henley played three songs with O.A.R. during a free concert on the range at historic Riviera Country Club. And Peter Jacobsen, who once had his own band on TOUR called Jake Trout and the Flounders, set up a date with Urban at the CVS Charity Classic later that year. These days, though, Henley’s spare time is spent with his two kids, 3-year-old Robert and Ruth, who’s 2. Besides, he says the real talent in the family belongs to his wife, Teil Duncan, an accomplished artist whose impressionistic paintings and prints are sold all over the world. “I think it’s amazing that she’s brought her business to where it is,” he says. “To where it’s just something that everybody can appreciate, whether you’re an artist or just somebody like me who doesn’t know much about art and can just say, I like the way that looks on that wall.” Henley, who is self-taught, has played guitar since he was 8 years old. His best friend and brother-in-law – they actually married sisters — always seemed to be in a band, and Henley loved music, too, particularly newer country music and anything from the ‘90s. “There was a time in my life, early to mid-twenties where I traveled with my guitar and played a lot,” Henley recalls, adding that his caddie did the same. Just don’t ask him to sing, though. “I’m terrible at singing,” Henley says. Duncan, who studied art at Auburn, wasn’t in the audience for Henley’s performances with Urban, Rucker or O.A.R. But she does remember her husband playing for her when they started dating after meeting at the wedding of her sister and his best friend. “Probably the first time we hung out, he would pull his guitar out,” she says. “So, he would just sing, like there was not a shy bone in his body. I was kind of laughing to myself because I was like, I can’t believe this. The guy’s just singing in front of me. “He just doesn’t even care, but it really put me at ease because I just knew that he didn’t care. He wasn’t nervous. So, it made me not nervous.” Just as Henley shared his music with her, Duncan made art a part of their relationship, too. She would do a sketch of her husband on the front of his birthday card every year. “And then I was like thinking to myself, I’m going to do this as a tradition every year,” Duncan recalls. “But then you know, kids happen. And so maybe one day we’ll pick that back up again.” Although she says she was “flying by the seat of her pants,” Duncan already had her business up and running when she met Henley. Rather than hanging her paintings in a gallery with limited exposure, she had utilized Facebook and Instagram to build a much broader audience. She paints – usually acrylics, watercolors and some oils – in a backyard studio at their home in Columbus, Georgia. Duncan’s style is distinctive, a delightful and colorful mix of reality and the abstract. “I’ll work on one collection at a time and produce about 15 paintings,” she explains. “And about every other month, I’ll say this beach collection is available July 6th at 11 a.m. They all become available on my website and people buy in from all over the country.” Her past collections include animals, pool scenes, flowing dresses and portraits. She has done coffee table books, stationary, notecards and wrapping paper, as well as collaborations with nationally known retailers like Crate and Barrel, One Kings Lance and Anthropologie. The couple’s two children often make “appearances” in her paintings of beach scenes or settings by the pool. One day, she plans to do their portraits. For now, her favorite painting at their home is the large abstract figure hanging in the “manly” room where Henley’s golf memorabilia are displayed. “This job is just so ridiculously wonderful,” Duncan says. “I feel like I get to go play in my backyard and have this amazing hobby, but I also get to make a living out of it. And it doesn’t demand a ton of time out of me. It’s okay if I take time away. “And then if I do, like during the pandemic, Russ for the first time ever could say, oh, I don’t have to practice. There’s literally nothing coming up. So, he watched the kids a ton. I got to paint a ton and it’s just, it’s always there. I can go back to it when it when I can and I can step away from it whenever. And it’s fine.” Henley enjoys seeing how others react to Duncan’s paintings. He says sometimes he’s too close to it to fully appreciate the artwork she creates. “I know it’s impressive,” Henley says. “And I should probably just look at it the same way she thinks about my job. They’re both very difficult. They’re very cool, interesting jobs, but they both require time and to practice it and figure out how to do it. “People seem to always love it and want to check it out. We have a studio we built for her in our backyard in Columbus and they’ll come over and just want to walk around it and look at it and see how, how does this happen? What’s going on here? “She always has some work she’s been working on, on the wall and it’s just paint everywhere. It’s all over the floor. It’s everywhere. And it’s a cool spot to come check out and people always love seeing it.” Duncan estimates that several dozen TOUR players or their wives have purchased her artwork. So, does she ever get the urge to paint golfers or golf courses? “People ask me that all the time,” she says. “And I never really have only because I’m kind of more drawn to an unmanicured landscape, but I’m not totally closed minded to it. “I really am surprised it hasn’t happened to be honest.” Not to worry. Golf is Henley’s job.

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