PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Scottie Scheffler was a fine young player with a bright future but no victories on the PGA TOUR. That seems like ages ago. It was only last month. Today, Scheffler could become world No. 1 with a third victory in four starts at THE PLAYERS Championship. He would need Jon Rahm to finish worse than 10th and Collin Morikawa worse than a three-way T2, but the fact remains, Scheffler has opened the proverbial floodgates. “I don’t really think about getting over the hump or monkey off the back or anything like that,” he said from TPC Sawgrass, where he missed the cut last year in his PLAYERS debut. “I will say second time around it definitely felt a little bit different being in contention.” To recap: Scheffler, who seemed destined to win when he dusted Rahm at the Ryder Cup in September, beat Patrick Cantlay in a playoff at the Waste Management Phoenix Open last month. It was lifechanging. There were tears. Then he tamed brutal conditions to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard last weekend. It was his second win in 21 days. His heater has been impressive, but not unpredictable. In fact, there’s a long history of players who have validated that first win with a second in short order. David Duval, the 13-time TOUR winner who now plays on PGA TOUR Champions, even strung together three Ws in three starts when he broke into the winner’s circle in October and November of 1997 after a series of frustrating close calls. No one has replicated that since, but a handful of players have been where Scheffler is now. “The first time I won, I went on a bit of a heater, too,” said Webb Simpson, who broke through at the 2011 Wyndham Championship, was T10 at The Barclays, and won the Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston. “It was actually a bit similar to what’s going on with Scottie.” Two wins in three starts? Try identical. History, though, shows they’ve got company. Justin Rose won the 2010 Memorial, finished T9 at the Travelers Championship, and won the AT&T National. Again, two victories in three starts. (He led the Travelers by three but shot a final-round 75, leaving him one round from three straight wins, otherwise known as the full Duval.) “I’m kind of glad he’s got the monkey off his back,” Rose said. “He’s still a young guy, it’s not like it was a big monkey or anything, but he’d been in the hunt quite a few times. I felt the relief at the Memorial. I was 30 years old, I’d played on the European Tour and I’d won a lot, I’d probably won 10 times in my career, but still, the U.S. media, I feel, are very stats driven. “It’s about your batting average, or your 3-point shooting percentage, whatever it is,” Rose continued. “And obviously we’ve all been used to the stats Tiger put up, so when you’re not winning, it gets frustrating. I was aware of my inability to finish some situations and what that might look like on paper, so to start to reverse that was a relief but also confidence-building.” Rose had three runners-up and four third-place finishes on TOUR before finally getting his first win. Scheffler, the 2019 Korn Ferry Tour Player of the Year and 2020 PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year, played well enough to qualify for East Lake in each of his first two seasons despite his lack of a victory. He had 17 top-10s before breaking through, including two seconds and three thirds. Duval had seven runner-up finishes in three seasons before busting the doors down. Winning tends to alter people’s perceptions of the close calls. Winning twice or more in short order, early in your career, changes the narrative completely. Xander Schauffele got his first two TOUR wins, including the TOUR Championship, in eight starts in 2017. Later that year Patton Kizzire got his first win at the OHL Classic at Mayakoba, then won again at the 2018 Sony Open in Hawaii – two victories in a span of four starts. Adam Scott got his first three TOUR wins, including the 2004 PLAYERS Championship, in a stretch of 13 starts. Jimmy Walker collected his first three trophies in eight starts in 2013—14. The outlier, of course, was Tiger Woods, for whom the floodgates opened immediately. He won twice in his first eight professional starts in 1996, made it three-for-nine at the Tournament of Champions to begin ’97, and nabbed his first major title at the Masters that April. The open-floodgates phenomenon is not unique to the TOUR, and in fact intensifies the further you climb down golf’s hierarchy. Sungjae Im began his Korn Ferry Tour career with a quick win and runner-up in 2018 to lead the money list wire-to-wire. Mito Pereira won in back-to-back weeks last year and was the 12th in KFT history to get the three-win call-up to the PGA TOUR. The floodgates are even busier in college. Maverick McNealy, one of Scheffler’s teammates on the juggernaut 2017 U.S. Walker Cup team (Collin Morikawa, Will Zalatoris, et al), was a sophomore at Stanford when he shot 65 to win the Southwestern Intercollegiate for his first college victory. He won the Olympia Fields/Fighting Illini Invitational the next week. It was the start of a heater in which McNealy won six times in 13 starts for the Cardinal. “I remember writing in my journal, ‘It’s way more fun playing to win than playing to not screw up,’” McNealy, who’s 21st in the FedExCup, said from TPC Sawgrass. “It definitely comes in waves. I’ve had stretches where I haven’t missed the center of the driver face for a month and a half. I’ve had stretches where I couldn’t miss a putt for like a month. “Unfortunately,” continued McNealy, who has two career runner-up finishes on TOUR, “they haven’t lined up together at this point; hopefully they will. There’s so much random variance in this game, you just kind of have to ride it out. When you’re on a heater you gotta ride it out as long as you can, and when you’re off a heater you’ve got to shallow it out and get back on one.” McNealy didn’t win in his first year at Stanford; he equates his pro career thus far as four years of being a freshman. But as Scheffler reminds, that can change. Confidence builds. The hot hand is real. Winless today, McNealy could be a multiple winner and FedExCup No. 1 next month. Life comes at you pretty fast – especially when the floodgates open.
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