There are major tournaments that only begin on the back nine on Sunday. There are major tournaments that come down to the final putts on the 72nd hole. And then there’s the 2025 British Open, which was pretty much over the moment Scottie Scheffler’s plane touched down in Northern Ireland.
Scheffler won the 2025 British Open at Royal Portrush on Sunday. But that sentence, while factual on its face, doesn’t even touch the level of dominance Scheffler exhibited throughout the entire week. This technically wasn’t a wire-to-wire win — Scheffler was one stroke off the lead after the first round — but it sure felt that way.
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Sunday wasn’t even a fair fight. Scheffler entered the day four strokes ahead of the field — and his two closest pursuers were a guy who had played in just two majors since 2020, and a guy who hadn’t won a tournament in nearly two years.
Scheffler didn’t waste any time snuffing out hopes. He birdied his first hole and three of his first five to extend his lead over the field to a full touchdown. Only one hole on the front nine gave him any trouble, and he quickly erased a double-bogey on the 8th with birdies on the 9th and 12th. From there, he cruised to victory without a single serious challenge. He finished at -17, four shots ahead of runner-up Harris English.
With the British Open over early, and the 2025 major season now over entirely, it’s worth starting the conversation: Where does Scottie Scheffler rank right this moment among golf’s all-time legends, and how much higher can he climb?
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Rory’s challenge wasn’t much of a challenge
There’s only one player in this generation who can mount any kind of a challenge to Scheffler’s domination … and Scheffler simply walked into his house and looted the place. The galleries at Royal Portrush tried to rally Rory McIlroy, the hometown kid, from the dunes to the sea. But McIlroy, like everyone else, was up against a generational opponent.
Were it not for Scheffler’s parents meeting all those years ago, this absolutely would have been Rory McIlroy’s tournament to lose. McIlroy embarrassed himself six years ago at The Open’s return to Northern Ireland; he hit his first shot out of bounds and missed the cut entirely. Since then he’s won just one major, but it was a big one — the 2025 Masters, the one tournament McIlroy has chased forever. He struggled in his first two majors after that Masters win, playing well below his capabilities, but found some steadiness and solace in himself this week.
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“It’s almost a celebration of what I’ve been able to accomplish,” McIlroy said Saturday night, speaking of the reception he received this week. “I want to celebrate with them too. I’ve just really tried to embrace everything this week. I’m having an incredible time. I’m really enjoying myself.”
He wasn’t able to summon up any real momentum on Sunday, two double-bogeys dragging down his score, but he appears to have shaken off whatever doldrums dogged him after Augusta.
Worth noting, in the current context: McIlroy ended that 11-year quest to achieve the career grand slam earlier this year. Eleven months from now, Scheffler will be at the U.S. Open, in position to claim a career grand slam of his own.
Sure, there were other good stories in the field. Bryson DeChambeau figured out links golf in real time, starting Thursday with a +7 round that had him four strokes ahead of last place … and then, over the next three days, fighting his way all the way up to -9. English (-13), Chris Gotterup (-12), Haotong Li (-11), Wyndham Clark (-11) and Matt Fitzpatrick (-11) all had unexpected moments of brilliance. But since golf doesn’t do podium finishes, all were fighting for, at best, a yellow top-10 square on their Wikipedia page, nothing more.
In May, Scottie Scheffler won the PGA Championship, his third career major, but earlier this week made headlines when he said winning golf tournaments isn’t what fulfills him in life. (Joe Robbins/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
(Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Scheffler set the stage earlier this week
Aside from the fact that he’s, you know, the No. 1 player in the world, we probably should have known earlier this week that this was Scottie’s week. Each major week begins with a series of press conferences where the game’s most prominent players take a few minutes in front of the media to answer questions about either the state of their game or the current topic of the week (PGA Tour vs. LIV, slow play, golf ball rollback, et cetera). Most often, these are pro forma affairs, producing a few aggregation-worthy news nuggets but little of real substance.
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Scheffler has been as guilty as any player of going through the motions at these events, keeping his head down and just getting through the litany of questions. But for whatever reason, he decided on Tuesday to hold forth on the cost of victory, and what golf means to him in the context of his own life.
“To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers,” he said. “I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world because what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
Were this any other player, we’d be thinking the guy didn’t have the killer instinct necessary to win at the elite level. Since it’s Scheffler, and we’ve seen him win at this level over and over, the effect is more revelatory — you don’t have to present as a complete psychopath to be a winner.
What’s the ceiling for Scottie Scheffler?
So now, with four majors in the bag, four trophies — well, two trophies and two green jackets — in hand, Scheffler has entered the conversation of all-time greats. (Wild fact: It took 1,197 days from Tiger Woods’ first major to his fourth; it took Scheffler … 1,197 days from his first major to his fourth.) No, he’s nowhere near Tiger and Jack Nicklaus. He’s not in the class of Arnold Palmer or Gary Player just yet. Golf’s pantheon rewards not just numerical excellence, but sustained greatness, and for all of Scheffler’s achievements, he only won his first tournament barely three years ago. (Perspective: He won that first tournament on the same day as the Rams beat the Bengals in Super Bowl LVI.)
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Still, there are only 21 men in golf history who have won more majors than Scheffler’s four. He’s 29 years old and playing golf not just at an elite level, but a sustainable one. Given the depth and breadth of talent in the world today, it’s unlikely Scheffler will be able to get to Woods’ 15 and Nicklaus’ 18 majors, but could he pass Palmer’s 7, Watson’s 8, Gary Player’s 9? It’s always treacherous to speak in absolutes when it comes to golf, but in this case … absolutely.
The knock on Scheffler early on was that he was too dull, too boring, too predictable to be a compelling figure. But winning, and winning by a lot, tends to build a few new levels onto the bandwagon. And Scheffler’s philosophies on golf and winning and family are likely to get him a few more new fans, too.
“He doesn’t care to be a superstar. He’s not transcending the game like Tiger did. He’s not bringing it to a non-golf audience necessarily. He doesn’t want to go do the stuff that a lot of us go do, corporately, anything like that,” Jordan Spieth said on Sunday. “I think it’s more so the difference in personality from any other superstar that you’ve seen in the modern era and maybe in any sport. I don’t think anybody is like him.”
The Scottie Scheffler Express is rolling at full speed now. And there’s a long way yet to go.
