ROYAL TROON — If you want to become the best golfer in the world, start with a ping-pong ball and ignore Nick Faldo. It worked for Scottie Scheffler, a player who has been with the same coach since he was seven years old and has a preternatural grasp of the fundamentals despite cataclysmic feet that leave him on the point of falling over when he hits the ball.
The key, according to former Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley, is to ignore what happens after the ball is hit, because what happens before is a good as it gets, better even than Faldo’s metronomic action rebuilt by swing guru David Leadbetter in the 1980s.
“I don’t look at his body,” McGinley explains. “I look at what the golf club does and the club is very passive. There is no manipulation [with the hands].
“It is in the perfect position here [on the way down] and here [through impact] and that is all that counts. He has brilliant control of the club face [square to the ball at impact] and you get that through a good grip. That’s what he works on the most. So his fundamentals are great.”
Scheffler is in an important way a throwback to the days when golf swings were decided by feel rather than science, where every element is sliced and diced into its constituent parts by Trackman technology. It wasn’t until he arrived on tour as a pro that he gave any thought to his action.
“It may look funny to you all, but it feels totally normal to me,” he said. “It’s something I never really thought about because it’s just always what I did. The last time I can remember trying to hit a shot with normal, traditional footwork was Faldo came up to me on the range a couple years ago at the Masters, and he was one of the guys that was, I think, pretty critical of it at the time. He asked me why, and I was like, I don’t really know. Let me hit one normal and see how it goes.
“So I hit one with traditional footwork, and I turned around, and I was like, it just feels like I’m locked into the ground. I don’t really feel like I can hit my shots. Then I just kept moving my feet like I normally do.”
McGinley explains what is going on. “It’s about exerting power through impact. It’s not about the finish anymore, it’s about stability at impact, and he has perfect stability. It is only after impact he loses it. That’s why he gets away with it. The ball has gone at that stage. Jack Nicklaus was not afraid to use his legs either. It’s a sign of how much power is going through his legs. So much of it nowadays is about generating power via resistance to the ground.”
Scheffler is past caring. “It feels unnatural if I don’t do what my feet normally do. We have definitely made changes to my swing, but that was something that he [coach Randy Smith] never changed. I think the words he would use is that was kind of just the DNA of my swing, and he doesn’t want to change what I did to try to work the ball.
“Part of it is when I was a kid, I used to play in the house with a ping-pong ball. A ping-pong ball is super spinny. I would learn to curve it from room to room and spin it a lot. That was what was fun for me about the game. As time went on, I didn’t want to turn into a robot. I wanted to do what I thought was fun, and that was seeing and creating, trying to hit shots. I get bored sitting on the driving range trying to hit every shot straight.”
There you have it, golf as art, and something to be enjoyed. Turn off Trackman now and start living.