And the table tennis player …
“I’ve known him since we were kids,” fellow tour pro Sam Burns said. “It’s hard to overstate how competitive he is.”
What about the pickleball player?
“You think about it — he hits a golf ball and he’s stationary, always the same distance from the ball,” said Ben Johns, the world’s top pickleball player. “So I wasn’t really expecting him to move around and be quite as athletic as he was.”
What does any of this have to do with golf? Only everything. With six wins this year and four other top-five finishes, Scheffler has differentiated himself from the field with booming drives, unparalleled ball-striking and mental focus that’s the envy of rivals. But he’s also among the most athletic golfers on tour, uncoiling his 6-foot-3 frame, generating power from his legs and hips and using his hand-eye coordination for perfect contact.
“He can do a lot of things that most golfers simply can’t do,” said John Fields, Scheffler’s coach at the University of Texas.
One example? Fields recalls watching a teenage Scheffler dunk a basketball.
“You think many guys out there can do that?” Fields asks.
It’s true — any talk of a vertical leap in the golf world is mostly focused on Phil Mickelson’s 2004 Masters win — but Fields said it’s just another component of Scheffler’s athletic arsenal. The longtime Texas coach started recruiting Scheffler when the golfer was all of 12 and over the years saw him both on golf courses and in basketball gyms. Scheffler was always pointed toward a pro golf career — he famously wore pants during junior rounds to mimic tour players — but he was also a well-rounded athlete who played a variety of sports.
“Being able to play multiple sports and compete and learning how to play on a team — I was never too focused on one thing when I was a kid,” he explained recently. “My dad always did a good job of letting me just go play and have fun.”
Scheffler was born in New Jersey but grew up in Dallas, so it’s not surprising he was playing youth football as a grade-schooler, lining up for a YMCA team called the Vikings. The sports changed with the seasons, and Scheffler played basketball throughout middle school, too.
“Scottie wasn’t ever really the guy you wanted guarding you,” said Clayton Murtha, a childhood friend and high school teammate, “because regardless of what the sport was, he was always bringing high intensity, especially on the defensive end.”
Golf always took up the majority of the time, and Scheffler racked up a string of wins at junior events. He won the U.S. Junior Amateur in 2013 and was just 17 when he made his PGA Tour debut in 2014 at the local Byron Nelson Championship.
Randy Smith, his longtime golf coach, remembers Scheffler approaching him shortly after winning the U.S. Junior Amateur. He had committed to Texas four months earlier and was about to start his senior year of high school.
“He came in the next week and said, ‘I know a lot of people say I shouldn’t be doing this and I kind of know what you’re going to say, but I wanted to tell you that I’m going to play basketball my senior year,’” Smith said. “I think I surprised him. I said, ‘I love it.’”
Scheffler was the sixth man off the bench for a talented Highland Park team. He grew more than a foot in high school and was a lanky sharpshooter, comfortable crashing the boards or firing from the wing.
“He’d sit out there looking at three-pointers like they were hot fudge sundaes,” Smith recalled.
Scheffler was listed at 6-1 as a senior and harbored no NBA aspirations, telling a Florida reporter at the time that he was playing hoops “for fun. That’s what my friends were doing, so it was nice to get a break from golf.”
There was at least one incident when his basketball hobby clashed with his golf pursuit. As a junior, Scheffler was playing ball in a buddy’s backyard a week before the state golf championship tournament when he suffered what he would call “the silliest injury ever.” He was running down the court when he stepped on a “ginormous acorn,” rolling his ankle.
“My buddies are freaking out because they hear the crack of the acorn,” Scheffler recalled for reporters in 2021.
He had to golf in an ankle brace and sneakers the next week but managed to win the second of three state titles. Regardless, the injury put his friends on high alert.
Matt Fraschilla, another Highland Park classmate, described playing pickup games in the school gym the summer after Scheffler’s senior year.
“The whole running joke was any time Scottie drove to the basket, everyone just got out of the way,” said Fraschilla, now an assistant basketball coach at Harvard, “because no one wanted to be the guy that hurt Scottie Scheffler.”
Scheffler still plays the occasional basketball game, as well as other sports, but as he recently noted, “I try to limit it a little bit just because I can’t be getting hurt.”
Pickleball is of particular interest these days. Scheffler has played casually and competitively with top players such as Johns and Anna Leigh Waters, as well as Tom Dundon, owner of the Professional Pickleball Association.
“I remember the first time I played with him — he was pretty raw,” said Johns, the sport’s 25-year-old star. “And his footwork was kind of funny. I was almost worried he was going to injure himself because he would go all-out for the ball.”
The two played against each other again a few months later in a celebrity pro-am event, and Johns could tell Scheffler had been practicing.
“It was pretty striking how much better his game got,” Johns said. “He was kind of leveraging what he was good at.”
Burns has played every sport possible with Scheffler over the years. In pickleball, he prefers to line up as his partner rather than his foe. “He just kind of holds the court,” Burns said, “so I don’t have to do very much, which is nice.”
Because Scheffler is such a competitor and so determined to succeed, Burns said, he tends to thrive in whatever sport he dabbles in. It all translates back to golf, of course: athleticism that allows him to generate power despite unorthodox footwork, hand-eye coordination to take mighty cuts and always make good contact, strategic thinking that helps land shots with pinpoint precision and focus to recover from setbacks and take on the world’s best, never mind the stakes.
But one question remains: Can he still dunk? As Scheffler acknowledged, there’s probably too much at stake these days to risk a bad fall or an ankle injury.
Still, Burns said, “I’m sure if you told him he couldn’t, he would try.”