a 5-iron to within 2 inches of the cup<\/a> on the 211-yard second hole. He caught Viktor Hovland with a 25-foot birdie on the fourth hole, pulled ahead for the first time on the 13th and wound up with a three-shot victory.<\/p>\nIt was his first time with the low 72-hole score at the Tour Championship. <\/p>\n
When he won in 2024, he had a two-shot lead before the tournament began given to the No. 1 seed under the \u201cstarting strokes\u201d format. He won by four shots, even though two other players had a lower actual score. That still bugs him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re coming down the stretch of a tournament and you\u2019re tied or one shot back, it\u2019s different than when you\u2019re adding it up at the end and there\u2019s starting strokes and all that stuff,\u201d Scheffler said. \u201cI think having a real tournament to finish the year, where I am the winner and the lowest score at East Lake, feels like a bit more of an accomplishment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scheffler won for the third time this year \u2014 twice in the last three weeks during the PGA Tour’s postseason \u2014 to match Chris Gotterup, Matt Fitzpatrick and U.S. Open champion Wyndham Clark for most titles in 2026.<\/p>\n
Players vote on the Jack Nicklaus Award for PGA Tour player of the year. Scheffler has won the last four years \u2014 another would tie him with Woods for most consecutive awards.<\/p>\n
Taking over the top spot in career earnings was inevitable. The $40 million purse at the Tour Championship now counts as official money. Scheffler won $10 million, pushing his career total to $130,390,661. <\/p>\n
Woods, who never played for more than a $10 million purse during his peak years from 1997 through 2009, had been at the top of the career money list for nearly 26 years.<\/p>\n
It was a small slice of redemption for Scheffler, who lost in a playoff to Hovland at the Travelers Championship, one of his five runner-up finishes this year.<\/p>\n
Hovland made only one birdie and closed with a 72 to finish alone in second, worth $5 million. Most aggravating for the Norwegian was having three putts hit the lip in a four-hole stretch on the back nine, two of them for birdie and one for par.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s just good, and he played good every day,\u201d Hovland said. \u201cI could have shot 66 easily as well today. Just didn’t have it. … It wasn\u2019t like anybody else really played all that great in contention, and that\u2019s what you see \u2014 a lot of guys just gagging and throwing up. And that\u2019s where he just kind of stays in it and shoots a nice score. That gets the job done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scheffler had two bogeys \u2014 one an aggressive miss with a wedge from the fairway on No. 7, the other from a gnarly lie in the rough on the 14th \u2014 and otherwise felt he didn’t miss much over a tough day of wind and firm turf that made the landing spots feel smaller.<\/p>\n
East Lake played to a cumulative average of 67.35 through three rounds. On Sunday, the average score was 70.07.<\/p>\n
Ryan Gerard, one shot behind Hovland staring out, made double bogey on the opening hole, followed with 13 straight pars and shot 72 to finish alone in third.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey made it as difficult as they could today, and that\u2019s kind of what we were looking for,\u201d Gerard said. \u201cI just wasn\u2019t on enough to execute shots to really tucked hole locations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scheffler said winning the Tour Championship for the FedEx Cup doesn’t change his outlook on the season. That’s for others to judge. Even so, he had a point to prove.<\/p>\n
He felt as though he had underachieved in the PGA Tour postseason \u2014 losing a six-shot lead to Rory McIlroy in 2022, not putting up much of a fight when Hovland won in 2023 when he started with a two-shot lead and finished 16 shots behind.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo come in this year maybe not winning the tournaments that I could have won throughout the regular season, to come in and win two out of three playoff events, is definitely a nice way to finish off the season,\u201d Scheffler said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was my motto going into the playoffs. Maybe in years I\u2019ve underperformed in the postseason, and maybe this is a year I\u2019ll perform better than I have in the regular season.\u201d<\/p>\n
That he did, and the beer no doubt went down smoothly.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
See AP\u2019s full golf coverage here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA (AP) \u2014 Scottie Scheffler’s second FedEx Cup title, and his 22nd victory on the PGA Tour during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[16703,44,4368,208,22422,56],"class_list":["post-60186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scottie-scheffler","tag-compensation-in-sports","tag-golf","tag-s","tag-scottie-scheffler","tag-scottie-scheffler-tour-championship-fedex-cup-tige","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}