Why Scottie Scheffler has been the best golfer in the world for 95 weeks

Standing on the tee at Riviera Country Club more than a year ago as the best player in the world, Scottie Scheffler was quickly brought down to Earth. He hit his tee shot and a fan shouted something the star didn’t soon forget.

“Congrats on being No. 1, Scottie!” the fan shouted. “Only 11 more years to go.”

Scheffler, remembering this story moments after winning the 2024 Players Championship, laughed and muttered that phrase again to himself quietly. Eleven more years to go. Because there he was answering a question on if he was nearing Tiger Woods-esque dominance in the game of golf, and Scheffler immediately thought of how absurd that seemed.

He’d been at No. 1 off-and-on for two years at that point, playing a level of consistently dominant golf the sport rarely sees over such a long stretch, and it didn’t even put a dent in the 683 weeks Woods spent as the Official World Golf Ranking No. 1. That’s more than 13 years.

But it’s been another year since, when nobody even came close to catching Scheffler in the top spot, and now he nears a new milestone. He’s been No. 1 for 95 consecutive weeks. While Woods had runs of 281 and 264 weeks, the next longest consecutive streak was Greg Norman’s 96 weeks from 1995 to 1997. OWGR has been around since 1986, and by the end of March, Scheffler will claim the longest untouched run of any golfer not named Tiger Woods.

And the scariest part?

“I could see him doing it a lot longer for sure,” Justin Rose said.

Barring injury or disaster, nobody is catching Scheffler anytime soon — his OWGR points total nearly doubles that of his closest competition, Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele. And while it’s true LIV Golf events don’t earn OWGR points and suppress the ranking of Bryson DeChambeau (16) and Jon Rahm (59), not even they would argue they’d be close to catching Scheffler. In a deep era where seven prime golfers can claim multiple major championships, Scheffler is achieving historic levels of consistency.

The Athletic spoke to former world No. 1 golfers to understand the challenge of reaching the title of best in the world and the pressure and weight of trying to keep it. For even just one week, much less 96.

Jason Day was on top of the world, riding the heater of all heaters. He held off peak Jordan Spieth. He kept McIlroy at arm’s length. When Day won the 2016 Players Championship by four shots, he existed in a tier of his own. Eight wins in 17 starts. His first major championship win came the year before. He was world No. 1, and at 28 years old, the future appeared to be in his grasp.

But he was mentally finished.

“I was like, I’m checking out,” Day said.

His golf life was becoming everything he dreamed of, but that dream meant more, more, more. More pressure. More demands. An introvert deep down, Day was pulled in every direction. More interviews. More commercials. More meet and greets. And he was so grateful he didn’t know how to set boundaries. “I didn’t tell people ‘no,’ and that burnt me out,” he said.

While Day exaggerates his decline, he pinpoints that as the moment when his career slowly regressed. He was out of the top 10 within two years. In four years, he was outside the top 50.

Staying at No. 1 is hard. Some players just get hot, and everyone involved knows they will cool down eventually. Sometimes they’re in an era of constant back and forth when one rest week costs you the crown. There can be injuries, and all of this ignores that golf is a sport where consistency is seemingly impossible. Slumps happen.

But for 11 years, nobody even had to even worry about that task, because one man owned it.

Luke Donald isn’t going to lie. As a kid on the putting green, he imitated making the six-footer to win the Masters or the Open Championship, not to become world No. 1. It became a goal later, but it wasn’t on his priority list when turning pro.

But then you pose the same question to Adam Scott, the 44-year-old Aussie’s eyes bulge as he turns to make this very clear: It was absolutely a focus.

As a teenager, Scott watched his fellow countryman Norman dominate the world rankings. Scott had two career goals: Win majors and hit that No. 1 spot. There was just one problem. Like so many golfers in his era, he never had a chance. Scott turned pro in 2000, right as Woods was winning four majors in a row. Other than some elite stretches from Vijay Singh in 2004 and 2005, nobody took the top spot from Woods from 1999 to 2010.

“The dream of winning a major was still alive,” Scott said. “(Woods) didn’t win every one, but it felt like for the first 10 years of my career, that the dream of being number one was completely unachievable. I didn’t believe enough in myself, but he was just that much better than me.”

But then a window opened around 2010 as Woods declined, and a new generation of top golfers had a chance to fight for the crown. But that generation only highlighted how inconceivable Woods’ run was. Nobody could keep it.

Lee Westwood was the first to take it. Martin Kaymer took it 17 weeks later. Back to Westwood. Then Luke Donald for 40 weeks. Then McIlroy and Donald back and forth. Then Woods took it back for a year and a half. Scott grabbed it for 11 weeks. Back to McIlroy for a year. Soon there was Spieth and Day and Dustin Johnson. Justin Thomas. Rose. Brooks Koepka. Rahm and Scheffler made their runs as well. In all that time from 2010 to 2023, only Johnson’s 64-week tenure in 2017-18 came close to what we’re seeing now.

Because as Thomas once said, “The thing about that is it’s not about getting there, it’s about how long can you stay there?”

Take Scott, for example. He finally earned his first major with a Masters win in 2013. That was one life goal checked. He sat down with his team shortly after and asked what was next. They all agreed. It was to hit world No. 1.

That goal was achieved on a rest week, as he overtook Woods in 2014 during a stretch when Scott planned on taking multiple weeks off. But when he took No. 1, it was so close with Woods and Henrik Stenson, that he could lose it any week. He thought this was the kind of honor he might never get back, so he signed up to play Colonial at the last moment. He then, of course, won in a playoff, creating a buffer.

The hardest part isn’t the pressure you feel or the target on your back — It’s the increase in attention. When Thomas briefly earned it in 2018, he said it was the first time in his career he teed up at a tournament knowing for sure he’d have a post-round interview. Every tournament you enter, it’s a guarantee you’ll be called in for a Tuesday or Wednesday pre-tournament news conference. Reporters suddenly ask about your thoughts and feelings and try to get in your head.

Donald felt fine with his game, in part because this wasn’t some flukey hot streak to get there. It was a two-year body of work that showed consistency. He held it for quite a while. But again, it was the additional obligations that made it hard off the course.

“You have to manage the media presence, the eyeballs, the people wanting more of your time,” Donald said. “That was more difficult.” Then, it only got worse when Donald missed cuts at majors and didn’t finish better than fifth in that period. “Obviously, I hadn’t won one, and there was more pressure to do that as a world No. 1.”

Kaymer once lamented in a European golf blog about the influx of strangers in restaurants asking for his time and the new attention the ranking gave. “It was exhausting to be around people who are those energy vampires who suck every bit out of you and then leave you. They tell you all their issues and you have to pretend that you’re interested. Close friends give you that energy so I found that a tricky part of it.”

Sometimes the pressure is additive, like Scott winning at Colonial or Rose going to Torrey Pines as world No. 1 in 2019 looking for validation. He’d been in a hot potato situation with Thomas, Johnson and Koepka throughout 2018, grabbing the title five times in five months for a combined total of 12 weeks. But the 2013 U.S. Open winner finally created space atop the ranking at Torrey, beating Scott by two shots.

“It was the first time I really enjoyed being world number one,” Rose said. “I teed up being the top guy, and then to play like the top guy was a nice moment for me. It was nice to kind of rubber stamp it that one week.”

Scheffler famously took No. 1 for the first time in 2022 when he broke out with three wins in five starts, but his legend took on a new level when he backed that up by winning the Masters in his first start. McIlroy reclaimed No. 1 from Scott in 2014 before going on to win the PGA Championship two weeks later.

Koepka, on the other hand, reached No. 1 four times from 2018 to 2019. Over this period, Koepka won three of his five majors, but never once did he do so as the sitting No. 1.

Maybe the most impressive chapter of Scheffler’s run hasn’t been the 13 PGA Tour wins. It might be the 2023 season, when he didn’t win even after retaking No. 1. He was in the middle of the worst putting season of his career, ranking 161st out of 193 in strokes gained putting. It was a constant storyline and topic of scrutiny. It led to frustration and occasional outbursts on the course.

Yet Scheffler was so skilled at every other part of his game he still finished top 5 in eight of 10 starts. McIlroy, Rahm and Viktor Hovland couldn’t reach him. He made it through that gauntlet of pressure only to get better and reach transcendent levels in 2024 with a second green jacket and nine wins worldwide.

The only man who can understand the zone Scheffler is reaching is the man he’s chasing. No, it’s not nearly the same as Woods, but existing in a tier all to yourself is one of the most difficult tasks in sports. How do you stay driven? How do you stay locked in?

“I was in it to find the answer to one question: How good can I be?” Woods once said. “I suppose I was searching for perfection, although that’s not attainable in golf except for short stretches. I wanted total control of my swing, and, hence, the ball.”

In the biography, “Tiger Woods,” by Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict, Woods’ old swing coach Hank Haney is quoted as saying: “Tiger never allowed himself to be satisfied, because in his mind, satisfaction is the enemy of success. His whole approach was to delay gratification and somehow stay hungry. It’s the way of the superachiever: the more celebrations, the less there’ll be to celebrate.”

While many would argue Woods’ approach was often unhealthy, leading to him pushing his body and mind into places he struggled to recover from, there is something in Scheffler’s mindset that comes closer than you’d think.

Scheffler philosophically does not believe in magic bullets or immediate fixes. He has a deep belief in gradual improvement over long stretches. As his longtime coach Randy Smith described Scheffler’s thinking: “I’m not doing anything but trying to get a little better each day each time I play. Just trying to get a little better at this, little better at that. And that’s all I need.”

When Scheffler was asked about his run Tuesday, he brushed off the question because he refuses to engage in any sort of big-picture legacy questions.

“Every time you go out and play, you’re almost looking in a mirror,” he said. “You’re trying to manage your emotions, manage your skill set, manage your way around the golf course. I don’t think about being No. 1. I didn’t go out to the range today feeling like the best player in the world. I showed up feeling like myself, and I went out to try and prepare to play in the golf tournament. Being No. 1 doesn’t give you any starting strokes unless we’re talking about (the Tour Championship).”

But as Scheffler’s fame reached new heights in 2024 as he won more, welcomed his first child and got arrested, it created a slightly different challenge. Even when he was No. 1 in 2022 and 2023, he didn’t have the largest galleries at most majors. Those were reserved for McIlroy, Spieth or an aging Woods. But by 2024, he couldn’t go anywhere without attention and requests.

That is where Day’s lessons must be learned.

This is something Scheffler seems well adjusted to do. He’s always limited his sponsor deals and avoided buying into the popularity and hype too much. He doesn’t commit to many interviews outside his PGA Tour obligations and doesn’t appear at public functions for clout. He’s not even a part of TGL. His focus is on his family and ensuring he’s physically rested.

“I think I’ve had to almost lean into that more, just continuing to improve my rest so that it’s actually restful,” Scheffler said in July. “I think that’s something that my wife and I are always working on. When we’re at home getting rest, what does it actually look like to be restful? That’s not necessarily sitting there and watching TV. There’s a lot of different things we do to get good quality rest so that, when we come back out on the road and play and do things, I have the energy to compete. I have the energy to — really the social energy to come out and interact with the fans and do this kind of stuff, sit in the media center.”

In the next few weeks, Scheffler will still have a more than comfortable lead for No. 1, so big Rose speculated Scheffler would have to go several months of doing nothing while another player simultaneously goes on an epic run just to get in contention to catch him. And, of course, Scheffler doesn’t seem likely to slow down. Shortly after returning from hand surgery, he finished T9 at Pebble Beach and T3 at the Genesis Invitational.

Woods and Norman held this crown for much longer in their careers. Scheffler is at 128 weeks in total. Norman had 331. Soon Scheffler will pass Johnson’s 135 for third all-time. But this is not about comparing him to the past greats. This is about seeing the era Scheffler is in now, and realizing he’s doing things we thought we’d never see again.

“He’s so unassuming and a genuine guy that it’s easy to gloss over the stuff that he’s been doing, but it’s probably, truly the closest thing to like a dominant Tiger back through the 2000s as we’ve had,” Scott said.

“I would have said I don’t see anyone separating themselves as much as Tiger did, and Scottie is getting close to it.”

(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photos: Roberto Schmidt, Robert Sullivan, David Cannon / Getty Images)