Scottie Scheffler’s season began in turmoil. Days before he planned to leave for The Sentry, the season opener in Hawaii, the world No. 1 sliced open his hand in a cooking accident.

Scheffler was unsettled. He didn’t know much other than that his hand hurt, he wouldn’t be boarding a plane to cross the Pacific Ocean, and that attempting to make homemade ravioli with a wine glass was a mistake. Before consulting doctors, Scheffler’s head was spinning.

“I couldn’t really move my hand too much,” Scheffler told PGATOUR.COM last week. “I didn’t really know the extent of the damage.”

Oh, how long ago that feels. Scheffler’s hand turned out to be fine. The damage was minimal, and he was back on TOUR in a month. Flash forward eight months, and Scheffler still has the same firm grasp over pro golf that he did when the year began. He has a larger lead on No. 2 Rory McIlroy in the Official World Golf Ranking than ever before, and he looks every part of a dominant, generational figure in the sport.

“It's a pretty special year,” Scheffler said last Sunday at the TOUR Championship.

Yup, that about sums it up.

Scheffler wrapped another historic season at East Lake Golf Club last week, making a final round charge only to be undone by a water ball at the 213-yard island par-3 15th. The week will be viewed as a disappointment in the context of everything Scheffler has done this year. He still finished fourth. Sure, he’s not the FedExCup champion. But he is THE CJ CUP Bryon Nelson champion and the PGA Championship champion and the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday champion and the Champion Golfer of the Year and the BMW Championship. He’s also a shoo-in for a fourth straight Player of the Year award, voted on later this year by his peers.

That should do just fine.

If 2024 was the year Scheffler fully announced he’s capable of complete dominance, 2025 was the year he cemented himself as a generational great. The comparisons to other titans of the sport, like Woods, felt silly before this season. They are less silly now.

Scheffler won five times, including two major championships, and he won in every way possible. He ran away from the field at the PGA Championship and The Open Championship, set the PGA TOUR scoring record at THE CJ CUP Byron Nelson, and then hunted down another top player in Robert MacIntyre to win the BMW Championship.

His lone deficiency to begin the year was putting. He solved that this season, too. At the recommendation of his putting coach Phil Kenyon, Scheffler changed to a claw grip inside 15 feet and quickly transformed from a shaky putter to an elite one. He ranked 20th in Strokes Gained: Putting this season, by far a career-high. He also led the TOUR in SG: Off the Tee and Approach, creating a deadly trifecta that underlies the dominance.

Despite the incredible season, it didn’t start that way. The hand injury cost him the first month of the year and hampered him when he returned, as he worked off the rust and reacclimated his body after a month of rest. Scheffler put together respectable showings, finishing ninth at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and third at The Genesis Invitational, but they weren’t to the level Scheffler expected or the golf world had come to expect after a nine-win 2024.

The game remained shaky through THE PLAYERS Championship, with Scheffler showing visible frustration more and more as he fell short of the results he knew were possible. Scheffler felt his swing fall into place at the Texas Children’s Houston Open, where he finished runner-up, then added a top-five at Augusta National. Another T8 at the RBC Heritage kept the momentum rolling. That’s when the dominance began to shine through. Scheffler shot 61-63-66-63 to set the PGA TOUR scoring record of 253, 31-under at TPC Craig Ranch to blow the field away by eight strokes.

“Got off to maybe a bit of a slower start than I would have hoped to, but I had a really good start at (THE CJ CUP) in May and that kind of propelled me to having a really great year,” Scheffler said.

Scheffler went on to win three of four starts, picking off the PGA Championship and the Memorial. It’s part of a streak of 14 straight top-eight finishes that will continue into the fall. It’s the longest such streak since Ben Hogan had 14 top-eight finishes in a row in the 1950s.

Scheffler was disappointed not to add another TOUR Championship victory last week. He would have become just the third player to win multiple FedExCups (joining Woods and McIlroy) and the first to win them in back-to-back seasons. He trailed Tommy Fleetwood by only two strokes when he reached the 15th hole, but he found the water with his tee shot and made a double bogey to end his hopes.

Scheffler remained proud of his season even after the disappointment. Asked to compare 2025 to his great years, it took a while for him to finish his answer, speaking to his brilliance.

“If you look at 2022, that was the year I got my first win, got my first major," Scheffler said. "That was a big stepping stone year for me; '23, I was consistent the entire year. I didn't have as many wins as I would have hoped to that year, but I finished high pretty much every week, which I think is very challenging to do. Then you look at last year, I was able to capitalize on a lot of my opportunities, and I think I won nine times in the calendar year last year. So that was a pretty special year. Looking at this year, multiple major championships, a couple of big-time PGA TOUR events. It was another really great year out here for me. I gave myself some chances to win and was able to capitalize on those. And any time you have a year where you can win multiple major championships, I think it's a pretty special year.”