The world’s best golfer might have the craziest footwork

There’s nothing textbook about the Scheffler shuffle, but it’s a key part of what separates him from the field. The world’s top-ranked golfer, who has won five times this season, enters this week’s U.S. Open as the overwhelming favorite.

It starts in the tee box, where Scheffler’s unconventional footwork is noticeable on nearly every visit, as well as most of his long iron shots. His front (left) foot turns and follows his shot, with the left ankle rolling along with the momentum of the swing. His back foot begins moving at contact, sliding backward and often lifting off the ground entirely — a sprightly flair that no club pro would dare teach.

He looks like a bowler sliding near the foul line or a dancer finishing a twirl. But Scheffler’s motion is about power, not grace.

“All you need to do with Scottie Scheffler is just listen to the strike,” said John Fields, Scheffler’s coach at the University of Texas, “and then watch the golf ball go where it goes. Never mind what it all looks like physically.”

Scheffler was 12 when Fields started recruiting him. The golfer was just 5 feet tall and about 100 pounds, and he already had developed happy feet in the tee box. Because he was so small, a young Scheffler would overcompensate and take mighty swings to find extra distance.

“And then as he got bigger and taller, his footwork got more, shall we say, aggressive,” said Randy Smith, Scheffler’s longtime coach.

Notah Begay III, an NBC golf analyst, started watching Scheffler around that time. It was the young golfer’s stellar short game that really stood out, but the footwork was hard to miss. To Scheffler, it was a natural part of his swing, and Begay credits Smith for not trying to change it.

“I think it was very smart of them not to address the foot issue because as anybody will ever tell you … if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” he said.

Scheffler has tinkered, as golfers do. When he was younger, he tried to keep his right foot anchored to the ground. But it never felt right, and Smith encouraged him to work with what felt natural.

“I mess around with him a lot, but he really is kind of a savant when it comes to the swing,” Scheffler said this week. “He has such a good understanding of my swing and where I need to be.”

Smith said it’s a credit to Scheffler’s athleticism that he’s able to pull off his unconventional routine. The swing, after all, is an athletic movement, and Scheffler manages to put his whole body into it. On the takeaway, he begins pushing his back foot into the ground, and on the backswing, he transfers all of his weight and power from the right side of his body to the left. The uncoiling of his 6-foot-3, 200-plus-pound frame can be ferocious, and the momentum carries Scheffler’s feet away from their starting position.

“I think my footwork was kind of how I was known to people,” Scheffler said recently. “I think a lot of people maybe viewed it as not that good of a trait in my golf swing. I think some people may have said that it would be hard for me to be consistent, hard for me to play under pressure with that much action going on in my swing.”

He doesn’t hear that much anymore. While his sliding feet might look out of control to the naked eye, slow-motion replays show almost all of the foot movement comes after the club makes contact with the ball, so it has no impact on the ball flight. Smith, who began working with Scheffler when the golfer was 7, said his balance has never been an issue.

“If you take a picture of it at impact, it’s dead on,” he noted.

Scheffler is among the most consistent long-ball hitters and ball-strikers the game has seen. He enters the U.S. Open ranked No. 1 in strokes gained tee to green by more than a full shot, a massive disparity. He averages more than 301 yards per drive and is the game’s 10th-most-accurate driver.

“It’s funny how we all get caught up in beautiful, stick-your-finish poses,” said Brandel Chamblee, a former pro and current Golf Channel analyst. “And while it is beautiful — Rory [McIlroy] does it; it is beautiful — nobody ever talks about the perfect balance of home run hitters, because their feet are going everywhere. They’re knocking it out of the park. Golf has essentially home run hitters now.”

Chamblee can rattle off others who danced around the tee box — everyone from Walter Hagen and Johnny Miller to Greg Norman and Mark Calcavecchia — but Scheffler’s ball-striking separates him from the game’s other top players. Smith said because Scheffler’s legs and hips are generating so much power, the 27-year-old is able to rely on his hands for precision and skillful shot-making.

“Of all the players I’ve been around or seen, I don’t know of too many players who have a better feel for where the clubface is during the golf swing,” Smith said. “Even if it’s not exactly where he wants it, by the time it gets to impact, he finds a way to get the clubface back to where he can make something out of it.”

As unusual as it all looks, no one would argue with the results. In his past 16 starts, dating from August, Scheffler has finished outside the top 10 just once. He has won six tournaments and finished tied for second three times, meaning he has finished in the top two in more than half of his events. And no golfer is hotter entering the U.S. Open. Scheffler has won five of his past eight events and, as McIlroy joked this week, “The only thing that took him from winning a golf tournament was going into a jail cell for an hour.”

“Every week we play,” Xander Schauffele said, “he seems to build a bigger lead and somehow make the mountain even taller for all of us to climb.”