World number one Scottie Scheffler is looking forward to getting his teeth into some links golf in the Genesis Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club near North Berwick, but his competitive instinct means that he’s not just there to sharpen his game for Portrush.
“Yeah, it’s good to be back in Scotland,” Scheffler said in his pre-tournament press conference. “I love this style of golf. It’s good to be back here playing and it’s pretty hot where I live, so I’m enjoying the cooler weather for a bit.
“Yeah, there’s definitely a certain aspect of getting preparation for next week but [I] definitely am not looking at next week.
“This is an important tournament for me, and this is a tournament I want to play well in. And if I wanted to just do preparation, I would have gone and played some other golf courses for fun. There’s other ways to get prep than coming over and playing tournament golf. It was important for me to get over here.
“Like I said, tournament golf is a little bit different than just playing for fun. Being here in the right conditions and in the wind and getting used to the time and stuff like that. But by no means am I showing up at this tournament to prepare for this week. It’s a tournament that’s important for me and a tournament I’d like to play well in.”
Scheffler has been racking up wins at a rate not seen since Tiger Woods in his prime, but the Texan has yet to taste victory on links turf. Generally regarded as the best tee-to-green player in the game, links golf asks different questions than those typically posed week-to-week on the PGA Tour, but he enjoys the challenge.
“You get to play a lot of different shots, high, low, and that’s something that I’ve always enjoyed, being able to work the ball and hit different types of shots,” he explained.
“The ball actually comes off a little bit spinier than it does off the bermudagrass we play at home,” he added.
An outspoken advocate for fairness within the game, he acknowledges that links golf in particular requires an element of luck with the typically firm turf and the undulations that can see a ball ricochet off at unexpected angles depending on where it lands. But for the most part, hitting it in the middle of the fairway is still a recipe for success.
“I think any time you win out here, there’s some sort of bounce or some break that you get that could go one way or another,” he said. “In these tournaments, it can be funny sometimes in links golf with the way the bunkering is.
“Sometimes if you barely hit it off line it can kind of bounce in the fairway and kind of hop and go into one of those bunkers and some days, you’re just hitting it way off line and it ends up barely right in the bunker and so you have a clean lie. There’s little stuff like that that happens throughout tournament week but that’s just part of it.
“You’ve just got to go out there — there’s in bunkers in the middle of the fairway. So hit the ball there most of the time. But most of the time there’s no bunkers in the middle of the fairway. Just try to get the ball in play.”
