SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Scottie Scheffler is used to cutting tournaments like a knife.
This year he’s having trouble finding a sharpener.
But Scheffler, who admitted Tuesday at Shinnecock Hills that he’d describe his year as “dull”, does have a chance to do something awfully special at the U.S. Open — complete the career grand slam.
Now, don’t get it twisted: Scheffler is still the top-ranked player in men’s golf and has a win already this year along with seven top-10 finishes in 12 starts (including a run of three second-place results in a row). He’s also first in the PGA Tour in strokes gained: total, and statistically his body of work has been, in a word, tremendous.
But we’re used to a certain kind of effort from Scheffler. It seems like he’s been just a touch off so far in 2026.
And he’ll be the first to say as such.
“I’d say I feel like I’ve been close most of the year. I feel like I just haven’t been as sharp as I needed to be. I think the margins in this game are so small. For me to be winning a lot of tournaments, you’ve got to just be really, really sharp,” Scheffler said.
“I think I’m leading the strokes gained statistics, so by no means is it a bad year. Is it up to the play I’ve had the previous couple of years? Probably not, but it’s not far off.”
Not since peak Tiger Woods have we seen a run of dominance like what we’ve had from Scheffler over the last three years or so. Yes, Rory McIlroy has already captured the career grand slam and then went back to Augusta National this April and successfully defended his title there. But Scheffler has been the man to beat essentially every time he’s teed it up. He won seven times in 2024 and six times in 2025, including two majors — the PGA Championship and The Open Championship. That means he comes to this week’s U.S. Open with history in his crosshairs.
If Scheffler wins this week, he would become the fourth-youngest golfer to complete the career grand slam after Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player, and seventh overall. McIlroy joked earlier this year that his caddie bought him a special gift, a scorecard from Augusta National that has all of the grand-slam winners’ signatures, but he was just hoping he wouldn’t have to get Scheffler to sign it this summer.
Scheffler would also, since the final round is June 21, become the first golfer to win a major championship on their birthday (Phil Mickelson was the closest, having finished second at the U.S. Open twice before).
Scheffler’s best finish at the U.S. Open was a tie for second in 2022. He finished tied for seventh last year at Oakmont.
The No. 1-ranked golfer in the world did confirm he knows what is at stake this week. Scheffler will already go down in history as one of the greatest players of this generation, but with all the other major wins already, the U.S. Open is his legacy’s void. This is hard to do, though. The grand-slam group is tiny because of it. McIlroy took 11 tries to win the Masters. Arnold Palmer and Sam Snead, men McIlroy is now chasing with his six majors to their seven, could never do it.
But as Scheffler often does, he’s trying to think big picture.
“Golf is such a funny game. (A good example is) this week, if I finish second this week, it’s almost like, ‘Hey, you failed in your first chance to win the career grand slam.’ It’s kind of, like, is finishing second a failure? Like, yeah, it can feel that way, but I think sometimes when you look at more of kind of a wider view of the sport and where your game’s at, second is not always that bad, but man, does it frickin’ hurt at the same time,” Scheffler said.
“You can feel like a failure in this sport oftentimes just because you’re not winning, and I think that’s just part of it. That’s why I said I try not to focus too much on my successes or my failures, one, because you get beat up an awful lot in this game. It’s a tough sport.”
The key to Scheffler’s success this week will have to come on Thursday, as his scoring average in the first round on the PGA Tour this year sees him sit 51st. He bounces back nicely by Sunday, however, as his final-round scoring average is tops on Tour. Scheffler will need to get off to a steady start at Shinnecock Hills as the wind is set to blow upwards of 70 km/h.
In typical Scheffler fashion, however, he didn’t get too high or low about his approach to this particular major.
“For me, would it be a dream to win the U.S. Open? Of course. But at the end of the day (the) grand slam has never been a motivating factor for me. I always just wanted to be the best version of myself, and that got me this far,” Scheffler said. “When it comes to this golf tournament, like I said, I’m going to step on the first tee and remind myself I’ve done everything I possibly could in order to play well, and now it’s just a matter of going out there and trying to execute and kind of going back to enjoying the competition versus feeling like you have to win for some reason.”
But if Scheffler were to win major No. 5? On his birthday? For the grand slam? At one of the founding clubs of golf in America?
That would be a magical slice of golfing history.