Sixty years ago, the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart arrived (cheeks flushed) to a history-changing definition.
The year was 1964, the case was Jacobellis vs. Ohio, and the definition rankling America’s highest and haughtiest legal authority? Hard-core pornography.
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [‘hard-core pornography’], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so,” Stewart wrote in a now-famous concurring decision.
“But I know it when I see it.“
Stewart might not have realized it at the time, but he had spoken to something much broader than his subject matter. Some things in life are understood better than they are articulated.
Like, for example, the greatness showcased by Scottie Scheffler on Sunday evening at the BMW Championship, when an 82-foot chip-in for birdie on the 17th hole won him the PGA Tour’s penultimate playoff event in utterly jaw-dropping fashion.
It’s not that Scheffler wasn’t great before stealing Robert MacIntyre’s soul on the 17th green, completing a four-shot Sunday comeback in startlingly routine fashion. By all accounts, Scheffler has been great for a while: His resume has already yielded four major championship victories, three-quarters of the career Grand Slam, more than $100 million in on-course earnings and one of the longest and most unambiguous tenures atop the World Ranking list since its creation.
It was more that Scheffler’s chip-in could be called the first “signature” moment of his career. The moment his dominance became undeniable to the most cynical observer. The moment he suddenly bent the laws of physics, altering the infinitesimally small chance of a tournament-deciding hole-out into a plausible, if not likely, outcome. The moment in which Scottie Scheffler’s greatness suddenly defied definition.
“Yeah, he’s hit a great shot,” admitted MacIntyre, the nearest (and most devastated) witness. “Nothing you can do with that. I just didn’t play good enough.”
“Ahhh, he’s darn good,” agreed Rickie Fowler. “Made that chip look quite a bit easier than it is. It’s easy to hit that 12 feet past, or down onto the fringe.”
Scheffler delights in easy. More than any moment, easy has defined his career — evidenced in a pair of four-shot wins at the Masters and Open, and a five-shot win at the PGA. In just the last year, he has played countless hours of pressure golf, faced dozens of hairy situations, and emerged from it all without an inkling of strain.
But on Sunday, easy earned a new definition. A trickling, downhill chip shot, from the rough, on the penultimate hole, without your normal caddie, in the moments after an inexplicable 3-foot miss? That isn’t supposed to be easy, and yet, when the ball finally fell into the hole, it seemed silly to think Scheffler would do anything else.
“You just shake your head at what you’re watching during this era from that man,” said NBC’s Terry Gannon.
For Gannon and the rest of the NBC crew paid to narrate Scheffler’s chip-in on Sunday, the only adequate emotion was bafflement. And the only historical analogue was obvious.
Anyone who loves and has talked about golf over the last two decades has had the unfortunate experience of explaining Tiger Woods to an outsider. If you have engaged in that activity, you understand the challenge facing the NBC crew on Sunday afternoon to some small degree. Yes, Woods revolutionized golf’s relationship with equipment and fitness. Yes, he won more convincingly than any player in history. Yes, he cultivated a mystique that transformed the economics of the sport. But each of these facts is incapable of explaining Woods in his totality.
Indeed, the best way to experience Woods’ greatness was to bear witness. To see him charge up the 18th fairway at the Masters in 2019 or Torrey Pines in 2008 or Pebble Beach in 2000. To watch the logo on his golf ball oscillate into the 16th hole at Augusta National or on the 17th at the Memorial. To feel your eyes betray your expectations. Those moments were fleeting and universal. They were utterly original. They were greatness you could not define.
In the aftermath of Sunday’s chip-in, Scheffler experienced a similar phenomenon in an entirely different way. He raised his wedge in the air, butt-end first, like a maestro silencing an orchestra — but did not follow up with a Woods-worthy fist-pump. He walked quickly to the hole and removed the ball before turning to the next tee. On TV, the NBC announcers said nothing as the crowd and the moment swallowed the screen.
“When it came out, it came out how we wanted to and then it started breaking and it started looking better and better,” Scheffler said later, referring to his chip-in with the same admiration one might give a particularly notable tree stump. “And yeah, it was definitely nice to see that one go in.”
It was, in fact, much more than nice. It was a cosmic intercession, a glimpse at the divine, the discovery of another true original.
These are big words, and yet they are also inadequate. The truth is that we all face the same battle NBC encountered on Sunday evening — the challenge of articulating something that is much better understood.
In the end, we’ll agree, as they did, that there are no words to define Scottie Scheffler’s greatness.
You’ll know it when you see it.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
