Oakmont (United States) (AFP) – Scottie Scheffler sees golf’s major tournaments like Grand Slam tennis championships, with finesse events like the Masters and strength tests like this week’s US Open at Oakmont. World number one Scheffler, the 2022 and 2024 Masters winner, comes off a victory at last month’s PGA Championship and sees new challenges at Oakmont the same way the red clay at Roland Garros offers a different tennis test than a hardcourt US Open.
“I kind of equate some of the major tests to the majors in tennis,” Scheffler said Tuesday. “You’re playing on a different surface. You’ve got grass, clay and then the hardcourt, and it’s a different style of game.” Augusta National offers undulating greens but almost no rough to encourage shotmaking, while Oakmont brings a US Open with deep rough, tricky bunkers, and fast sloped greens.
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“The US Open compared to the Masters is a completely different type of test,” Scheffler said. “At the Masters, you have a lot more shotmaking when you get around the greens because it’s a lot of fairway, there’s pine straw, there’s not really the rough factor. Then when you get here, it’s a lot of hacking out of the rough. You still have to be extremely precise but when you talk about strength and power, that becomes more of a factor at these tournaments because when you hit it in the rough, you’ve got to muscle it out of there.”
“There’s no picking one as better or worse than another, just as with the tennis majors. It’s a matter of style. It’s just a different type of test than you see at the Masters. Both of them are fantastic tests. I don’t know if one of them is better than the other, but they’re just different,” Scheffler said. “Here, the winning score I don’t think is going to be what the winning score was at the Masters.” Rory McIlroy won the Masters on 11-under 277 after a playoff with Justin Rose. Expectations are for this week’s US Open winner to be lucky to break par for 72 holes.
“When you miss the green at the Masters, the ball runs away and it goes into these areas, and you can play a bump, you can play a flop. There’s different options,” Scheffler said. “Here when you hit the ball over the green, you just get in some heavy rough, and it’s like, let me see how I can pop the ball out of this rough and somehow give myself a look.”
That strength factor is something Scheffler hopes to take advantage of this week as he did by using his shotmaking skills at the Masters. “I’d say there’s definitely a strength factor coming out of the rough,” Scheffler said of Oakmont. “There’s so many bunkers, I don’t really know if this is a golf course you can necessarily just overpower with kind of a bomb and gouge type strategy, especially with the way the rough is. You have to play the angles. Some of the greens are elevated, other ones are pitched extremely away from you.”
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