LOUISVILLE, Ky. The perspective was even harder to come by than birdies amid all the raindrops, bourbon and cigar smoke that drifted across golf’s biggest stage on Friday during one of the sport’s most bizarre mornings ever.
When the best player in the world, Scottie Scheffler, was arrested, had his photo taken, his police statement recorded and his release secured, business owners near the Valhalla Golf Club were selling “Free Scottie” t-shirts outside. Fans, some of them self-proclaimed Scottie lovers, were already wearing them inside.
And by the time Scheffler walked off the course, remarkably tied for third at the PGA Championship after a round that seemed as efficient as any he’d played lately, he had already come undone, birdie by birdie, with the notion that the Early morning fight with the police, the trip downtown, that prison-issued orange shirt, or any of the endless snark and comments that surrounded it all would slow him down.
Was it a classic case of mind over matter? Or another illustration of the public’s ever-increasing thirst for a 24-hour reality TV life? Depends on who you ask.
“It’s just amazing how you come here after something like that, put all that aside and make a birdie on the first hole,” said Dean Adams, a golf fan who drove up from Nashville, Tenn., with friends and was waiting for the launch. the best golfer in the world near the 14th green.
Scheffler made five more birdies after that and shot a 5-under 66.
Every time a putt was thrown or a putt was hit, cries of “Scott-eee, Scott-eee” and “Free Scott-eee” pierced the rain- and mud-soaked country club. Two fans raised their bourbon drinks after a good approach to the 12th green around 11 a.m. and shouted “Here’s one for Scottie.”
“As far as the best rounds of my career go, I would say it was pretty good,” said Scheffler, who has won four times this year, including at the Masters. “I definitely never imagined going to jail, and I definitely never imagined going to jail the morning before one of my game times.”
As incredible as Scheffler’s ability to separate his off-field problems from his on-field performance was, this was more than a story about the mindset of a great athlete or a remarkable day on the links.
The episode was triggered when a PGA vendor employee, 69-year-old John Mills, was struck and killed by an oncoming bus as he tried to cross traffic outside the golf course in the slippery pre-dawn darkness.
Police said the officer who tried to stop Scheffler as he ran onto the route ended up in the hospital after being dragged to the ground when the car Scheffler was driving “accelerated forward.”
Scheffler called it “a chaotic situation and a huge misunderstanding.” He used part of his time in the cell to stretch.
“That was a first for me,” he said.
All of this was set against the backdrop of the Louisville police force’s troubled past: Just a year ago, the U.S. Department of Justice found that police in Kentucky’s largest city violated the Constitution in multiple ways with an overzealous use of force that discriminated against black people.
No one will confuse the Scheffler incident with the episodes that led to these discoveries.
“But it’s just another bad image for the city,” said golf fan Bill Miller, a Louisville resident. “I would like to understand what the officer was probably trying to do. But it’s sad. We came here just to watch golf.
To see that this was more than golf, it was taking a walk in the Kentucky rain and mingling with the umbrella-wielding, neck-craning crowd that lined up 10 deep.
Fans wore orange jumpsuits and another popular selection of t-shirts, these ones emblazoned with Scheffler’s recently taken photo.
They checked their phones for the latest in what quickly became a battle every second in the social media hellscape to be fresher, funnier and more inappropriate.
Almost all of the memes — like the photoshopped image of Scheffler wearing his green Masters jacket over his orange prison jumpsuit — were in some level of bad taste.
They talked more about the world we live in than about Scheffler’s struggles, which will likely drag on until Sunday, when the tournament ends and this circus leaves town.
“The conclusion you can draw is that whenever you have a famous person involved in any incident that is outside the norm of, like, eating three meals a day, it provides fodder for the most outrageous claims that can be made or things that can be said. ,” said Dennis Deninger, a sports communications professor at Syracuse University.
“They are almost always based on few or no facts.”
One beautiful thing about sports is how that ever-present scoreboard just tells you the facts. Coming off the course on Friday, the fact is that Scheffler has a good chance of winning.
And yet this was another one of those days when a sports story spread far beyond a scoreboard explaining things in black and white.
“He’s the best guy right now, both as a player and as a person,” Louisville’s John Glenwood said as he waited for Scheffler to pass on the 17th fairway. “We’re here to support him.”
His friends beside him, who didn’t want their names used, agreed. They said they were big Scheffler fans.
One of them was wearing an orange jumpsuit he bought that morning; the other two wore their new “Free Scottie” T-shirts, which may become the most remembered souvenir of the 2024 PGA Championship.
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AP Golf:
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