Who will Scottie Scheffler follow: Tiger Woods or Johnny Miller?
One of the two or three best golfers of all time (yes, Tiger). Or merely a great golfer, Hall of Famer in fact, who still seemed to have underachieved, given how great he was at his best (Johnny).
Or maybe somewhere between?
Scheffler recently won his second major championship, which was his ninth career PGA Tour victory, and followed it up with this past week’s win in Hilton Head to continue his current streak of head-turning greatness: Four wins and a runner-up in his last five starts.
We can go back 25 years (Tiger) and 50 years (Johnny) to find similar post-WWII streaks, as well as two eventual career paths that suggest you just never know what happens next.
1999: Tiger Woods begins his run of steady dominance
Tiger Woods was an established star within the golf world before he even turned pro. A few early wins confirmed that his golf would transfer well to the play-for-pay game, but then came the 1997 Masters, where he lapped the field and became much more than just a “golf world” star.
He would play 10 more majors without a victory (and win just once in 1998) until the 1999 PGA Championship, which was his second major and 10th overall PGA Tour win. Similar mileposts to Scheffler’s, though at 23, Tiger was four years younger than Scottie today.
In ’99, after winning the PGA and finishing 37th the following week, Tiger would win his last four starts of the Tour season, as well as the season-ending World Cup of Golf. He’d also open the next season with wins in his first two official PGA Tour starts.
Scheffler’s streak of four wins in five starts is now on hold as he goes home to Texas to await the birth of his first child. His next start will be the third week of May at the PGA Championship in Louisville.
Golf’s past and present this past December, when Tiger Woods congratulated Scottie Scheffler after Scheffler’s win in the Hero World Challenge, which Tiger hosts.
His tee-to-cup brilliance in this extended stretch hasn’t been seen since any number of great stretches Tiger put together during his unmatched run from 1999-2009. It’s one thing to get wins in bunches, but quite another to have a bunch of bunches, as Tiger did.
Fifty years ago, another future Hall of Famer won in bunches — a couple of times, in fact. But Johnny Miller’s career arc never stretched too far without a detour, and serves as a cautionary tale that no matter the brilliance of the maestro, you never know when the music might stop playing.
1974: The Desert Fox threatens the Golden Bear’s reign … for a while
Johnny Miller’s third professional win came in his fifth season and was the first of his two majors — the 1973 U.S. Open, where he shot an unthinkable 63 at beastly Oakmont on Sunday.
Three years later he won his 18th Tour event and his second major, the British Open. It would be his last win of the decade. Shaky putting strokes have ruined many a golf game at all levels, but this time they derailed one of the great runs of golf in PGA Tour history.
Unlike Tiger on many occasions and Scheffler of late, where lengthy streaks of great play and victories encompassed various types of golf courses, Miller’s domain was the western United States, particularly the Desert West.
Along with the old Bing Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, near Miller’s Northern California hometown, Johnny ruled in Tucson, Phoenix and Palm Springs. He won his first three starts of ’74 and three of his first four the next year, shooting a cumulative 49 under par at Phoenix and Tucson and winning those two tournaments by a total of 25 strokes.
Through his golfing exploits and that Sears line of Johnny Miller Menswear, he was becoming the new face of golf, and at times making it look easier than anyone should. He was the first “Next Jack Nicklaus.”
“For his next trick,” Dan Jenkins wrote during the early-’74 blitz, “Miller will win a tournament by mail.”
Johnny won two of his first four starts in ’76 — Tucson and Palm Springs, naturally — but showed signs of considerable cooling that was interrupted in July by his second major, the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. And that was it for three years.
The ugly word is “yips,” the age-old malady that can affect folks in various walks of life, particularly athletics. Whether it’s shooting a free throw, throwing the ball to first base or, in this case, making a 3-foot putt, the seemingly mundane becomes daunting because the brain-to-hands wiring has short-circuited.
Johnny battled them, made some headway, and in the 1980s he won sporadically, including a 1987 win at Pebble Beach after a four-year winless drought. That was surely it, everyone assumed, but in one of the most unlikely wins ever, he won Pebble again seven years later with a putting stroke that belonged on a pipefitter.
How improbable was it? Well into his NBC broadcasting career, Miller had made just five Tour starts between 1990-94 before that last win.
Which way for Scottie Scheffler?
Scheffler’s roll call of wins is somewhat similar to Miller’s: Over the past 26 months, he’s won four tournaments twice each — The Masters, Phoenix, Bay Hill and the Players Championship.
He also dealt with a balky putter last year, though those issues have subsided enough for him to flourish. He’s currently 93rd on Tour in “shots gained: putting,” which doesn’t sound great, until you recall he was No. 162 last season.
Injuries and perhaps personal issues can hamstring a career, as they did with Tiger, but an ill-wired putting stroke can send it flailing. Keeping peace with those gremlins will likely be key to Scheffler’s future path.