Scottie Scheffler’s incredible 2024 just got even better with the world No. 1 receiving a massive bonus from the PGA Tour, almost double the size of Rory McIlroy’s.

Scheffler has won six times on the PGA Tour this season, including a memorable second Masters title, and he followed it up with victory at the Olympics in Paris last week to make it a golden year for the 28-year-old.

The American has raked in a massive £22million in on-course earnings this season, and his bank balance swelled further on Monday with confirmation he had finished atop the Comcast Business Tour Top 10 rankings. The list acts as the PGA Tour’s regular season order of merit, and Scheffler finished top by a huge margin

For his efforts, he will receive a £6.2m bonus, and he has huge opportunities to boost his winnings in the final three weeks of the season through the FedEx Cup Playoffs. The FedEx St. Jude Championship and BMW Championship have £3.1m purses going to the winners, while the Tour Championship title is worth an eye-watering £19.6m.

It’s been an incredible year for me both on and off the course, so to finish up the regular season by earning the top spot in the Comcast Business Tour Top 10 is an honour,” Scheffler said. “Every year I try to perform and compete to the best of my abilities, so this award really represents the hard work put in throughout the course of the season with the support of my family and team.”

Xander Schauffele, winner of the PGA Championship and The Open, comes in second on the list, and receives a bonus of £4.7m, while Rory McIlroy finished third and receives £3.8m. Collin Morikawa takes £3.4m for finishing fourth.

Wyndham Clark (£3.1), Ludvig Aberg (£2.7m) and Sahith Theegala (£2.2m) finished in fifth, sixth and seventh respectively, with Hideki Matsuyama (£1.9m), Sungjae Im (£1.7m) and Shane Lowry (£1.6m) rounding off the rankings.

Scheffler’s remarkable run began in March at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he romped to victory by five shots. A week later, he held his nerve when Schauffele, Clark and Brian Harman faltered to win The Players Championship.
Masters glory followed in April, donning the green jacket for the second time after mastering brutally windy conditions, but he that was not enough for the two-time major champion, claiming the RBC Heritage title eight days later.
Another double followed in June, winning the Memorial Tournament and the Travelers to emphasise his credentials as the best – and most consistent – player on the planet. Schauffele’s pair of major triumphs threatened to take the shine of Scheffler’s year, but he produced perhaps the best closing round of his career to go nine-under-par at Le Golf National to snatch Olympic gold from Tommy Fleetwood.

Scheffler stars as a heavy betting favourite for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, which tees off at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee on Thursday. He starts at 15/4, with Schauffele and McIlroy priced at 8/1 and 19/2 respectively.

 

Tiger Woods has just about every shot imaginable in his arsenal. Whether the situation requires the ball to go high or low, left or right, the 15-time major winner has the shot in his bag to get it done.

Watching Woods work around the greens you can see his creativity really shine. Rarely on the course does he hit just a stock shot with his short game. Every scenario is a little bit different, and each requires specific adjustments in order to have the best chance of chipping it close.

One of Woods’ go-to shots around the greens comes in the form of a “draw chip.” And in today’s edition of Play Smart, we’re going to hear from the man himself on how to hit it.

How to hit Tiger’s draw chip

Sometimes getting the ball close from short range requires a little bit of creative thinking. For Woods, that comes in the form of shaping the ball left or right to get the ball close.

For a shot that needs to move left-to-right — or one that might be affected by a tough lie — he turns to his patented draw chip.

Executing the shot is simple. According to Woods, he opens the face just a touch, keeps his hands forward at address and then when the club head is approaching impact, he tries to close the face down and move his body forward.

“I’ll get more spin,” Woods says. “But I’m also ensuring that I don’t fat it.”

Next time you’re around the greens and are worried about catching the ball a little heavy, try focusing on hitting a draw chip. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to execute — and how useful it is to have in your arsenal.

 

 

Xander Schauffele has set his sights on securing the rare career grand slam in golf – a dream fellow pro Rory McIlroy has been chasing for years. The career grand slam is achieved when a golfer wins all four major tournaments during their playing life, and Schauffele claimed two out of four titles by winning the PGA Championship and The Open Championship.

The American golfer is now halfway to realising his dream, just one major title behind McIlroy. The Northern Irish golfer only needs to win the Masters Tournament to complete his career grand slam. To secure his own, Schauffele needs to win the US Open and the Masters. Speaking to MailSport, the 30-year-old admitted that this is a goal he has been dreaming about for a long time.

Schauffele said: “The career slam has always been written down as something I’ve wanted. Getting to two after not having one for such a long time is something that feels really good. Expectations can be a mean thing and I think all people in sport have a certain amount of cortisol in the body. You stress, you get anxious, have hard times. I have.

So to get to two is great, and it makes me remember writing this stuff down with my dad at 13 or 14 – number one player in the world, majors, all these things.”

Schauffele narrowly missed adding a second Olympic gold to his collection off the back of his Tokyo triumph, finishing tied for ninth at 12-under-par in the tournament at the Paris Games, closely trailing the eventual victor Scottie Scheffler. Meanwhile, McIlroy had a more successful tournament and ended up tying for fifth with a commendable score of 15-under-par – a mere four strokes from the top.

While the pair didn’t achieve any medals at the Olympic Games, both Schauffele and McIlroy are fully focused on their ultimate goal of the career grand slam. Golfing icon Tiger Woods is convinced that it is only a matter of time for McIlroy, as he praised the talent and drive the Northern Irish star possesses on the course.

Before the Masters Tournament kicked off back in April, five-time winner Woods praised McIlroy’s talent, as per Golf Digest.

I think Rory will be a great Masters champion one day, and it could be this week. You never know. I just think that the talent he has, the way he plays the game and how the golf course fits his eye, it’s just a matter of time.”

 

 

TROON,Scotland — Only a chosen few are awarded “The Stop.” It is both earned and conferred, and always cashed in at the Swilcan Bridge. The legend makes his way over the crossing, pauses, perches his leg up on the stone ledge, turns away from the Old Course and toward the fans to his right and behind him, then back to the town of St. Andrews and to the people craning their necks from pubs and hotel windows to say they saw it, and waves. The Stops of yesteryear are run annually on Open broadcasts and pictures of The Stop are plastered in clubhouses across the world, because The Stop matters, a graceful transition of a golf legend from the pangs of now into the gloss of the past.

Tiger Woods was bestowed The Stop in 2022. It made sense; he was nine over through 35 holes, 20-something shots behind the leader and miles from the cut. He was just 46 years old, but his return from a savage car accident raised plenty of questions about an already tenuous future, and with the R&A likely deviating from its tradition of hosting the Open at the St. Andrews every five years it was unclear when the Auld Gray Toon would host again … and what type of shape Woods would be in when that time came.

Woods is a student and historian. He is well aware of The Stop. What it means, to himself and to others. Over the past decade, he had preached a cognizance of the finish line. And yet, knowing what was ahead, Woods glided over the most famous bridge in golf, stride unbroken. He did raise his hat to the heavens, a concession made by his brain, but his legs were taking direction from his heart. At the 150th Open, Tiger Woods was given The Stop. He kept walking.

“I hope people remember Tiger as Tiger was, the passion and the charismatic aura around him,” Colin Montgomerie said in an interview with The Times of London last week. “There is none of that now. At Pinehurst [for the U.S. Open], he did not seem to enjoy a single shot and you think, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ He’s coming to Troon, and he won’t enjoy it there either.” Montgomerie later added, in response to Woods’ comments last month that his competitive days may be numbered, “Aren’t we there? I’d have thought we were past there. There is a time for all sportsmen to say goodbye, but it’s very difficult to tell Tiger it’s time to go. Obviously, he still feels he can win. We are more realistic.”

To various extents for the last decade, similar eulogies have been made about Woods’ career—only for Woods to prove how much life he has left. Perhaps that’s partly why Monty’s remarks made the rounds. But as blunt as Montgomerie was, the collective response has been just as telling, because there has been little, if any, rebuttal. Montgomerie said what we all know to be true:

In sports, everything ends badly. Otherwise, it wouldn’t end.

Badly is a sober assessment of Woods’ golf as of late. More than as of late: Since winning the 2019 Masters he has failed to finish inside the top 20 at a major and has either missed the cut or withdrawn in five of the last seven. He’s played four rounds of an official tournament just three times in the last four seasons. This is partly an upshot of the fact he hardly plays at all. The last time Woods teed it up at an event that wasn’t a) a major, b) his Genesis Invitational or c) a silly-season event was in the summer of 2020. That is the profile of a ceremonial figure … which Woods was at the U.S. Open, in the field thanks to a special exemption from the USGA. He fought, but Pinehurst painfully illustrated it was a test he could not pass. Golf pounds its chest about its meritocratic fields but Woods, in his current form, is more celebrity than competitor.

 

 

last year in the first round at the British Open, Rory McIlroy was greenside in two shots at the par-5 finishing hole, yet five minutes later he fist-pumped a 10-foot par save. Why? McIlroy was nestled under the lip of one of Royal Liverpool’s nasty bunkers. He tried to play out sideways and failed. His second attempt required one foot in, one foot out of the bunker. The whole scene even sparked a minor rules controversy.

It all stemmed from a problem Scottie Scheffler warned about earlier in the week. “Here it seems like the faces of every bunker have almost a downslope going towards it,” Scheffler said last year. “I don’t think that’s something I particularly like in a golf course. I think it doesn’t reward the good shots as much.”

We’re used to seeing these chaotic scenes in pot bunkers at The Open, but last year the unusual shape of the bunkers that Scheffler alluded to made them particularly penal.

You don’t want to be in these bunkers,” 2009 Open champion Stewart Cink said of Royal Liverpool. “They’re so flat. The bottoms of them are so flat that if a ball comes in with any momentum, it’s just going right up to the lip and stop. There’s not a little upslope that helps you at all. They are very penal.”

The difficulty of bunkers being flat is exactly what Cink and Scheffler described. There is nothing preventing the ball from rolling underneath the face. This isn’t an issue, of course, on most American courses, where the bunkers naturally rise up to the lips, but on links with riveted-face pots, the bottom of the bunkers can be nearly perfectly level.

That’s how you get scenes like McIlroy on the 18th hole last year, trying to play sideways away from the hole and still not able to get it out.

But we’re likely to see far less of that this year at Royal Troon, as Scheffler says the R&A have raked the bunkers a little differently. Scheffler described in his Tuesday press conference that the bunkers are built up near the edges to encourage balls to filter back into the middle of the sand, as you can see below.

 

Last year in the first round at the British Open, Rory McIlroy was greenside in two shots at the par-5 finishing hole, yet five minutes later he fist-pumped a 10-foot par save. Why? McIlroy was nestled under the lip of one of Royal Liverpool’s nasty bunkers. He tried to play out sideways and failed. His second attempt required one foot in, one foot out of the bunker. The whole scene even sparked a minor rules controversy.

It all stemmed from a problem Scottie Scheffler warned about earlier in the week. “Here it seems like the faces of every bunker have almost a downslope going towards it,” Scheffler said last year. “I don’t think that’s something I particularly like in a golf course. I think it doesn’t reward the good shots as much.”

“You don’t want to be in these bunkers,” 2009 Open champion Stewart Cink said of Royal Liverpool. “They’re so flat. The bottoms of them are so flat that if a ball comes in with any momentum, it’s just going right up to the lip and stop. There’s not a little upslope that helps you at all. They are very penal.”

RELATED: Tiger Woods fired back at Colin Montgomerie, but Monty knows the truth

The difficulty of bunkers being flat is exactly what Cink and Scheffler described. There is nothing preventing the ball from rolling underneath the face. This isn’t an issue, of course, on most American courses, where the bunkers naturally rise up to the lips, but on links with riveted-face pots, the bottom of the bunkers can be nearly perfectly level.

That’s how you get scenes like McIlroy on the 18th hole last year, trying to play sideways away from the hole and still not able to get it out.

But we’re likely to see far less of that this year at Royal Troon, as Scheffler says the R&A have raked the bunkers a little differently. Scheffler described in his Tuesday press conference that the bunkers are built up near the edges to encourage balls to filter back into the middle of the sand, as you can see below.



Players are more likely to be playing from the middle of the bunkers this week at Royal Troon.

Luke Walker/R&A

“I love how they changed how they rake the bunkers this year with the more traditional sloping coming off the walls,” Scheffler said.

While this makes one of Royal Troon’s toughest features slightly less daunting, Scheffler says it makes the course play more fair and less reliant on luck.

“Last year I thought it was a bit silly how they flattened out each bunker,” he said. “The bunkers are still a penalty enough when the ball isn’t up against the lip. It was a bit of luck whether or not your ball would bury into the face because you have a flat bunker and a wall

This year, Scheffler says players have more of a fighting chance to get out of the deep bunkers, instead of being handcuffed like McIlroy. Since more balls will filter back into the middle of the bunkers this week, players will have the option to either take on the difficult shot and play straight ahead, or play it safe and go out sideways.

“It leaves more opportunity for great shots and risk and reward,” he says.