For the majority of the Tour Championship, it has been business as usual for World No.1 Scottie Scheffler as he turned a two-shot advantage at the start of the FedEx Cup Playoffs finale into a five-shot lead with one round to play.
The American is aiming for his maiden FedEx Cup title, and if he achieves it and takes the $25m first prize, it will cap an incredible season that has included seven other victories worldwide.
Scheffler’s form has been so good throughout 2024 that it can be easy to forget that he is still capable of the occasional mishap, and one of his rare mistakes came at a crucial point at the East Lake tournament.
Scheffler had opened up a seven-shot lead over the front nine of the final round, but a bogey on the seventh stymied his apparently relentless march to the title, and on the very next hole, he found himself in a bunker around 80 feet from the pin.
Such a scenario is ordinarily no problem for Scheffler, but on this occasion he shanked his effort, missing the green to the right to leave him work to do to avoid his third bogey of the round. Unfortunately for Scheffler, he couldn’t recover the situation and he did indeed finish with a costly five on the 324-yard par-4.
No one is immune to the shank. Not even Scottie Scheffler. pic.twitter.com/RVlQfZyzjGSeptember 1, 2024
Even more concerning for Scheffler would have been the consistency of his closest rival on the leaderboard, Collin Morikawa, who birdied the hole to reduce the gap to just two shots with plenty of golf still to play.
That would have briefly given Morikawa hope that it could yet be him who lifts the trophy for the first time, but, perhaps inevitably, Scheffler closed the door no sooner than he had left it ajar. He followed his slip-up on the eighth with three successive birdies between the ninth and 11th to repair the damage and restore his five-shot advantage.
Scheffler recovered well from his shanked bunker shot on the eighth
For all Scheffler’s brilliance in 2024 there have been other uncharacteristic errors along the way. He suffered a similar shank from a bunker in April at the RBC Heritage, while in July, he topped a tee shot at The Open.
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