We said in the build-up that River Highlands tends to produce the kind of Sunday shootout the majors never allow, and the Travelers duly delivered one. What it did not advertise was that the shootout would run into Monday, that it would come down to a single four-foot putt, and that the man standing over it would be Scottie Scheffler. He missed. Viktor Hovland, who had spent fifteen months wondering when the next win was coming, suddenly had it, and the season’s last signature event ended with the most familiar face in golf shaking his head on the high side of the hole.
A finish that refused to end on Sunday
The two of them reached the seventy-second green tied at twenty-one under, the sort of number that tells you everything about how River Highlands had been playing all week. Weather had been gnawing at the schedule, and when the light finally went there was nothing for it but to send everyone home and resume the playoff on Monday morning, with a few thousand locals filing back in to watch two players settle a twenty-million-dollar tournament in the cool of a working day.
They returned to the par-four eighteenth and both found the fairway, which set up exactly the kind of test the hole was built for. Scheffler went first with the approach and did what Scheffler so often does, flighting an iron to four feet and drawing a roar from the crowd packed around the green. It looked, for a moment, like the tournament was over before Hovland had even hit. The world number one with a short birdie putt to win is about as close to a settled matter as golf offers.
The putt that turned it
Hovland had other ideas. He answered the pressure with an approach of his own and rolled in from seven feet for birdie, the kind of putt that does not so much win a hole as load the whole weight of the moment back onto the other man. Now Scheffler had to make his four-footer simply to keep the playoff alive, and the calm that usually attends his putting deserted him at the worst possible time.
He hit it firmer than he wanted, by his own admission afterwards, and the ball caught the left edge and slid past, running a good seven feet beyond before it stopped. From a position most of us would happily take to win any tournament we ever play, he had gone to a hole that was suddenly, brutally over. Hovland had his eighth Tour title, his first in well over a year, and he had taken it off the best player in the world on a green where the best player in the world rarely loses.
What it means for both men
For Hovland the relief was the story. He has never been short of ball-striking or of the occasional dazzling week, but the wins had dried up, and there is a particular kind of doubt that creeps into a good player who keeps contending without closing. Beating Scheffler head to head, on a Monday, with the whole thing resting on nerve rather than form, is the sort of victory that resets a player’s sense of himself. The three-and-a-half million that came with it will not have hurt either, but it was the manner of it that mattered.
For Scheffler it is a stranger week to file away. He arrived at River Highlands carrying the residue of a US Open he had every reason to win and leaves it having lost a playoff he had every reason to win as well. None of it speaks to any real decline. He was in the mix at both, which is precisely where he lives. But two short putts in a fortnight, one for a slam and one to extend a playoff, are the kind of small failures that gnaw at a man who trades on inevitability. He will be fine. He is always fine. It simply was not his June.
On to the seaside
The signature season closes here, and the Tour now turns its eyes towards the links and the Open at Royal Birkdale. Hovland heads there a winner again, his confidence restored at the best possible moment, and Scheffler heads there with the look of a man who has unfinished business with a putter. River Highlands gave the back half of the schedule exactly the jolt it needed, a red-figure thriller to wash away the memory of Shinnecock’s marble greens, and it took an extra day to do it. Nobody who watched the Monday finish will complain about that.