How Scottie Scheffler Obliterated the British Open

Scottie Scheffler ran away with the British Open at 17-under par to win by four strokes.

Playing with Scottie Scheffler in the final group on Saturday, English golfer Matthew Fitzpatrick had an up-close look at why everyone’s efforts to chase him down at the British Open would be utterly and completely futile.

“His putting is night and day,” Fitzpatrick said. “That’s obviously the difference that’s taken him to this unbeatable run.”

Ever since Scheffler ascended to his position as the best golfer on the planet, putting had been his lone bugaboo. Every other part of his game was consistently excellent, but whenever he stepped onto the green, he suddenly became fallible.

Usually when he lost, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint why.

But over the course of the last year, Scheffler has made a series of adjustments that have turned his one weakness into a bona fide asset. And now he has the Claret Jug to prove it.

Capped by a final round that was more of a coronation than a competition, Scheffler ran away with the British Open at 17-under par, four strokes ahead of fellow American Harris English. The victory at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland marked his first Open Championship, his second major of the season and the fourth of his career.

Scheffler holes his birdie putt on the 1st hole during the final round.

Altogether it marks the most dominant spell of golf since Tiger Woods was in his prime. Scheffler’s wins at the British and the PGA Championship earlier this year mean that the U.S. Open is now the only major missing from the 29-year-old’s résumé—and at this point, it seems more like a matter of when, not if, he will take one home.

Scheffler has never looked more unstoppable than he did this weekend, when he didn’t merely notch his first win on a links course, but did so by absolutely obliterating the field.

And the scariest part for everyone attempting to keep up with him is that the key to his runaway victory was his handiwork on the greens.

By the end, the advanced metrics showed that Scheffler had gained nearly nine strokes on the field through his putting. And it wasn’t long ago that such a showing would have been out of the question.

Back in 2023, Scheffler ranked 162nd out of 193 players on the PGA Tour in putting, with the numbers showing that he was giving away nearly a third of a stroke per round compared with the average putting performance.

At some tournaments, his yips on the green were even worse than that—costing him wins and millions of dollars. In other instances, the rest of his game was so dominant that it didn’t matter. When he won his first Masters in 2022, Scheffler four-putted on the final hole. He still won by three.

But last year, Scheffler started overhauling his approach on the greens. He switched from a blade-style putter to a mallet. More recently, he also adopted the trendy claw grip, where players place their dominant hand on the side of the grip, almost as if they’re holding a pencil.

Those changes raised his game to a new level. Last season, Scheffler’s putting improved to just above average. This year, he has grown into one of the best putters on Tour, entering the week 22nd in strokes gained putting.

That improvement was never more obvious than at this British Open.

The advanced metrics showed that Scheffler had gained nearly nine strokes on the field through his putting.

Scheffler made that clear beginning early on Thursday, when he carded his first birdie of the tournament on the par-3 third hole with an 18-footer. That set the tone for a week in which he was steady on his short putts, and even managed to sink some longer ones. When he took the lead with a second-round 64, he holed birdies from 34, 17 and 15 feet away.

Yet the real reason nobody had a prayer of catching him wasn’t the ones he nailed to go further and further into the red. It was the putts he made to avoid giving strokes back.

Early in Scheffler’s final round, he was in a pair of dicey situations when his putter saved him. On back-to-back holes on the front nine, he rolled in par putts from 16 feet and 15 feet to keep his scorecard clean.

That was part of a 32-hole stretch from Friday to Sunday when he didn’t card a single bogey. When it finally snapped that on the eighth hole in the final round, it was actually a double bogey after another part of his game surprisingly failed him: his drive landed him in a pot bunker, and his first attempt to get out caught the lip.

But he bounced back with a birdie on the next hole, and the only question on the back nine was how much he would win by. Once he reached the final green, there was no pressure on his final putt of the tournament, a tap-in for par.

Like almost every other effort this week, it dropped straight into the hole.