Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler are at Bay Hill this week with designs of winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
McIlroy enjoyed a stellar season on the PGA Tour in 2025 but he was still usurped by world number one Scottie Scheffler.
The Northern Irishman and the American have been the best two golfers in the world consistently for the past four years now.
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Scheffler has been the better player out of the two, with 20 PGA Tour wins to his name since February 2022, including four major championships.
The 29-year-old from Dallas, Texas, has every single shot in the bag, and that’s what makes him so good.
In fact, PGA Tour player Ryan Gerard recently said he’s obsessed with one shot that Scheffler hits regularly.
“A lot of guys, when they take speed off a golf club, the ball flight comes down,“ Gerard said.
“Scottie hits this shot with this smooth knockdown swing, but he launches it higher, spins it more, and it bridges the gap between two full numbers. I’ve kind of been obsessed with this shot since I played with him the final round of Houston last year, and I’ve gone about learning how to hit it.
“The ball is a little more forward in my stance, I choke down on it and feel like I’m slowing down through the ball and speeding up after.
“That launches it higher with less speed. I don’t have the extra spin like Scottie, but it’s coming out higher and softer.
“I think it’s going to serve me well at Players, Augusta, PGA, U.S. Open.“
So is the high-launch shot with less speed and more spin something that McIlroy has in his locker?
What Rory McIlroy has done to master Scottie Scheffler’s speciality shot
McIlroy spoke to reporters in Orlando on Wednesday afternoon.
He was asked if he has learnt to successfully play the shot that Scheffler pulls off to perfection so often.
“I definitely think it was one of the reasons I went to a softer, spinnier ball was to be able to hit shots like that,“ McIlroy admitted.
“Really important weeks like this where the greens are really firm, greens at Augusta can get firm, greens at a U.S. Open for example.
“So to be able to, yeah, to hit a ball that comes down soft, but not have to hit it flat out, that’s a skill in and of itself.
“You can see when Scottie does it he has this sort of high, sort of languid finish when he does it. A little bit like if you look at Tiger back in the day, same sort of thing.
“So, certainly when the greens get firm, the pins get tucked away it’s definitely a great shot to have.“
McIlroy is clearly one of the most talented golfers of all time and even he had to change golf balls in order to master the shot that Scheffler has nailed down.
Scottie Scheffler delivers his verdict on the shot he has mastered
Scheffler was asked by reporters on Wednesday whether he had to learn how to hit the high, soft and spinny shot that he has now perfected.
“No, I think, when I look kind of back on my career, I felt like coming out of college I wasn’t a great ball-striker,” Scheffler said.
“I felt like I had the potential to be a great ball-striker, but I had some things in my swing I needed to clean up. So looking ’19, ’20, ’21, my swing really started to improve in that stretch.
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“In the off-season between ’21 and ’22 I made a really big emphasis on learning, really kind of fine tuning how to hit a lot of different types of shots. That’s always something that’s been fun for me.
“I get bored sitting on the range and working on my golf swing, or working on technique and hitting the same shot over and over again. It’s always fun to create and do different things with the golf ball.
“That’s one of those things that you can always be practicing. You can always learn how to hit new shots. I’ve always been a guy that, when I got out there, whatever I see he is typically what I’m going to try and do.
So sometimes that calls for high shots and sometimes that calls for really low shots with not a lot of spin. Just depends on the conditions.
“This will be a week in which, I mean, you’re going to need a lot of different shots, but most of them are going to have to be higher in the air just based on how firm the greens are and how soft the run-up areas are.“
It seems like the world number one’s high, spinny shot will be very much needed during the Arnold Palmer Invitational this week, what with the firm and fast greens at Bay Hill.
Scheffler is clearly the master of hitting that specific shot, and perhaps that is actually what has separated him from the likes of McIlroy over the past few years.
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