Did a professional golfer just signal a vibe-shift? (2011)

On Scottie Scheffler and the (hopeful) end of the age of #winning.

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I.

Sometimes I think the modern era began on the first day of March in 2011, with a one-word tweet from the actor Charlie Sheen that became a mantra for the social-media age. Sheen would later admit that he was in a very dark place mentally when he tweeted that word; he regretted the storm he unleashed, and he acknowledged that it was not actually a triumphal statement, but a desperate cry for help. Yet in the moment, Charlie Sheen tweeted that word—winning—and the online world, still accustoming itself to the funhouse mirror that is social media, bent it into a pompous societal mission statement. Here was someone whose life and career appeared to be collapsing before our very eyes, but he was tweeting right through it; he was imploring us not to believe what we were seeing with our own eyes and ears, and we bought right into it.

At that moment, the appearance of winning became the most important element of online life. It was the first sign of the slow and inevitable twisting of American culture that led so many people to abandon their morality in pursuit of a hashtag. And 15 years later, that hashtag feels more hollow than ever.

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II.

This week, the number one golfer in the world, Scottie Scheffler, made an unexpected confession: He told a room full of reporters that winning didn’t make him particularly happy. In the moment we’re currently living through, this felt like a stunning admission. It is not something that elite athletes are often willing to admit to in their prime, let alone when so many of their images are carefully and willfully crafted online to maximize their earning potential.

Scheffler had spent years building up to this moment, as the great columnist

Mark Whicker

writes:

As a youth, Scheffler won 90 events on the North Texas PGA section tour. He would wear golf attire to school so he could go straight to the range at Royal Oaks Country Club in Dallas without stopping off at home. He won the U.S. Junior Amateur, was the nation’s top-ranked amateur, played on the Walker Cup team, won the Big 12 individual title for Texas, and played in two U.S. Opens. He was PGA Tour Rookie of the Year, too, and played in the Ryder Cup before he won a tour event. But there was no sense that Scheffler was going to rewrite the game, and, indeed, he didn’t get a PGA Tour win until Phoenix in 2022. Then he won two other events and the Masters in the next two-and–a-half months and has been No. 1 in the world ever since.

But now it was as if, like David Byrne, he wasn’t quite sure how he got here, and what he was supposed to do next. It was, Whicker writes, reminiscent of the classic final scene in the Robert Redford movie The Candidate, framed by an electoral victory and the ensuing question What do we do now?

During this press conference leading into the British Open, Scheffler dropped any pretense of being a public figure. He exposed the depths of his psyche, speaking about how all that winning—including three major championships in the past four years—had not left him fulfilled. He tried not to sound ungrateful; he understands how privileged and lucky he is. But winning is, to him, a sugar high that lasts for a few minutes and then disappears, and leaves him wondering why he’s chasing after it in the first place.

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III.

It is wild, in this mediated world where bullshit emerges from the Internet’s every orifice, to actually bear witness to a moment that utterly honest. This wasn’t bespoke “authenticity” crafted to fit a narrative; this was actual authenticity, with no outward reward for its subject other than catharsis. And yet many people inevitably viewed Scheffler’s monologue as an admission of weakness. Sports are dominated by stories of pathological hypercompetitiveness—Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady—so that when we witness an athlete who doesn’t speak of his career in that way, a certain segment of society somehow views them as emotionally deficient.

"You've Never Won Anything" (1998, 2014, 2020)

I’m sure Scheffler wasn’t efforting to make some kind of profound statement outside of himself, but I wonder if it hinted at a backlash against the world as it is. Maybe a generation who grew up under this oppressive umbrella of #winning is actually tired of the hashtag. For nearly 15 years now, we have lived under the paradigm Charlie Sheen accidentally set in place—one that a demagogic president and his minions have now elevated to both a depressing and comical apotheosis, and one that glorifies presentation over reality. But none of that—either the actual winning or the appearance of winning—is actually leading us anywhere. We’re walking in circles and acting as if we’re running a marathon. And as his social-media team cringed in a corner, Scheffler was actually willing to say these things out loud.

At the root of the American myth is this notion that ambition leads to happiness, and perhaps that’s true to an extent. But at some point, there are diminishing returns when it comes to actually living a fulfilling life. Michael Jordan is the greatest athlete of his era, but the question of whether he is actually a happy man is a complex one. I imagine, whatever happens to Scottie Scheffler from here on out, he is perceptive enough to chase happiness instead of chasing the hashtag. Let us hope it was not just about him; let us hope it heralds the first tentative steps into an entirely new era.

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