AUGUSTA, Ga. — There was a moment Thursday afternoon when Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler stood beside each other and chatted. This was on the third green, with the Masters just a couple of hours old. They are the two top-ranked players in the world. Their games are slightly different in style but each absolutely complete. In such conversations, they can relate to each other in ways others — even some of their peers — cannot. In sheer ability, they are among a handful of golfers who are the best on the planet.
They have so much in common, yet at Augusta National Golf Club, they occupy polar opposite head spaces. The reason is simple: Scheffler has a green jacket, and McIlroy does not. That difference defines and informs everything they say and feel and think about the Masters and its host club. Scheffler gabs and gushes. McIlroy hems and haws. One is effusive and self-assured. The other is eternally searching.
“Sometimes I still can’t believe it myself, walking in the champions’ locker room,” Scheffler said.
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“There’s no point in doing anything different this week compared to other weeks,” McIlroy said, adding, importantly, “I guess.”
Any Masters field is divided into two groups: those who have won here and therefore can return forever and those who haven’t and are left to dream about getting to the other side. For the first group, the drive down Magnolia Lane can be soothing and freeing because this is the site of a career-defining, life-changing triumph. For the second, that same drive can be suffocating and ulcer-inducing because as the years tick by, the chances grow fewer. It’s only natural to let the mind devolve into “I wonder what that champions’ dinner is really like.”
Scheffler, the top-ranked player in the world who won his first major here in 2022, opened the 88th Masters with a squeaky clean 6-under-par 66 to make sure leader Bryson DeChambeau didn’t run away with his 65. McIlroy, whose guts are strewn all over these grounds, steadied himself for a 1-under 71.
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“It was okay,” McIlroy said. “I held it together well. It was a little scrappy.”
“I enjoy coming here and competing in this golf tournament,” Scheffler said.
Thursday’s two data points don’t mean Scheffler will win another green jacket or that McIlroy never will win his first. But something about their pairing here starkly drew the lines between the two, at least at this moment in time.
By almost any measure, McIlroy is the more accomplished player. He leads Scheffler in major championships, four to one. He leads him in PGA Tour wins, 24-8. McIlroy, who has been playing golf around the globe since he was a teenager, has won 17 times on the Europe-based circuit now known as the DP World Tour. Scheffler can counter only with a pair of wins on the minor league Korn Ferry Tour. McIlroy has been the top-ranked player in the world for 122 weeks, Scheffler for 82.
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Yes, McIlroy, 34, simply has been doing this longer than the 27-year-old Scheffler. His résumé should be gaudier. But he is inarguably chasing something here that Scheffler already has. It’s a defining difference.
Consider how each arrived and prepared for this week. Scheffler was here Sunday and did what he always does when he first returns: race into the clubhouse and grab his green jacket — which current champions can take home for the year they won but past winners must leave on the property.
Turns out it still fits — and looks sharp to boot.
“It’s kind of fun walking around the grounds and being able to put it on,” Scheffler said. “It was a lot more fun getting to wear it for a whole year.”
He laughed because that can be a default mode. In just his fifth Masters, he knows both feelings. McIlroy is here for the 16th time, and it’s possible he has tried that many ways to approach his preparation. The plan this year: come up for two practice rounds last week, compete at the PGA Tour stop in San Antonio — where he finished third — head home to Florida and not get to Augusta until midday Tuesday.
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“I feel like I’ve done it quite a few different ways,” he admitted. “And I guess [I’m] just trying to bring a little bit of normalcy into what I sort of try to do week-in, week-out.”
One has a routine he embraces because it brings back great feelings. The other is still wandering through the pines because whatever he has tried before hasn’t produced what, by now, is the only acceptable result.
It’s hard to blame McIlroy for trying new things. His wounds here are deep and real and go back more than a decade. In 2011, he opened with a 65, held the solo lead at the midway point and took a four-shot lead into Sunday. He shot an 80. His relationship with the place is complicated, even weighty, because a Masters win would make him just the sixth player with victories at all four major championships.
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“No question, he’ll do it at some point,” none other than Tiger Woods said this week. “Rory’s too talented, too good. He’s going to be playing this event for a very long time. He’ll get it done. It’s just a matter of when.”
McIlroy’s response?
“It’s nice to hear, in my opinion, the best player ever to play the game say something like that,” he said. “Does that mean that it’s going to happen? Obviously not.”
He’s not a full-on pessimist at this place. But over more than a decade-and-a-half, it’s fair to say his performances haven’t fostered optimism. And on Thursday, he was subjected to, in McIlroy’s words, “the best golfer in the world right now” playing the best golf in the world right in front of him. In the rare instance in which Scheffler made a mistake — a drive into the pine straw left of the seventh fairway, a tee shot into the bunker over the par-3 12th — he did something otherworldly to extract himself. At No. 7, it was a screaming low hook around trees and into the middle greenside bunker, from which he got up and down for par. At No. 12, it was the softest little sand shot that gently trickled into the cup, turning a likely bogey into an improbable birdie.
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“Scottie does such a good job of — it doesn’t look like it’s 6 under par, and then at the end of the day, it’s 6 under par,” McIlroy said. “He’s just so efficient with everything.”
Well, almost everything. Scheffler’s wife, Meredith, is pregnant with the couple’s first child. Though she’s not due until next month, Scheffler has said he will leave Augusta if the baby comes early — even though the nursery at home near Dallas isn’t ready.
“I think we’re just very unprepared to be parents,” Scheffler said.
That’s fine, for now. He is prepared to play well in what’s due to be another windy round Friday. He has recent evidence he can do that. McIlroy is looking for that. At the 18th green, as they took off their hats — both white, both bearing the Nike swoosh — they headed into their evenings, so similar in so many ways, separated by a gulf so much wider than Rae’s Creek.
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