Twice is nice for Scottie Scheffler.
On Wednesday, the 27-year-old Texan was named the winner of the Jack Nicklaus Award as the PGA Tour Player of the Year for the 2022-23 season.
“I was very pleased with the news. I was very proud of how I played most of last year. The consistency was very special to me,” he said. “To be able to win this award two years in a row is truly special.”
In doing so, he becomes the first player to win Player of the Year honors in back-to-back seasons since Tiger Woods won the award in three straight years from 2005-2007 and 11 times overall. Scheffler said that PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan called him to tell him that he had won the award and that he was one of less than a handful of back-to-back winners.
“So I looked to see how many times Tiger won it and there was years from like 2000 to 2008 where he won it almost every year. I think Vijay clipped it one year and that was it. So he’s got some pretty absurd stats like that,” Scheffler said. “Anytime you can be mentioned in the same breath with Tiger it’s very special. I grew up idolizing him as a player, and anytime you can get mentioned with him is very special.”
The Player of the Year award is determined by a member vote, with PGA Tour members who played in at least 15 official FedEx Cup events during the 2022-23 season eligible to vote. The voting period ran from Dec. 1 through Dec. 15. Scheffler received 38 percent of the vote and was selected over four other nominees: U.S. Open champion Wyndham Clark, FedEx Cup champ Viktor Hovland, Rory McIlroy and Masters champ Jon Rahm.
BY THE NUMBERS: Did the players get the vote right?
Rahm, who won the GWAA Player of the Year Award on Tuesday, which is voted on by members of the media, won four times last season before defecting to LIV Golf last month. When Scheffler was asked if he was surprised that he won, he said, “Maybe a little bit. I think it was a close race. It could have gone either way.”
Asked the same question on a separate conference call with media, he said, “I just think it depends on what the guys kind of looked at for their vote. I guess this year they really kind of appreciated my consistency. Like I said, I was very proud of that. The way I played the entire year, I think I maybe only had one or two starts that were — that I would categorize as not great, but other than that I had a lot of starts where I just played really solid golf and to do that for an entire season out here I think is very difficult. I’m very proud of that aspect of my game.”
Scheffler won twice during the 2022-23 season successfully defending his title at the WM Phoenix Open and winning the Players Championship by five strokes. (He also won the Hero World Challenge in December.) In 23 starts, Scheffler recorded 13 top-fives and 17 top-10s, both high marks for any player in a single season on Tour since 2005, when Vijay Singh and Woods each had 13 top-fives and Singh had 18 top-10s. Scheffler never missed a cut and set the Tour record for most official money earned in a single season at $21,014,342, breaking his own record set last season ($14,046,910).
Scheffler is the fourth player to win the Jack Nicklaus Award in back-to-back seasons since the award was established in 1990, joining Fred Couples (1991, 1992), Nick Price (1993, 1994), and Woods (five straight from 1999-2003, three straight from 2005-2007). McIlroy (three times) and Dustin Johnson (twice) are the only other players to win Player of the Year honors multiple times.
Scheffler also received the Byron Nelson Award for recording the lowest scoring average on Tour in 2022-23. At 68.63, Scheffler’s scoring average was the lowest on Tour since Tiger Woods in 2009 (68.05).
Scheffler was presented the award at The Sentry, the 2024 season-opening event in Maui, Hawaii.
Patrick Cantlay, who in 2021 edged Rahm for Player of the Year, recalled visiting Woods at his home shortly after he received the Jack Nicklaus Award.
“It felt like a big deal to me at the time that I had got a Player of the Year, and they give you this little Jack Nicklaus bronze trophy that’s about yeah high,” Cantlay recalled. “So we’re walking through Tiger’s house and we’re in the basement and he’s got, like, 11 of ’em lined up right next to each other all in the corner of the basement boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I go, ‘Hey, I’m catching up,’ and he looked at me and he goes, ‘You got a lot of work to do.'”
