Akshay Bhatia is one of the very best young golfers around in the modern game and he’s been comparing himself to Scottie Scheffler over at the Hero World Challenge.
Bhatia is already a two-time PGA Tour winner at just 23 and while he didn’t manage a victory in 2025, he’s still had another impressive year.
The Los Angeles native will be looking to kick on in 2026 and build on what he’s got going on already.
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The Australian Open, for example, should almost be the fifth major. The market down there is huge with potential.
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Of course, assessing the season as a whole is a hot topic of conversation for all the players over in the Bahamas at this week’s Hero World Challenge.
And for Bhatia, it’s all about realising where he is at.
Akshay Bhatia makes Scottie Scheffler comparison
Having won twice already on the PGA Tour, Akshay Bhatia is already firmly on the right trajectory to have a hugely successful golfing career.
Right now, he’s simply looking to keep building and despite not winning in 2025, he knows he’s on the right path in the main.
Indeed, when asked to assess his season overall, Bhatia called on people to remember he’s only 23 as he nodded towards Scottie Scheffler at that age.
“Yeah, 100 percent. I think that I don’t really realize how young I am. This week I’m the youngest guy in the field, which is really hard for me to process,” Bhatia commented.
“And one thing I ask myself, which is kind of funny, don’t know if I should share it, but I’ve gotta ask myself what was Scottie Scheffler doing at 23? He was still working his way on the Korn Ferry Tour, or maybe even not, I don’t know, but look where he is now at 27, 28 years old.
“So I just try and remind myself that no matter how hard or easy certain things feel, it’s a long career. I was talking to Rickie, it’s his 17th year coming up and it’s really amazing like to process that for me because I feel like I’ve been out here for a long time and I’m not even close.”
What Scottie Scheffler had actually achieved at 23-years-old
It’s easy to forget that Scottie Scheffler is still only 29, given all he has achieved in the game already.
That means we need to look back to the 2019/2020 period to assess where he was in terms of being the same age as Bhatia.
Scheffler, as Bhatia mentions, was just starting out and was the Korn Ferry Tour player of the year in 2019 as he got ready to make the jump to the PGA Tour.
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In his first year on TOUR, Scheffler was also named Rookie of the Year and quite remarkably, secured a fifth place finish at the TOUR Championship to cement himself as a player to watch. Furthermore, he also shot a round of 59 that year at the Northern Trust Championship, very much showing he had the game to compete.
As we now all know, that was just the start for Scheffler and as of now, he’s the world number one and by some distance.
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