Brandel Chamblee is a huge admirer of Scottie Scheffler, and why wouldn’t he be?
Scheffler has been the dominant figure in the game over the past few years, and Chamblee has often highlighted how he is producing levels similar to the ones we saw from Tiger Woods more than 20 years ago, when he was in his prime.
Chamblee has not been afraid to compare Scheffler with Woods, but the 29-year-old world number one clearly has a lot more to do if he is to even get close to the 15-time major champion’s records.
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Scheffler has 20 PGA Tour wins to his name over the past four years, including four major championships.
He is currently in the midst of a run on the PGA Tour where he has recorded 18 consecutive top-10 finishes – something that Tiger was never able to achieve.
Yet he is one of the most humble players in the world, despite his obvious greatness.
And Chamblee has an interesting theory as to why that is.
Scottie Scheffler explains his approach to golf
The 29-year-old world number one has often received criticism for his so-called ‘boring’ approach to press conferences.
Before the start of the Genesis Invitational this week, Scheffler explained his approach to practicing and working hard on his game.
“You never get to a place where you feel like you’ve got it figured out,“ Scheffler said.
“I always like practicing and trying to improve, and creating new shots.
“I think golf is kind of the endless pursuit of trying to figure something out. I’m never going to get there but there’s no harm in trying.“
Those comments sum Scheffler up perfectly.
He is one of the hardest working players in the game, if not the hardest.
The 29-year-old is the best golfer in the world by quite some distance, yet he is humble enough to admit that he will never truly master the game.
That tells us everything we need to know about the man.
Brandel Chamblee on why Scottie Scheffler said he’ll never truly figure golf out
Chamblee was speaking on the Golf Channel and responded when asked why Scheffler doesn’t regularly give fascinating answers when asked questions during his press conferences.
“It’s interesting listening there, and obviously, Scottie Scheffler is a very intelligent guy, but listening to the best players in the world, the greatest athletes, try to explain their talent, you are almost always disappointed,“ Chamblee explained.
“One of the best writers, the late David Foster Wallace, wrote three essays about this very topic. One of them was called String Theory. Another was about Tracy Austin, another was on Roger Federer.
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“And in it, he basically says, you know, the best athletes are physical geniuses, but they’re notoriously inarticulate at describing their performances.
“And so to get to the highest skill level, it’s achieved through combining great talent and great repetition to such a degree that the variables are performed unconsciously. They’re not thinking about it.
“Because they’re not thinking about it, they cannot clearly articulate it, and David Foster Wallace argues, and I would agree with him, that it is not a failure of intelligence that they can’t explain what they’re doing, or how they’re doing it, quite the contrary.
“It’s a necessary component to the genius.
“And so, as we sit there, most of the time, they’ll say, ‘I’m gonna try to play one shot at a time’.
“And we’re all like, you know, we roll our eyes, because these cliché-ridden responses are not what we want to hear.
“The best performances live in a very narrow psychological bandwidth. When you start thinking about them, they get to the front of your mind, and everything gets difficult then.
“It’s just only when you’re not thinking about them, and can’t explain them subsequently when you play your best golf.
“And so, it’s up to the great writers to try to divine out.
“This is why great writing is so important to sport, and it’s so important to golf.
“I grew up reading all the best writers because they would take out of these responses the little bit they could, and then they would try to tell us what we all want to know about what made Hogan great, what made Jack great, what made Tiger great, and that’s why great writing is so important to sport.“
In fairness to Chamblee, he makes a great point there. As soon as golfers start overcomplicating and overthinking their process, their form begins to go downhill.
Jordan Spieth is the perfect example of that. Perhaps he needs to take a leaf out of his fellow Dallas native’s book and simplify things as much as he can.
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