When Scottie Scheffler sank the winning putt at Royal Portrush last year to win The Open Championship, the countdown began toward the 2026 U.S. Open, where he would have his first chance to join golf royalty as the seventh man to complete the career grand slam.
At the time, Scheffler was in the midst of a Tiger Woods-like run of dominance. The World No. 1 finished in the top 10 across his final 15 starts of the 2025 season, six of those coming in the form of victories. He was running away from his contemporaries, and the task of completing the grand slam felt like an inevitability rather than a legitimate question.
Scheffler's U.S. Open record is stellar with four top 10s in his last five starts, and his game seems perfectly suited for the USGA's exacting test of a player's patience and skill.
He began 2026 with a bang, winning in his first start at The American Express to build even more hype for a potentially historic season. But then the winning stopped, and some rare cracks in the façade began to show. The typically stoic Scheffler has been more visibly frustrated on the golf course than usual, peaking with a blowup two weeks ago at the Memorial to caddie Ted Scott over a poor club choice.
The positive for Scheffler? Despite not being on his A-game for much of the year, he's still a factor in every tournament he starts. He's remarkably consistent, not finishing outside the top 25 in a PGA Tour event since the 2024 BMW Championship. However, the standard he has set for himself requires such an elite level of play that a five-month-long winless drought raises questions few others ever have to answer. There is only a select group of players who could have a stretch like Scheffler and have it be considered a slump, but so goes the life of a generational golfer.
Scheffler arrived at his U.S. Open press conference on Tuesday well aware of what the conversation would be about, but with a career grand slam looming and a chance to join six of the greatest players ever, he reiterated that wins and career achievements are not what drive him.
"It's kind of a funny thing. It's like, yeah, if I win this tournament, that would be amazing, but then I show up the next week, and it's like, 'OK, now Scottie's won the grand slam, he's won all these golf tournaments. Now, where do we go from here?'" Scheffler explained. "So no matter what, as a player and as a professional athlete, you're never going to live up to the expectations of people. Sometimes, that's a little bit of the fallacy in our sport, is like, if I win the U.S. Open, then I'm going to be satisfied. I've won all the tournaments, and my career is essentially over, and I've accomplished everything I could want to accomplish. But I think the goal posts are always just moved further and further."
"... 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. So 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."
Scheffler defines success shot by shot. What's most important is committing to the process and executing the vision he has for each individual swing. The frustration we've seen from Scheffler this season exemplifies that. He's not freaking out over not winning; he's simply executing fewer shots up to his standard, and it's wearing on him on the course. His off weeks feel more off, even if the results aren't dramatically different, and he is visibly having to grind harder to scratch out strong finishes.
"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," Scheffler said. "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. I feel like maybe I've just been a touch dull, because, statistically, I think I'm maybe leading the FedEx Cup. I think I'm leading the strokes gained [overall] statistic, 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."
Scheffler's dominance over recent seasons was due to the metronomic consistency of his game. Across 72 holes, he was going to be better than everyone else, but that tempo has fallen just enough out of rhythm to disrupt that advantage. His ball-striking has slipped from best in the world to merely good, ranking 16th in strokes gained approach this season, and he's had to rely far more on the putter and short game than he's accustomed to.
Shinnecock Hills puts one's complete game -- and mental fortitude -- to the ultimate test. There is no room for indecision or a lack of commitment, and it demands precision and execution on every shot. It's why, 11 months ago, it felt like such a fitting venue for Scheffler to potentially be crowned the latest member of the career grand slam club. The course that punishes mistakes more severely than almost any other seemed like a perfect fit for the player who makes fewer mistakes than anyone else.
However, now that we've seen Scheffler lack that same sharpness, one cannot help but wonder if his game is up to that test. The margins to win anywhere are slim, as he explained, but that's taken to the extreme at a U.S. Open. Scheffler is aware of the challenge ahead of him this week at Shinnecock, and he knows that if he doesn't produce his best, his pursuit of the career grand slam will stretch on for at least 12 more months.
"The great thing about this course, specifically from what I've noticed, is if you're executing and you're hitting the ball in the right spots, you can play this golf course," Scheffler said. "The minute you start hitting the ball offline, you are like, 'Man, how do I even finish this hole?' [That's] sometimes what it feels like."
Scheffler has consistently shrugged off any conversation of career goals or entertained any discussion of his place on the all-time list. His personal satisfaction isn't judged in trophies but instead on the minutiae of every swing. Perhaps that does make Shinnecock Hills the perfect place for his career grand slam pursuit to begin. To reach the pinnacle of the sport and join the all-time greats, he'll have to conquer a golf course that asks the same question on every single shot: Can you execute?
This season, Scheffler hasn't had the right answer as often as he'd like.
Add CBS Sports on Google Join the Conversation comments
