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AUGUSTA, Ga. — Golf is supposed to be the most maddening game around, and yet Scottie Scheffler made it look absurdly easy. He did not seem any more stressed winning the Masters than he did hitting balls in his New Jersey backyard as a 5-year-old, launching them over his house and toward a charmed future as the best player on the planet.
Yes, while carrying a five-stroke lead, he did turn the 18th green Sunday into a back-and-forth comedy worthy of his childhood days spent at the Rockland County minigolf and range above the Hudson River. He had grinded so hard and for so long over 71 ¹/₂ exhausting holes on a brutal course, he decided to ease up, break that steel grip on his concentration, and have some fun. Scheffler grabbed his mouth in mock horror after his third missed putt, inspiring the gallery to rise and cheer for him and successfully will that fourth putt for double bogey into the cup.
But man, did the kid ever earn it.
“I’ll give myself a free pass on that one,” Scheffler said while wearing the green jacket.
He has a free pass to Augusta National forever now, as its first Jersey Boy champ.
As it turned out, the road to a 10-under finish and a three-stroke victory over Rory McIlroy wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Saturday night, Scheffler watched some Season 4 reruns of his favorite show, “The Office,” after spilling his dinner in the car on the ride home, much to the delight of his wife, Meredith. The following morning, however, was an entirely different story. That’s when the weight of holding the Masters lead since Friday came crashing down upon him.
“I cried like a baby this morning,” Scheffler said Sunday night. “I was so stressed out. I didn’t know what to do.”
He had won three PGA Tour events over the last two months, and he was already a certified Ryder Cup hero, and yet for the first time in his career Scheffler broke down before a final round. He told Meredith that he wasn’t ready for the challenge, that he felt overwhelmed. She gave her spouse a pep talk, made him a big breakfast, and Scottie calmed down on arrival at the office.
“This golf course and this tournament is just different,” Scheffler explained.
He conquered it anyway, showing the public no fear in the process. Seventeen years to the day after Tiger Woods sank his magical, mystery chip-in at the 16th to win his fourth green jacket, Scheffler sank his own at the third hole to win his first while spending the week wearing Tiger’s shirts and shoes and swinging Tiger’s irons. Cameron Smith, a sturdy Players Championship winner from Australia, had turned a three-stroke deficit into a one-stroke deficit over the first two holes and had appeared to squeeze the leader hard.
The chip-in defined the 25-year-old Scheffler as a study in big-game poise.
When victory was assured, Scheffler’s father, Scott, started summoning the memories from his son’s youth — hitting balls in the snow on the 9W range, and later in the frigid darkness at the nine-hole Orchard Hills course at Bergen Community College. Scott would stand near a flagstick with a flashlight, near his daughters, and Scottie would fire some line drives right at them. “He would yell at us when he hit it,” Scott said. “He would hit the girls.”
The course manager kicked off the Schefflers more than once, at least until Scott persuaded the man to take measure of his son’s game. “Then he didn’t bother us anymore,” Scott said. The father learned to move away from the flag with his flashlight as his son took aim.
What a special New Jersey/New York journey it’s been. Born in Ridgewood, N.J., Scottie was 4 when he first started demanding that his father take him to the old driving range on 9W. A Navy veteran and pro named George Kopac ran the range, and couldn’t believe the power and precision of young Scottie’s swing. On angry winter days, Kopac would leave out a Super Jumbo size bucket for the boy behind the shed, and make sure one rubber tee and a turf mat were cleared of snow.
The routine was simple: Scottie pounded balls for hours in an otherwise closed-down range, and Kopac family members retrieved them after the snow melted. So of course, a month after George’s death at 88, all the Kopacs were glued to their TVs Sunday in Rockland.
“I wish my dad was here to see what a wonderful man Scottie has become,” Kathy Kopac texted The Post. “Many tears of happiness for Scottie were shed today. I know my father is up there saying, ‘I knew he would make it.’ ”
Scottie made it because his father, Scott, was a dedicated stay-at-home dad while his mother worked tirelessly as an executive in a Manhattan law firm, and then as a law firm COO in Dallas. The son of a car salesman, Scott grew up a public-course kid in a town (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.) defined by its private-course standard of living. “We were the dead-end kids,” Scott said. He was a rough-and-tumble basketball player at fabled St. Cecilia High School, once home to a hoops and football coach by the name of Vince Lombardi. He raised a kid tough enough to win golf’s Super Bowl.
“He’s just a nice young kid born in New Jersey and raised in Texas, and he’s got a little bit of both, which is wonderful,” Scott said of his boy. “I guess he belongs to the world now. He’s public now, which is a little scary. But he’ll represent himself well.”
Don’t worry, Scottie Scheffler already has.
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