BLAINE, Minn. – Scottie Scheffler is taking a page out of the Bill Belichick playbook. He’s moving on to the 3M Open, jet lag be damned.
“I made it to my alarm this morning. Yesterday I was up at like 3:45,” he said on Wednesday during his pre-tournament press conference. “Today I woke up for my 4:15 alarm, so that was definitely better.”
After finishing T-4 at the British Open at Royal Birkdale, Scheffler isn’t wasting any time reflecting on what could’ve been.
“No, I definitely haven’t done that already. During the year, I just get pretty into the competition. So like with the cadence of the schedule, it really is kind of one week to the next. I always do my best to kind of live in the present, so I wouldn’t say I reflect a whole lot,” he said. “Right now, this week, we’re in Minnesota and I spent the last day and a half kind of getting ready for this tournament.”
Scheffler said he thinks this is his first trip to the Land of 10,000 Lakes and certainly his first time teeing it up at the 3M Open. It’s a big deal for a tournament in its eighth season on the PGA Tour that has struggled to attract the top players in its usual date following the end of the major season but before the FedEx Cup playoffs heat up.
This year, however, there is an extra tournament between the 3M and the first playoff event in Memphis, and so tournament organizers, who have been wooing Scheffler for the past few years and applied the full-court press beginning in October, got their man.
“I didn’t really want to have three weeks off before the playoffs,” Scheffler said. “This was a tournament that I had heard a lot of good things about and so far everything seems true. The people have been tremendous, the fans have been really nice to me so far and the tournament seems to do a really good job just taking care of everybody.”
Scheffler has proven to be quite the draw. He’s the first world No. 1 to play the 3M Open since Brooks Koepka in 2019, and the buzz around the tournament because of Scheffler has been unrivaled, said tournament director, Tracy West. Ticket sales have surged by 25 percent as of Tuesday and are still climbing. Even tournament title sponsor 3M blew through their allotment of tickets for the first time and had to buy more.
On Tuesday, kids were scurrying about for best positioning to get autographs and the cart taking Scheffler to the range stopped on multiple occasions so he could pose for selfies with fans of all ages. On Wednesday, Scheffler played nine holes with Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell in the pro-am. When he tees off on Thursday at 8:29 a.m. ET, Scheffler will be a heavy favorite to get back into the winner’s circle. He won his season debut at The American Express in January, notching his 20th career PGA Tour title, but he’s gone 178 days since his last win. In the past four years, he’d never gone longer than 28 days between his first and second victory of the season.
Still, he has led the FedEx Cup standings the last five weeks, the longest stretch of any player on Tour this season and this week marks 144th career week inside the top 10, or 60 more than Collin Morikawa, the next most of any player currently in the top 10.
Scheffler takes great pride in consistency. Another indication of that steady, reliable play is his cumulative total score at the majors, 20 under, tied for the best with Sam Burns this major season. A year after winning two of the four majors, Scheffler struck out, finishing second at the Masters, T-14 at the PGA Championship and T-4 at both the U.S. Open and British Open. Asked to name which one frustrated him the most, he said, “All four of them.”
It has been a season of so many close calls. He recorded his 10th top-five finish in 16 starts on Tour this season, the most by any player, with the next best being Matt Fitzpatrick with seven, and his five runner-up finishes on Tour this season are tied for the most of any player in a season in the ShotLink Era (Cameron Young 2022, Vijay Singh, 2003).
“I still feel like my game’s in a good spot and I’ve played some nice golf. I haven’t played any great golf yet, but I’ve played some nice golf over the course of the season,” he said. “I think if you took a blind look at some of my results, I think a lot of people would say that’s a really good season.”
If Scheffler did reflect on what prevented him from defending his Open title, he’d likely settle on his balky putter. For a 59-hole stretch – from the seventh hole Thursday through the 11th Sunday – Scheffler failed to make a single birdie putt of seven feet or longer. He ranked 60th of the 78 players to make the cut. For the season, he ranks 14th in Strokes Gained: Putting, the best performance of his career, so he said it’s not something he’s going to dwell on.
“There’s always ebbs and flows. I think when you look at links golf and the conditions of the greens last week, I think you can see how the ball’s rolling; there was some activity there,” he said.
The fans of the 3M are delighted he decided to be here this season and even his competitors embrace the challenge of going head-to-head with the world No. 1.
“Everyone wants to hit it like him, but no one has a swing like he swings it,” said defending 3M Open champion Kurt Kitayama. “I think his whole demeanor and the mental side of it, how he handles the pressure I think is something to admire.”
Adam Schupak is a senior writer for Golfweek, covering the PGA Tour.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Buzzing in Blaine: Scottie Scheffler brings star power to 3M Open
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