The stark contrast of Scheffler and Spieth at Hilton Head: An 18-Hole Live Diary

Yes. This is what happens when an adenovirus won’t go away, and in fact keeps getting worse—instead of going to Harbour Town, which is roughly 2.5 miles away, you sit inside your AirBnB, achy and tired despite a decent night’s sleep, with a sore throat that makes even a simple sip of water feel like torture, and you fire up ESPN+ because it’s Thursday of the RBC Heritage and Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth are playing together. (I promise that’s the last time I complain about being sick, at least until lunch when hunger forces me to eat, which should feel approximately like swallowing razors.) It’s a great pairing, and it’s some compensation for being laid up, so let’s go hole by hole with two of the most interesting men in the (golf) world.

Hole 1: Spieth and Scheffler present a sharp contrast here, which is what makes the pairing so enticing. One of them has gone full Alexander-the-Great on professional golf, conquering everything in sight up to and including the Masters, while the other missed his second-ever cut at Augusta and continues a bizarre feast-or-famine stretch of years that is very tempting to call post-prime. As in, maybe, at age 30, this is Spieth’s new normal and we shouldn’t expect much more.

But of course we will. Especially here, in Hilton Head, where he won in 2022 and lost in a playoff to Matt Fitzpatrick last year. And his uneven play isn’t the only huge contrast with Scheffler; Spieth is more exciting, more flamboyant at least in his style of play, and in his career has captured hearts and minds in a way that no other American can claim. Considering how steady Scheffler comes across, and how erratic Spieth plays (and, yes, how they each look), it’s wild to think that Scheffler is three years younger.