ATLANTA — During his post-round interview after shooting 65 Thursday at the Tour Championship, Scottie Scheffler casually dropped a bit of news that the World No. 1 player suffered “a weird injury” during the British Open last month.
It begged the question: what exactly was the weird injury?
“Probably TMI, but I had what’s called a pilonidal infection,” he said.
It sounded innocent enough and surely no one had a clue what that was until he added, “It’s an infection at the top of your butt crack. You can look it up.”
OK, then. Well, we didn’t see that coming.
Scheffler continued and feel free to click out of this story any time you want – especially if you’re eating.
“It was really hard for me to bend down. It was really hard for me to make a swing on Sunday. Walking was actually extremely difficult,” explained Scheffler, who shot 2-over 74 in the final round and finished T-21 at St. Andrews. “I don’t know if any of you have ever had something like that”—can’t say that we have—“but if you talk to someone that does it is excruciatingly painful. It was brutal. It’s one of those things that just happens.”
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“Yeah, I’m not going to say it here. I’ll tell you after because that would really be TMI,” he said.
Laughter ensued.
“Yeah, I didn’t ever really plan on telling anybody,” he continued. “It’s kind of one of those things you put on the back burner, and it’s stuff that happens. Guys deal with injuries over the course of the season, and that one popped up at a wrong time for me when I was playing really well.”
The questions kept coming—what’s the saying, curiosity killed the cat?—how long did it take to get over it?
“About a week,” Scheffler said. “They did a procedure on me Sunday after we got done that the European Tour doctors did a really good job kind of flushing everything out.”
And then finally, at last, it was over as the next question delved back into his golf game rather than his back side. Was there any value in the way you played last week coming into here?
Expect Scheffler to be the butt of several jokes for his unfortunate over-sharing – perhaps until the next millennium.
