Scottie Scheffler really struggled during his opening round at The Memorial Tournament on Thursday.
Scheffler was nowhere near his best and he made so many uncharacteristic mistakes throughout his round at Muirfield Village.
The 29-year-old from Dallas seemed to be completely lost with his swing at times on day one, and he ended up carding a one-over par 73.
Scottie Scheffler received huge criticism for his actions on Thursday at The Memorial Tournament as well.
Scheffler berated his caddie for a full five minutes after finding the water with his tee shot on the par-three 16th hole.
The world number one was perhaps more frustrated than he ever has been before on the golf course.
Scottie Scheffler’s message to golf course architects after day one at The Memorial
Aside from Scheffler’s controversial actions on day one at Muirfield Village, the golf he played in general was fairly poor by his standards.
However, it’s worth noting that the golf course was extremely challenging.
The average score at Muirfield Village on Thursday was 73.054, with the gusting winds and deep rough causing the players all sorts of problems.
Scheffler spoke about the challenge represented by the golf course after his round and highlighted how the trees can make the wind so unpredictable.
“So I might be two or three shots away from the low round where if we’re all sitting in that situation, it’s not — you know, it’s hard to predict what it would be if that was the case,“ the world number one said.
“But it was just one of those deals where I felt like I was hitting some good shots, really. I made a sloppy swing on 14 and outside of that, I hit what I felt was a lot of quality iron shots and didn’t really get much for it.
“Just I think that that’s the nature of how the golf course is and kind of how difficult it can get — I can talk about on 10 too – but I think that’s the nature of how difficult the golf course is, especially when the greens get this firm and it’s late in the day and they’re also really fast and the wind can be a little bit unpredictable.
“And that’s always how it is around this golf course just — because you have a lot of trees and the wind can start bouncing around in different directions and I think that’s just another reason why it’s so hard.“
The recent trend in golf course design has been to remove trees but, as Scheffler said, that actually makes the wind more predictable as there are no natural canopies for it to ‘bounce around’ in.
What Scottie Scheffler previously said about tree removal from golf courses
Last year, Scheffler made it very clear that he isn’t a big fan of the recent trend in golf course design.
“That’s one of the reasons why I would like to get into some golf course design, because what they are doing to golf courses now I don’t like,“ he said.
“They take out all the trees, make the greens bigger and typically make the fairways bigger as well. So the only real barrier to guys trying to hit it as far as they want to or need to is trees.
“When you host a championship tournament if there are no trees you can hit it wherever you want.
“If I miss the fairway by 10 yards I am in the thick rough. If I miss it by 20, you are in the crowd.”
Scottie Scheffler has made his feelings very clear on how important trees are to increasing the difficulty of golf courses.
Whether the alarming trend of tree removal will continue remains to be seen, though.
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