Monday Rap: Scottie's Return, The Possible Death of the Underdog, And What To Expect From Tiger Woods This Week

Steph Chambers. Getty Images.

Unless you're Tiger Woods, a once-in-a-generation Cyborg capable of dusting your opponents with Darwinian superiority, most every golfer needs at least one break to go their way if they're going to leave with the trophy. When there are 100-plus world-class players vying for the title, and everyone's so damn close in ability, the vagaries of a sport played outdoors on a different venue every week can prove the difference. 

This isn't to say Scottie Scheffler would not have won the WM Phoenix Open for the second straight year had he not been tapped on the shoulder by the Golf Gods. But it certainly didn't hurt. Scheffler got a couple of rather fortunate bounces down the stretch at TPC Scottsdale on Sunday—the first came on 13, when he blocked a tee shot dangerously close to a desert bush right of the fairway. It skirted that bush, found the fairway, and he went on to make eagle. On 14, he pulled one badly left—a miss he struggled with all day—only for his ball to find a clean lie in the sand and an unimpeded look at the green. On 15, he sent another one right and had it kick off a hillside back into short shorter grass. On 16, after yet another pull that saw his approach shot trickle all the way down a hill and rest near the grandstands enveloping the hole, he got to place his ball, ensuring a good lie. He played a no-nonsense chip from there and canned a 15-footer to send the crowd into a raucous. That, followed by Nick Taylor's nasty 270-degree horseshoe lipout for birdie, gave Scheffler a three shot lead playing the last and allowed PGA Tour officials to breathe easy, knowing there'd be no playoff that would bleed into Super Bowl time. 

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Good breaks mean nothing, however, if you don't capitalize on them. And while Scottie Scheffler is absolutely young enough to be part of the TrackMan generation, and he hits it plenty far, his most impressive ability might be his Spiethian-like ability to just get that ball in the damn hole. It's not always pretty—his…unique?…footwork and sui generis finish are as homemade as it gets, but who cares about aesthetics? Scottie's now won five times in the last 12 months, including back-to-back WM Phoenix Opens, and he just rudely interrupted our discussion of whether Rory McIlroy or Jon Rahm is the finest player in the world. I'd still go with Rahm based purely on consistency—he finished solo third this week, bringing his run of T-8 or better finishes to nine in a row, including four victories—but the much-maligned algorithm now favors Scheffler, who's back on the mountaintop as world No. 1. 

His Scoring Gene was on full display on Sunday, when he hit just five fairways for the second round in a row. He shaped second shots around trees. He made putts when he had to. And he's magic around the greens—Tiger Woods is known to be an admirer of just how creative Scheffler is with a wedge in his hand. You don't win the Masters without being able to summon a bunch of different short-game shots, and Scheffler has the unique ability to hit both cut and draw chips. It's part of the reason he's won at every single level—he won 140+ tournaments as a kid in Texas. He won the U.S. Junior Amateur in 2013. He became the top-ranked junior in the country in 2014. He was Big 12 freshman of the year in 2015. He was the Korn Ferry Tour's player of the year in 2019. Then, after a brief hiatus from the winner's circle, he's kicked it back into gear and has developed into one of the game's finer closers. Whether he has his best or not. 

"I think today was probably pretty good example of that," Scheffler said after the W. "I hit some wild shots off the tee that were pretty uncharacteristic for how I usually shape the ball. I was just able to grind it out, make a lot of putts. I think I only had two bogeys this week. Which is really, really around this golf course. So I'm proud of that with my short game and putting. Hoping to build on this going forward."

Scheffler then flew to Los Angeles and was on the Riviera range first thing in the morning, prepping for a round alongside the University of Texas' Brian Stark as he tries to qualify for the Genesis through the College Showcase. Good-guy move, to not pull out of that obligation. The show rolls on. 

The underdog story, a dying breed?

Brett White missed the cut by a million this week. And yet he couldn't wipe the smile off his face. It makes sense, when you zoom out and consider all that happened before he Monday qualified for last week's WM Phoenix Open. 

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White's journey to professional golf is a bit out there—he's definitely not your Texas-born, Oklahoma State-bred blue bood. White grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich. and played hockey most of his life. It's only until high school that he really began to focus on golf, and he had a solid-but-distinctly unspectacular career at Eastern Washington. But he felt like he'd been improving every year, and as long as that continued to be the case, he knew he wanted to give professional golf a try. So he did what pro golfers do: he shacked up in a spot in South Florida and played mini tour events, hoping to peak for Q-School and earn his way to the show. 

A few years into his pro golf journey, he ran into a nightmarish roadblock. 

White was playing in the 2017 New Hampshire State Open when he noticed something off with his buddy. He played well, though, losing in a playoff. Still, he wanted to figure out what exactly as going on with his body. 

"The last two rounds, my body started to ache," Brett told me. "I started feeling unwell. Tired, I was probably sleeping like 12 hours a day." 

He went to an urgent care center and got a pretty standard diagnosis: mononucleosis. He'd rest for a few weeks, and then he'd be back. But he had another tournament the following week, the Rhode Island Open, and guys on the Mondays-and-mini-tour guys can't always afford to take away the time their bodies might crave. So he played, made the cut, gutted it out and then drive all the way home to Michigan. He went to his primary care doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and a steroid and told him to simply rest. That's all he could do. 

"That's what I did for the next week. I rarely got out of bad. Feeling really lethargic. That next weekend, six or seven days after bedrest, getting up the stairs got progressively harder. I felt so, so tired, and I was gradually getting worse."

His dad noticed his son clinging to the walls just to get up some stairs. That sounded an internal alarm, but he had a follow-up appointment in a few days. He labored to the office, the longest he'd been out of bed since the beginning of the ordeal. 

"I was just supposed to get some bloodwork, but I was really struggling. I mean, I was sweating. Then a nurse practitioner came down and said, let's get him to the emergency room. He doesn't look right."

White was admitted—and he wouldn't leave for a long time. He kept deteriorating for three additional days as doctors administered test after test. At first, they thought it could've been vertigo. Medication for that didn't help. Then they started neurological testing and noticed something off. Testing kicked into overdrive

"I had so many vials of blood taken. I had to take a spinal tap, they had to get spinal fluid to test for certain viruses. I'd been playing in Latin America and the Caribbean, and that's when Zika was going around. They must have tested me for 30 or 40 viruses that could trigger a false positive on a mono test."

But every one of those came back negative. The only thing that came back positive was for mono. 

"That's what I had; it was mono. But my body just couldn't fight off the mono. And so it went into my brain. When the brain swells, bad things happen. And that's a problem."

That…that was a problem. A big one. In the two or three days before doctors got the brain swelling under control, White couldn't walk more than 50 feet unassisted. He had a bed alarm, so he couldn't get out alone. Once they did get the swelling down, it was time for rehab. He transferred to an in-patient rehab center back home in Michigan. 

"They had the swelling down, but the lasting effects were still there. The rehab process—it kind of reminded me of going to school. It was like, classes. I'd wake up at 7:30, they'd check my vitals, do a couple of neurological tests just to get some baselines. And then it was off to class: an hour of physical therapy, which was at first just getting up and walking down the hall."

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He steadily progressed, and a month after his release he was back swinging a club again. But he had to essentially re-learn the golf swing, for his coordination was all off. Nine months later, he teed it up in a Korn Ferry Tour event and restarted the second chapter of his golf life. He earned status through Q-School for last year's KFT season but had limited success, meaning he only has conditional status for this season. White hasn't gotten into any of the first four events of the year and has been back on the Monday grind. He played last week's one for the WMPO, shot 66, waited around, and got into a $20 million designated event. 

He shot 75-74 to miss the cut by seven shots, and yet he couldn't have been in better spirits when we spoke, smiling at the memories from an unreal week. 

"I let Scottie Scheffler play through on the sixth hole during a practice round," White said. "I got to shake hands with the Masters Champion. We made the turn, I went and got lunch, and played the back nine with Jason Dufner. He's cool as hell." 

This whole story is cool as hell…but it might be a dying breed. It's an open secret in tour circles that the vast majority, if not all, of next year's designated events will feature limited-fields of around 70. That, of course, will mean no more Monday qualifiers for weeks like the Waste Management Phoenix Open, which would mean no more stories quite like Brett's. Ryan French, also known as Monday Q on Twitter, penned an open letter to PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan about this very issue.

Only it's not just Monday Q stories that would be in jeopardy with limited-event fields. Because Nick Taylor never would've gotten in had this been a 70-man event. Taylor entered the week ranked No. 223, but the Canadian played his way into the final threesome on Sunday with Scheffler and Rahm, two of the top three players in the world. He proceeded to shoot 65 to tie Scheffler and beat Rahm by three, finish solo second, and make $2.18 million for his efforts. It's a testament to just how deep the PGA Tour win that a guy like Taylor, with a relatively modest resume (at least compared to the big boys), can go toe-to-toe with the greats for 72 holes on the craziest stage in golf. 

I understand both sides. The benefits of bigger fields are stories like Taylor's and like White's. These are the stories that golf nerds like us cherish…but do they appeal to the larger audience? The one "Full Swing" is trying to reach? Because there are benefits to smaller fields, too: shorter broadcast windows, consistency in fields, and a higher probability of having A-list players facing off with A-list players down the stretch. On recent past issues like these, where the interests of the top guys go against the interest of the rank-and-file guys, the Tour has decided in favor of the stars. Which makes sense—stars are the main attraction, and it's clear that a bigger piece of the pie is headed in their direction with initiatives like the designated events and the Player Impact Program. Let's just hope the Brett Whites and the Nick Taylors of the world still get their flowers.

What to expect from Tiger Woods this week?

In scanning the internet for recent reviews of Tiger Woods' game, I stumbled across a pretty eye-opening statement from Jim "Bones" Mackay, who caddied for Justin Thomas when he played in the same group as Tiger and Charlie in the PNC Championship. 

"I was impressed by a lot of things this week," Mackay told Golf.com's James Colgan. "Nothing impressed me more than how well Tiger played. I was out there thinking, Oh my gosh, it's a Ryder Cup year." 

Woods looked razor sharp from 150 yards and in that week in Orlando. He looked, put simply, like a PGA Tour player. But we cannot emphasize enough just how different a hit-and-giggle, on a dead-flat course in Florida, with no rough, and riding a cart between shots, is from competing in a designated event on the PGA Tour. Ever since the accident, Woods has remained consistent in his assessment of his own game: he can hit all the shots, he just can't walk the way he wants to. It's really that simple. When you watch him over the ball, particularly with a shorter club in his hand, you could easily forget that his leg was crushed by the weight of an SUV. You're then instantly given a sobering reminder when he begins to labor toward his next shot. Watching him try to navigate the undulations at Southern Hills was downright painful to even witness, and he must've been in extraordinary pain to withdraw from a major championship for the first time as a professional. He then looked flat all week at St. Andrews and, just before he was set to play in the Hero World Challenge, shared yet another injury that's related to his leg: plantar fasciitis in his right foot, which can make walking excruciatingly painful. 

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The good news for Woods is that he's obviously feeling better than he did in December, when he pulled out of the Hero. And, other than a steep walk downhill on the first hole and a steep walk uphill on the last, Riviera is almost dead-flat. It's a big reason why he's playing, and the very fact that he is teeing it up sent a jolt through TPC Scottsdale last Friday. 

"That's awesome," said Max Homa upon hearing the news. "I imagine we'll be carrying him down the hill on 1 and up it on 18. Which no one would mind. But it's awesome. I'm really glad he's back. I think we're privileged any time he plays now. Obviously we don't know his schedule. Seems like he's going to try to play the majors. So it's really awesome he's playing a tour event. Especially his event. One of my favorites. So I'm stoked to see him back out there."

Jon Rahm concurred: "He's playing Riv? Nice. Well I didn't know. Great to hear. Great to hear. After all he's gone through. It's incredible that he keeps trying."

He'll have to try with everything he has. This first competitive start in seven months, on the golf course he's played most times without winning on, against virtually all the best players on tour, and a body that changes based on the day. Simply making the cut this week—and, ideally, not fading physically like he did at the Masters and the PGA Championship—would qualify as a hugely successful week. But Woods, of course, will feel like he has a chance to win. He has said umpteen times that he won't tee it up in any event he doesn't feel he can. The odds are definitively stacked against him. But that's been the case time and time again throughout his career. 

Elsewhere…

—Party like it's 2016, because Rickie Fowler and Jason Day are both showing major signs of a resurgence. Fowler, who has recently returned to Butch Harmon's guidance, had a hole-in-one on Sunday and finished T-10—and that's after finishing T-11 in his last start at the Farmers Insurance Open. He's made five cuts in a row, and the eye test suggests a much more fundamentally sound swing and greater control of his ball. Rickie's stock is on the rise, and so is JDay's. 

Day's had a pretty unique career—he reached world No. 1 in 2015 and held it for nearly a year from March 2016 into February 2017. He once won eight tournaments in a 13-month stretch…but he was doing while sacrificing his body. Day's old move relied on a ton of side bend and put serious stress on his back—that, plus a legendary practice routine, meant he lived his life in pain. That's no longer the case. He's now working with instructor Chris Como and has rebuilt his swing with his back in mind. He still believes he can return to No. 1 with this new move, and his recent scores show he's on the right track. Day followed up a T-7 at the Farmers with a solo fifth in Phoenix, and he's now close to getting back into the top 50 in the world rankings. Day and Fowler played together on Sunday, and they fed off each other's vibes. 

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"I've been good mates with Rickie for a long time," Day said. "We came out pretty much the same year. I understand what he's going through. I think he understands what I'm going through as well. So it's nice to see him playing some really good golf because for a moment there both of us weren't playing great. I don't think our head space was in the best of shape."

—We, the golf world, might owe the football world an apology. The grass used for last night's Super Bowl was apparently a new blend, developed with funding help from the United States Golf Assocation. The USGA was rightly proud for its efforts to help the country's biggest sporting spectacle. 

Only problem…it didn't go well. At all. Like, it went horrible. Players were slipping and sliding all game, with one even calling it the worst field he's ever played on. 

I thoughts it a curious choice, to consult the USGA for grass help. Because golf-course grass comes loose. Often. Those are called divots. That's not what you want happening on a football field. 

—"Full Swing," Netflix's behind-the-scenes documentary on professional golf, debuts this Wednesday. Episode 1, however, is on YouTube after Michelob Ultra and Netflix's Super Bowl commercial. "Frenemies" follows Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, telling the stories of their friendship and how it's evolved over the years. It's a pretty fitting episode to lead off with in that it focuses mainly on the human-interest side of the story. Golf fans will already know what happens during the actual tournaments, and the producers didn't want this show to look like a broadcast or like one of those British Open Official Films, that tells the story of a tournament in chronological order. This is a documentary about people.

—What an electric, electric week that was in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. From the moment I touched down on Sunday evening, you could feel the buzz in the valley—the WMPO is a massive event in its own right, but adding the Super Bowl to the mix sent the whole area into overdrive. The thing about the WMPO, though, is that it peaks on Saturday. That's when the most fans come, that's when it's craziest, and that's when it doesn't have to compete with the Super Bowl. It got me thinking…why not switch this tournament to a Wednesday-Saturday schedule, just like the Farmers did to avoid the AFC and NFC Championship games? I realize they sell way more tickets on weekends than weekdays, so it's unlikely to give up a weekend day, but it does feel like if this tournament is going to continue to grow in importance—all the pieces are in place for that to happen—it should finish with its climax on Saturday, because Sunday almost feels like a slight hangover.

—Mark Hubbard brought out "The Snail" on TPC Scottsdale's 16th on Friday. He does this sometimes when he's clearly going to miss the cut, and it's glorious every time. 

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—And yet Stewart Cink gets the award for Best 16th Hole Performance. My man immediately sprung into action after hearing Kevin Durant got traded to the Suns late Wednesday evening. He began calling around and eventually got connected with the Suns' equipment manager, who was able to make him a fresh Durant jersey for him to rock inside the arena. 10/10. 

—South African Ockie Strydom shot nine-under 63 to win the DP World Tour's Singapore Open, his second win on the circuit since December. This week's DPWT event is in Thailand. 

—Dustin Johnson has fallen out of the top 50 of the world rankings, and we've got a big problem on our hands. Everyone knows there are not 50 players better than Dustin Johnson in the world. But there are also rules about criteria for getting points, and LIV hasn't followed them. What I do know is there is less confidence in the OWGR than ever before. I don't pretend to have a solution, but this is only getting worse.

—LIV Golf released a promotional video for its 12 teams and their captains and…yeah, you just have to see this one:

—Australian Rhein Gibson closed with 64 to win the Korn Ferry Tour even in Colombia. They're now off for a month before restarting the season stateside in March. 

Until next time,

Dan