Who will Scottie Scheffler follow: Tiger Woods or Johnny Miller?
One of the two or three best golfers of all time (yes, Tiger). Or merely a great golfer, Hall of Famer in fact, who still seemed to have underachieved, given how great he was at his best (Johnny).
Or maybe somewhere between?
Scheffler recently won his second major championship, which was his ninth career PGA Tour victory, and followed it up with this past week’s win in Hilton Head to continue his current streak of head-turning greatness: Four wins and a runner-up in his last five starts.
We can go back 25 years (Tiger) and 50 years (Johnny) to find similar post-WWII streaks, as well as two eventual career paths that suggest you just never know what happens next.
1999: Tiger Woods begins his run of steady dominance
Tiger Woods was an established star within the golf world before he even turned pro. A few early wins confirmed that his golf would transfer well to the play-for-pay game, but then came the 1997 Masters, where he lapped the field and became much more than just a “golf world” star.
He would play 10 more majors without a victory (and win just once in 1998) until the 1999 PGA Championship, which was his second major and 10th overall PGA Tour win. Similar mileposts to Scheffler’s, though at 23, Tiger was four years younger than Scottie today.
In ’99, after winning the PGA and finishing 37th the following week, Tiger would win his last four starts of the Tour season, as well as the season-ending World Cup of Golf. He’d also open the next season with wins in his first two official PGA Tour starts.
Scheffler’s streak of four wins in five starts is now on hold as he goes home to Texas to await the birth of his first child. His next start will be the third week of May at the PGA Championship in Louisville.
Golf’s past and present this past December, when Tiger Woods congratulated Scottie Scheffler after Scheffler’s win in the Hero World Challenge, which Tiger hosts.
His tee-to-cup brilliance in this extended stretch hasn’t been seen since any number of great stretches Tiger put together during his unmatched run from 1999-2009. It’s one thing to get wins in bunches, but quite another to have a bunch of bunches, as Tiger did.
Fifty years ago, another future Hall of Famer won in bunches — a couple of times, in fact. But Johnny Miller’s career arc never stretched too far without a detour, and serves as a cautionary tale that no matter the brilliance of the maestro,…
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