No offense to the three players ahead of him, but the golfer entering the weekend at the Memorial Tournament as the betting favorite is the guy in fourth place.
That’s the way it is when you’re Scottie Scheffler and you’re the best player in the world.
Scheffler hasn’t lit up Muirfield Village Golf Club in the first two rounds. His consecutive 2 under 70s are pedestrian by his lofty standard, not that he was complaining. The rainy and unseasonably cool weather made scoring difficult.
“Solid day,” Scheffler said. “If I holed a few more putts, I would have had a little bit of a different score. I felt like I was hitting my lines out there and hit a lot more fairways today. I definitely felt better with my ball striking, so 2 under in these conditions was definitely not a bad score today.”
Scheffler is at 4 under. The 28-year-old from Dallas is three shots behind co-leaders Nick Taylor and Ben Griffin and one shot behind Akshay Bhatia. The betting site betmgm.com lists Sheffler as the Memorial favorite at +175.
Scheffler is trying to become the second golfer to win consecutive Memorials. The other is Tiger Woods. Scheffler might not dominate the tour the way Woods did in his prime, but he’s as close as anyone has come since those days. Scheffler won the Byron Nelson and the PGA Championship already in May.
A year ago, Scheffler had control of the tournament from the start. He shot a 67 to lead after the first round and outlasted Collin Morikawa to win the tournament by one stroke. He’ll have to come from behind this year, but it’s hardly an insurmountable deficit.
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Scheffler started his second round as if he might take the lead when he got birdies on the first, third and fifth holes. He parred the rest of the front nine.
On No. 10, he hit his tee shot into the rough and had to chip out into the fairway.
“Just a terrible lie,” Scheffler said. “If there was more rough in front of me, I would have maybe tried to hit an 8-iron or something and hack it down the fairway, but it felt like it was worth the risk to try and pop it out of there with the 5-wood. The worst that was going to happen was the ball was going to end up where it did.”
Scheffler then three-putted from 43 feet for a double-bogey.
“Sloppy,” he said.
But he rebounded with birdies with a 9-foot putt on the 10th and a 12-footer on the 11th hole. He finished the rest of the round with all pars except for a bogey on No. 14 after hitting in the water.
“The golf course is playing really long,” Scheffler said. “It’s a very challenging golf course. When the rough gets this wet, anytime you hit it in the rough, the lies are going to be really bad and it’s going to be really challenging. It’s definitely important to keep the ball in play and try and stay dry.”
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Top-ranked Scottie Scheffler lurking in fourth place at Memorial Tournament
Reporting by Bill Rabinowitz, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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