Scottie Scheffler feels ‘weird’ about handicap

There’s a sizable chunk of Scottie Scheffler’s DNA that longs for nasty weather, difficult conditions, and the grind of grueling competition.

So having a 10-stroke lead on the field — a major handicap — heading into the first round of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta is almost off-putting. It goes against his very nature.

But the No. 1 player in the world is learning to live with it.

“It’s going to be a little weird, the only tournament of the year where you actually start with strokes ahead of the field,” he said on Wednesday morning, sneaking out quickly before Jay Monahan and Rory McIlroy took to the podium. “I think what’s going to probably work best for me is to look at it like a four-day event and really ignore the starting strokes deal and kind of go out there and do my thing and see where it puts me at the end of four days.

“There might be a tiny bit of added pressure but I get two extra strokes, which is definitely nice. It’s definitely a position that I want to be in for sure.”

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After a meteoric rise in which he won four times in six starts, culminating with his first Green Jacket at the Masters last April, the University of Texas product hasn’t found the winner’s circle in his last 11 tournaments but he’s hardly fallen way off. Although he has missed three cuts since Augusta — most notably at the PGA Championship — he’s also racked up a pair of second-place finishes and placed T-3 at last week’s BMW Championship.

And the money has followed. Scheffler claimed the season-long Aon Risk Reward challenge and the corresponding $1 million prize, it was announced earlier this month. That’s on top of the $4 million he earned for finishing first in The Comcast Business Tour Top 10, both of which are bonus money on top of the record money he has already earned.

So, when was the last time Scheffler, a former University of Texas star who helped the Longhorns win three Big 12 championships, got strokes in a match?

“It’s been a while, yeah. It’s nice being on this end of the strokes versus having to give them up to everybody, which is nice, like I have to do at home,” he said. “I’d have to really think. I can’t remember anything off the top of my head if I was ever the one getting strokes. I’m not going to give you a hard ‘no,’ but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.”