It’s Scottie Scheffler vs. The World, but Pinehurst hasn’t been kind to heavy favorites

Neither the impending arrival nor the howling existence of a newborn son could rattle Scottie Scheffler, who arrived at Pinehurst this week seeking the latest triumph in a summer of dominance not really seen since Tiger Woods in his pomp. Were it not for one overzealous Louisville cop who thought no one was looking — and never turned on his body camera — and dragged Scheffler off to jail the morning of the first round of the PGA Championship, the talk this week might be about the seeming certainty of a Scheffler slam.

Even then, Scheffler, after stretching in his cell, played well enough to contend until the adrenaline wore off Friday afternoon. “The only thing that took him from winning a golf tournament was going into a jail cell for an hour,” Rory McIlroy quipped Tuesday. But it’s no joke. Scheffler’s won five of the last eight tournaments he’s played, including last week’s Memorial, when his son greeted him on the 72nd green at the Memorial along with Jack Nicklaus, and finished in the top 10 of 12 of the 13 events he has entered this year. “You can have a nice little run, but then most of the time you kind of fall back to whatever, a more average week,” Viktor Hovland said. “But his average week is just really, really good. It’s just very, very impressive to watch.”

Scheffler’s precise ball striking and thoughtful approach — so finely honed and carefully considered it verges on boring — have finally been married with a reliable putting stroke, and there’s less of an aura of invincibility around him than inevitability. “It’s probably what happened in the early days with Tiger,” Raleigh native and former U.S. Open champion Webb Simpson said. “You kind of get used to it, so it becomes less of a big deal. It’s almost like an afterthought: ‘Scottie won again this week.’”

It’s Scheffler vs. The World in the U.S. Open, and it may take everything The World has to beat him. “He’s the gold standard right now, and we’re all looking up to him going, ‘All right, how do we get to that level?’” Bryson DeChambeau said. Except Pinehurst No. 2 has never shown much interest in playing into that kind of narrative. Woods twice arrived as a Scheffler-caliber favorite and twice left disappointed. McIlroy won the British Open and PGA Championship later in 2014 but faded from contention on the weekend at Pinehurst that June. And the creativity required around the greens and, since 2014, the wiregrass-and-scrub rough, has given leaderboards a distinctly foreign tinge in the past two visits, which may play against Scheffler as well.

Golfers who grew up bumping-and-running shots into Scottish greens or navigating Melbourne’s Sand Belt courses may very well have an advantage on this unusual layout. Throw in the element of luck introduced by Donald Ross’ diabolical greens and the luck inherent in any U.S. Open, and this is anything but a coronation for Scheffler. It may, in fact, be the toughest test he has faced yet. “Just because I won last week doesn’t give me any shots against the field this week,” Scheffler said. “We all start even par, and the field is level again starting on Thursday. Last week doesn’t really matter.”