PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland – By the time Scottie Scheffler reached Royal Portrush’s first green and saw his ball 16 inches from the cup, the question of the day had already changed.

The final round conversation was no longer whether Scheffler would win The 153rd Open Championship. Now it was by how much – and exactly how in the hell Scheffler was lapping the field by so many.

At the second green, Scheffler’s lead was five shots. By the fifth green, it was seven. It finished at four, as Scheffler completed an utterly dominant week with a final-round, 3-under 68 to win The Open, Scheffler’s fourth career major championship and second this year.

It was a performance reminiscent of Tiger Woods’ eight-shot victory at the 2000 Open Championship. With each passing accomplishment, the comparisons between Scheffler and Woods get less hyperbolic. It’s often a fraught discussion to compare any modern player to Woods, arguably the best golfer to ever live. It’s usually unnecessary, unearned and unfairly burdensome.

That Scheffler has legitimately entered the conversation is a testament that he might be the one individual who doesn’t feel that burden. Looking for an explanation for why Scheffler routed the field at Royal Portrush? Start there, and with Scheffler’s comments that foreshadowed it just a few days ago.

Scheffler’s Open week began with a bang, a five-minute out-of-nowhere soliloquy in his pre-tournament press conference that shed light on the world No. 1 golfer, who is still often misunderstood.

Somewhere in the last five years, a consensus built that Scheffler was boring. His golf often lacked the theatrics of Woods or the rollercoaster ride of Rory McIlroy and was deemed dull, respected but not adored. Damn good, but fun? Hardly.

His personality was viewed in the same light. An incredible golfer, but one who wasn’t relatable like fan favorites of this generation, like McIlroy or Max Homa. Boring.

That sentiment has been slowly shifting for a while, if you paid attention. The media have become wiser about asking the right kind of inquisitive questions, and Scheffler has dropped his guard. Scheffler has no time for how it feels to be world No. 1 or what any result might mean for his career arc or narrative.

But ask him about the golf swing, course strategy, or – as we found out earlier this week – life, and he can enlighten you if you’re willing to listen.

The dam broke Tuesday, when Scheffler wrestled with some of the deepest parts of his mind as a camera was rolling, working through why any of this matters to him. It was nihilistic to some, painfully relatable to others.

“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf?” Scheffler said. “Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about because I've literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport. To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I'm not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I'm not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world because what's the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.

“There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life, and you get there, you get to No. 1 in the world, and they're like, 'What's the point?'” Scheffler added. “I really do believe that, because what is the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad?”

Athletes don’t talk like that, at least publicly. Hell, most humans don’t openly contemplate the purpose of life and their role in the grand scheme of society. Monotony of everyday life blocks that heavy topic from bubbling to the surface.

That Scheffler, far and away the best in the world at what he does, willingly opened the wound was insightful, telling of his depth that many have been too uninterested to see. It’s also why Scheffler’s win at The Open is so scary.

Scheffler’s identity is not as a golfer. It’s what he does, but not who he is. The list of golfers who can truthfully say the same is slim. That detachment is dangerous. A mind free of the burden of expectations or the weight of impending history. Heady territory when paired with a golfer who’s also better than everyone else.

With his win at The Open, Scheffler is just a U.S. Open victory shy of the career Grand Slam. If he completes it, he’d be the first career Grand Slam champion to also have an Olympic gold medal.

Does Scheffler care about any of that? You already know the answer. How he’s become so dominant, so generational, is precisely because he doesn’t find fulfillment from chasing those accomplishments.

And the scariest part is that despite that, Scheffler is still working tirelessly to get better – motivated by process, not outcome. Intertwined in the narrative of Scheffler’s dominant three-year run is the prevalence of the one weakness that kept him from annihilating records: his putting. The numbers were bad. The visuals when he missed were worse.

That led to Scheffler changing from a blade to a mallet putter and adding Phil Kenyon as a putting coach, the only other coach besides Randy Smith that Scheffler’s ever had. They were drastic changes for a golfer who hasn’t changed his warmup routine since he was a junior.

Scheffler worked his way back to being an average putter in 2024, but the work with Kenyon has fully set in this year. The numbers are phenomenal (he was 22nd in Strokes Gained to begin the week). The occasional outbursts on the greens are mostly gone because he wasn’t missing much.

The last test of Scheffler on the greens was links golf. Since 2022, Scheffler had yet to gain strokes in any Genesis Scottish Open or The Open Championship. He lost strokes on the greens last week, too, further exacerbating the concerns.

The only concerns there should be after Scheffler’s showing on Royal Portrush’s greens are those of his competitors. Scheffler ranked first in Strokes Gained: Putting at The Open, gaining nearly 10 strokes in what was his career-best performance, both statistically and situationally, given the stakes and the outcome. It’s just the second time in his career he’s led a tournament in the category.

How did things change so quickly from week to week? Kenyon told PGATOUR.COM that Scheffler didn’t make any notable changes. The two spoke about Scheffler’s struggles at The Renaissance Club last week and chalked it up to “really poor” green surfaces. Kenyon checked Scheffler's alignment to make sure everything was where it should be. It was, and two agreed to move forward without dwelling on the results.

“If it was two or three years ago and I had a week like I had last week on the greens where I felt like I was hitting good putts and they weren't going in, kind of a frustrating week overall, I would have maybe questioned things or tried something different this week,” Scheffler said.

“Putting in such a mental part of the game, you can very easily erode confidence during a tournament,” Kenyon said, “but I don't think Scottie ever really panicked.”

Scheffler hit just three fairways in the first round, but his putter kept him in it and he compiled an impressive 3-under start because of it. As the driver heated up, the putter stayed warm – a deadly combo that created the comfortable final margin.

There could be a temptation to believe this was an outlier week with the putter. The raw strokes gained totals might be unsustainable, but the trend is not. Scheffler has become one of the best putters in the sport.

“I always believed he could,” Kenyon said.

“The guy is equipped to win on any golf course anywhere in the world,” Kenyon continued, “but I always felt like this was probably the best Open Championship venue for him … because you've got the change in direction of the holes that gives you different crosswinds, and you've got to really control your spin and trajectory. There are some greens and pin positions that are tough to get to. So it rewards a really good shot, but it's not unfair. It's a shotmaker's golf course.”

There’s no better shotmaker than Scheffler. The outcome of the tournament was interesting for all of one hole. After birdying three of his first seven holes, Scheffler uncharacteristically failed to get out of a fairway bunker on the par-4 eighth that led to a double bogey. Suddenly, his six-shot lead was only four, and the momentum was finally behind the chasers. But Scheffler answered back immediately on the ninth, wedging his approach to 5 feet and making birdie. He added another at the 12th to get back to 17-under, this time with a five-shot lead in hand.

It’s that quality of Scheffler’s that is most reminiscent of the all-time greats, who always seemed to make the back-breaking par save or bounce back birdie that stifled any chance of a comeback. Scheffler had a pair of those on Saturday, saving par at the 11th and 14th despite leaving himself in horrible positions off the tee and on approach. Just before Scheffler’s double bogey, he holed a 15-foot par save at the seventh. Had he missed that and gone on to make the double at No. 8, his lead would have dropped to only three shots.

That’s what the superstars do. They suffocate a tournament into submission, letting the chasers make the mistakes while they plot their way around the course and win comfortably. Any mistake is momentary, dramatic only until they correct it a few shots later.

“He doesn't care to be a superstar,” said Jordan Spieth, a frequent practice partner with Scheffler back in Dallas. “He's not transcending the game like Tiger did. He's not bringing it to a non-golf audience necessarily.”

Scheffler will if he keeps compiling weeks like Royal Portrush.

Fans flock to dominance, eager to root for or against an increasingly undeniable outcome. It becomes required viewing, an acknowledgement that you’re watching history unfold in front of you. It happened with Woods in golf, Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes in football, Lebron James and Michael Jordon in basketball.

Scheffler is getting there, even though it doesn’t matter in the slightest to him. Maybe it matters more to Scheffler’s competitors, who with each passing Scheffler victory might start asking the same question the world No. 1 pondered at the beginning of the week.

What's the point?

Scheffler stood stoic on the 18th green, listening to an R&A executive give his preamble before it was time to hand over the claret jug to its new owner. Scheffler nodded along as it went, expressionless until he saw something out of the corner of his eye. From down below the left side of the green, little Bennett Scheffler had spotted his dad up above and was determined to get to him.

“Da-da,” the 1-year-old squeaked, slowly waddling his way up the hill before face-planting into the turf.

Scheffler’s face lit up, laughing and encouraging his son to keep trying to crest the hill, before finally going over and setting the claret jug down, picking up his son instead.

“This is what makes him happy,” Scheffler’s father, Scott, said greenside beside his wife, Diane, and Scheffler’s wife, Meredith.

That’s the point.