LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Free Scottie.
It’s a trending hashtag, it’s a chant and it’s even a T-shirt for sale for $10 in the parking lot at Valhalla Golf Club at the 106th PGA Championship.
Taylor Farrell and Cole Turner, friends who drove in early Friday morning from Indiana to attend the second round, were stopping to pick up a friend at a hotel when news broke that Scottie Scheffler had been detained by police ahead of his morning tee time. The hotel happened to be next to a print shop so they downloaded images off the Internet and e-mailed them to a 64-year-old lady who made the shirts.
“It took 30 minutes,” Farrell said.
PGA: Tournament hub | Friday tee times | Photos
They weren’t the only ones. Some industrious entrepreneur arrived in the Valhalla Golf Club parking lot with a carload of shirts and was selling them for $10. One fan wearing a #FreeScottie shirt said he had another and offered to sell it for $20.
Good to see that American free enterprise is alive and well.
Props to the dude in the parking lot selling these https://t.co/Y1bzSjkOPl
— JBF (@foggyjb) May 17, 2024
Others simply used a black Sharpie to a white shirt while one fan wore an orange jumpsuit amid his buddies and said of Scheffler, “We’re doing this in support of him. He’s one of the most humble people on the PGA Tour.”
On several holes of Scheffler’s opening nine, fans started a chant of Free Scottie and the message spread like wild fire much like the taunts at Patrick Cantlay and his refusal to wear a hat during the Ryder Cup in Rome. Only this time it was a Scottie lovefest. Indeed, the crowd had the feel of a home Ryder Cup and Scottie received a level of fandemonium the likes of which the world No. 1 and two-time Masters champion has never experienced.
Fans who did not want to be identified wore “Free Scottie” T-shirts to support Scottie Scheffler at the 2024 PGA Championship’s second round. (Photo: Matt Stone/Louisville Courier Journal)
There were several creative fans who did their best to get chuckles. Some of the best:
“Scottie, I need your lawyer”
“You play pretty good with an ankle bracelet on”
“Is this your work-release program?”
And to a group of cops assigned to monitor Scheffler’s threesome: “You guys going to let him get away with that?”
When one of the officers in Scheffler’s detail was asked if he was getting heckled, he shook his head in the affirmative and said, “But I’d heckle me.”
For all the chants and cracks and fans hoping for a reaction to their shirts from Scheffler as he walked by, the world No. 1 just kept his head down and stayed in his bubble.
Scottie is free and the fans at Valhalla loved him like never before.