All Scottie Scheffler could do was stare.
His second shot, out of the bunker, on the seventh hole Sunday had hit the green and, in classic Shinnecock Hills Golf Club style, did a U-turn, rolling back into the sand. Scheffler ended up bogeying the hole, and it marked the latest missed chance in a round full of them for Scheffler — turning a 30th birthday that could’ve been about a career Grand Slam on Father’s Day into one that left him with what-ifs.
Plenty of the hype building ahead of Sunday revolved around Scheffler and the run he could make while chasing Wyndham Clark. He’d appeared to have solved the course over the back nine Saturday and could’ve been even closer than the six strokes he trailed by at the start of the round. But Scheffler settled for 1 over Sunday and even for the tournament, finishing in a tie for fourth — with J.T. Poston and Keith Mitchell — and four shots behind Clark, who won his second U.S. Open in four years.
“I felt like I did enough to have a really good round,” Scheffler said. “It was just, man, I felt like I hit a lot of good putts that were really close to going in. Just wasn’t able to kind of hole those.”
The crowd following Scheffler kept pulling for each of his shots to hit fairways and greens while begging for Clark to end up in bunkers. There were chants about his birthday, too. Fans wanted the comeback. They wanted the history.
But Scheffler’s struggles started on the first hole — when his second shot rolled off the green and his putt to save par missed — and continued on the seventh, when he lost the stroke he’d picked up with a birdie two holes prior. He moved back to 1 under with a birdie on the 10th, but he finished his round with a bogey and four consecutive pars.
So Scheffler’s bid for history became a secondary storyline to Sam Burns’ bid for a historic comeback. He wasn’t the one threatening, really, as Clark stumbled. This wasn’t as close a call as the U.S. Open in 2022, when he finished in a tie for second, one shot behind Matt Fitzpatrick, but it was winnable — especially when Clark started collapsing.
Instead, Scheffler was left wondering about his first round — an area where he has struggled recently — and his 72 from Thursday, as his bid for the career milestone was put on hold for at least one more year.
“At the end of the day, I was trying to move my way up the leaderboard,” Scheffler said. “I have belief that if Wyndham shot even par today, I believed that I could catch him. It’s just a matter of executing the shots.
“… I was close [Sunday], but not where it needed to be.”
