AUGUSTA, Ga. – Golf is said to be the craziest game there is, and yet Scottie Scheffler made it look absurdly simple. He seemed no more stressed about winning the Masters than he was batting balls in his New Jersey backyard as a five-year-old, hurling them all over his house and into an enchanting future as the world’s greatest player.
Yes, despite going five shots ahead, he turned the 18th green Sunday into a back-and-forth comedy worthy of his childhood spent on the Rockland County miniature golf course and in the reach across the Hudson River Has. He had been grinding 71 1/2 grueling holes on a brutal course so hard and for so long that he decided to back off, break the steel grip on his focus and have some fun. Scheffler gripped his mouth in mock horror after his third missed putt, inspiring the gallery to rise and cheer him on and successfully bring that fourth putt into the cup for a double bogey.
But man, did that kid ever deserve it.
“I’ll give myself a free ticket for that,” said Scheffler in the green jacket.
He now has a forever free pass to Augusta National as the first Jersey Boy champion.
As it turned out, the road to a 10-under finish and a three-stroke win over Rory McIlroy wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Saturday night Scheffler was watching some season four reruns of his favorite show The Office after spilling his dinner in the car on the drive home, much to the delight of his wife Meredith. The next morning, however, was a very different story. That’s when the burden of holding the Masters lead since Friday came down on him.
Scottie Scheffler poses with the Masters trophy. Getty Images
“I cried like a baby this morning,” said Scheffler on Sunday evening. “I was so stressed. I did not know, what I should do.”
Having won three PGA Tour events in the past two months and already a certified Ryder Cup hero, Scheffler collapsed before a final round for the first time in his career. He told Meredith that he wasn’t up for the challenge, that he felt overwhelmed. She gave her spouse a pep talk, made him a big breakfast, and calmed Scottie down upon arrival at the office.
“This golf course and this tournament is simply different,” explains Scheffler.
He conquered it anyway, showing no fear to the public in the process. Seventeen years to the day after Tiger Woods sunk his magical, mysterious chip-in on the 16th to win his fourth green jacket, Scheffler sunk his own on the third hole to win his first while spending the week with it spent wearing Tiger’s shirts and shoes and wielding Tiger’s iron. Cameron Smith, a stalwart Players Championship winner from Australia, had turned a three-shot deficit into a one-shot deficit on the first two holes and appeared to be pressuring the leader hard.
Scottie Scheffler on the 18th green. REUTERS
The chip-in defined the 25-year-old Scheffler as a study in big-game attitude.
With victory assured, Scheffler’s father Scott began conjuring up memories of his son’s youth – hitting balls in the snow at the 9W range and later in the frigid darkness at Bergen Community College’s Orchard Hills 9-hole golf course. Scott stood with a flashlight near a flagstick, next to his daughters, and Scottie fired some line drives directly at them. “He would yell at us when he scored,” Scott said. “He would hit the girls.”
The course manager avoided the Schefflers on more than one occasion, at least until Scott persuaded the man to measure his son’s game. “Then he stopped bothering us,” Scott said. The father learned to move away from the flag with his flashlight while his son took aim.
Scottie Scheffler sinks his last put as he wins the Masters. EPA
What a special trip to New Jersey/New York! Born in Ridgewood, NJ, Scottie was 4 when he first demanded that his father take him to the old driving range at 9W. A Navy veteran and pro named George Kopac ran the range and couldn’t believe the power and precision of young Scottie’s swing. On nasty winter days, Kopac would set a super-jumbo-sized bucket out from behind the shed for the boy to use, and saw to it that a rubber T-shirt and a lawn mat were cleared of snow.
The routine was simple: Scottie spent hours hitting balls in an otherwise closed area, and the Kopac family retrieved them after the snow melted. Of course, a month after George’s death at the age of 88, all of the Kopacs were taped to their TVs in Rockland on Sunday.
“I wish my dad was here to see what a wonderful man Scottie has become,” wrote Kathy Kopac to The Post. “Many tears of joy were shed for Scottie today. I know my dad says up there, ‘I knew he was going to make it.’ ”
Scottie made it because his father, Scott, was a dedicated stay-at-home father while his mother worked tirelessly as an executive at a Manhattan law firm and then as the COO of a Dallas law firm. The son of a car salesman, Scott grew up as a public course kid in a town (Englewood Cliffs, NJ) defined by its private standard of living. “We were the dead-end kids,” Scott said. He was a rough-and-tumble basketball player at the storied St. Cecilia High School, which was once the home of a basketball and soccer coach named Vince Lombardi. He raised a kid strong enough to win the Super Bowl in golf.
“He’s just a nice boy who was born in New Jersey and raised in Texas, and he’s got a little bit of both, which is wonderful,” Scott said of his boy. “I guess he belongs to the world now. It’s public now, which is a little scary. But he will represent himself well.”
Don’t worry, Scottie Scheffler already has it.