U.S. Open 2026: The brilliance, frustration and resilience of Scottie Scheffler
· Yahoo Sports
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — It's tempting, albeit short-sighted, to view Scottie Scheffler's Saturday at Shinnecock through the lens of his last two holes. Had he made the seven-foot par putt after an exceptional bunker shot on 17, and had he holed the downhill four-foot birdie putt on 18, he'd have finished at three under, just three shots behind Wyndham Clark, who was fighting his own battles many holes behind. It would have guaranteed Scheffler a spot in the final group and given Clark a few unsettling scenarios to ponder. It would also have meant he shot a frankly unbelievable 30 on the back nine and come off the course with the kind of torrid momentum that would have to rattle the seemingly unshakeable leader, at least a little.
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But let's temper the recency bias just a bit with a few relevant facts:
—Scheffler shot a 69, one under, which was one of exactly two under par rounds in the entire field (shout out Emiliano Grillo who somehow found a 67 out there.)
—He shot a 32 on the back nine, best of the field, and the list of players who broke par on that brutal inward nine is three names long—Scheffler, Clark and Sahith Theegala.
—The USGA upped the green speed, the wind blew (though maybe not as much as the gleeful amateur meteorologists were predicting), dust was in the air, and the list of players under par dwindled from ten to three.
—Scheffler himself seemed upset on the range at the state of his swing (conducting animated discussions with his coach Randy Smith) and started the day with two straight bogeys. He was lucky to make the first one, too, burying a nine-footer to prevent an early disaster. To come back from that and actually finish under par on a day when the field's average score was almost four over is a testament to his grit.
—There's also this—you could argue that missing the putts on 17 and 18 was a little unlucky, but luck also swung the right way a few times, most notably on 14, when he faced a tricky up and down for par from behind the green, and instead holed the chip for birdie. Ditto for his second shot on 16, which was an act of genius, but also touched with good fortune itself, a few yards and a bad hop from getting lost in the bunkers.
That list hopefully gives a bit of context to an exceptional day at Shinnecock, and yet...
...and yet, behind him, Wyndham Clark just kept getting up and down from trouble, and then made a massive birdie on 14, and then delivered the kiss of death with the only eagle of the entire tournament on 16 and now carries a six-shot lead into the final round that looks impregnable. We can give Scheffler all the credit in the world for his fight, but that first instinct is still true; he gave up a universe of momentum because he couldn't make the crucial putts at the crucial time to put real pressure on Clark. Wild things can happen on Sunday, and he earned his spot in the final group after surviving a scare from Sam Stevens, but as the sun sets over Shinnecock, it doesn't feel hyperbolic to say that those putts cost him a chance—even the shadow of a chance—to win the U.S. Open, and the career Grand Slam with it.
At his press conference, Scheffler looked appropriately wind-whipped and exhausted. He gamely answered the 12 questions that came his way, but when he tried to explain why the course was hard, or what the chip-in on 14 meant for him, he expelled the words in a quiet rush with intent but no energy behind them. As a sign of how he viewed his own day, he said the words "steal" or "stealing" or "stole" six times, making it clear that Shinnecock was only yielding birdies at the point of the knife. When asked how he viewed his position heading into Sunday, he mustered the verve to crack a joke.
"I mean, I'd rather be leading," he said.
The laugh didn't last long.
"We've been battling hard for a few days," he continued, "and I did a good job of keeping myself in the tournament. I'll need a really nice round tomorrow if I'm going to try and catch Wyndham."
David Cannon
Just as he was saying those words, Clark made a 14-foot putt on No. 13 to save par and remain at six under. Later, Scheffler would speculate on the final margin, placing it between three shots and seven shots, but knowing what he'd just survived, he couldn't have expected that it would shake out close to the worst-case scenario.
All he could do was analyze the conditions, and the assessment from the podium was like listening to a soldier assess the enemy's formations after being routed in battle.
"The fairways were starting to firm up yesterday," he said. "Then the greens today started to firm up ... on the greens, you'd see some pretty green grass and then some very brown grass, so there was a little bit of mystery in terms of how the ball was going to react when it hit the green ... I feel like if you hit a great shot, you're going to get rewarded. Good shots are going to be borderline. I assume going into tomorrow they're going to continue to get firmer and firmer."
As for the putt on 18, he could only shrug his shoulders at the "mystery" of how the ball would break late in the day. They read inside left, he hit it inside left, but it never stopped breaking.
So it goes. Everyone got beat up, but Clark was more immune than the others, and now Scheffler seems to be chasing a fantasy rather than a career slam.
But when it was all over, he was back on the range, and then on the putting green, where you could see him attempting a replica of the putt he missed on 18. Barring a meltdown that would match Norman's humiliation in '96, he's not winning the U.S. Open tomorrow, but if there's a shred of hope here, it's contained in everything that happened on Saturday, and how it reaffirmed the most material truth: Bury him on the leaderboard, muck up his swing, throw wind and sun and dust in his face, and he'll still be up for the fight.
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