Remember that narrative about Scottie Scheffler suddenly forgetting how to win golf tournaments and putting together a disappointing 2026 campaign? It was a popular one for much of the year, but that storyline is now dead with Scheffler winning the Tour Championship on Sunday, two weeks after dominating the first FedEx Cup Playoff event to wrap up his season with three wins and earning just shy of $31 million, a sum that excludes bonuses.
While the final round of the Tour Championship lacked any sort of juice down the stretch, it did mark the 30-year-old’s 18th win over the last three seasons. A player by the name of Tiger Woods also picked up exactly 18 wins during the same time frame by the age of 30, which leads us into our favorite exercise: making comparisons.
Scheffler winning the Tour Championship by three shots and ultimately cruising down the stretch was the culprit of creating little excitement, but Michael Block doing Michael Block things over on the senior circuit was admittedly taking attention away from the proceedings at East Lake as well. The man is his own content factory.
Lastly, the week-long drama in the YouTube Golf world with Good Good’s terrible ad, the blowback, and Grant Horvat peddling kids’ clubs at an obscene price tag, there is one final analysis of the situation that must be brought forward.
Welcome to Par Talk, a weekly read to get you caught up on all the happenings that took place in professional golf that you need to know. You can follow Mark on X @itismarkharris and email him at mark.harris@outkick.com.
There isn’t much to recap from the Tour Championship. The best player in the world, who played the most consistent golf all season, earned the crown as FedEx Cup champion at East Lake. Scheffler, far and away, had the best iron play for the week, and when he’s in control of his irons, as he was in Atlanta, he’s untouchable and capable of sizable victories, which is exactly what unfolded.
Now, let’s get into the fun stuff. Kyle Port of Normal Sport fired off a post on X after Scheffler’s win, comparing his age 28-30 age season to Tiger Woods’ age 28-30, and they’re alarmingly similar.
SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER TURNS HOT-MIC F-BOMB INTO MOTIVATION, RALLIES FOR TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP WIN
Strictly looking at the numbers, the resumes are nearly identical, but Woods winning four majors compared to Scheffler’s three, and Scheffler edging out Woods in the strokes gained category, is where things open up for a discussion. Strokes gained, remember, is a statistic relative to tournament fields and how a player performs against other players, not just the golf course, such as greens hit or fairways hit.
If we stick to the golden rule that majors trump all things, that version of Woods beats out this version of Scheffler. There is no fun in that scenario, but where there is fun is claiming which era of the PGA Tour was deeper.
Woods, battling with the likes of Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, Retief Goosen, Jim Furyk, and other greats during his 28–30 run, may make that era more top-heavy than what Scheffler is dealing with at the moment. Does that also mean Woods’ era was deeper overall, though?
I’m not sure it does. Technology has played a huge role in professional golf, which has helped with the result that the PGA Tour is filled with more elite talent than ever before, but that shouldn’t mean it should be cast aside as if it doesn’t matter. Just because the times have changed doesn’t automatically mean the times have gotten worse or less meaningful.
Nobody is comparing Woods’ overall career to Scheffler’s, but over a three-year stretch, this version of Scheffler is (at the very least) on par with that version of Tiger. It may not be as flashy, it may not be as exciting, and you can call Scheffler ‘boring’ all you want, but that doesn’t make the previous statement untrue.
Michael Block turned 50 in June, making him eligible to compete on the PGA Tour Champions, and he’s not-so-quietly made the most of his sponsor’s exemptions on the senior circuit.
Playing on another sponsor’s invite in this past weekend’s Ally Challenge, the PGA professional had not missed a cut in his four previous starts and earned a pair of Top 10 finishes along the way. The guy has simply been playing great golf, has brought juice to the senior tour, and has suddenly become one of the better players – for at least a stretch – on a 50-and-up circuit that is absolutely filled with legends of the game.
Block began Sunday’s final round at the Ally Challenge atop the leader board, and while he posted a 2-over 74 to finish T-3 and four shots back of eventual winner Steven Alker, he still stole the show, just as you’d expect him to.
On the Par 3 eighth hole, one of the most absurd things ever witnessed in a professional golf tournament unfolded courtesy of Mr. Block.
After hitting his tee shot on the 200-yard hole to about 15 feet, Block decided that this was the perfect opportunity to put on a show for the fans. Not only did he launch his club back to his caddie to catch and rip his putter out of his hand, he began walking backwards to share some fist bumps and high fives with the volunteers surrounding the tee box.
Again, this all took place on the eighth hole after he hit a pretty standard shot onto the green. You would have thought he knocked it to eight inches and was about to tap in for the win, but no, the man hadn’t even made the turn yet.
If this were anyone else on planet Earth doing this, they’d be criticized until the end of days, but since it’s Michael Block, it’s just another day.
Love the guy, hate the guy, don’t care about the guy, whatever the case may be, one thing is for sure, and that is that you can’t ignore him or escape him.
Everyone, including myself, has an opinion about the Good Good and Callaway ad, the complete fallout that has taken place after the fact, and Grant Horvat jumping into the fray by creating a set of kids’ clubs and selling them for the cool price of $200.
It was a week to forget for the YouTube golf universe and the millions of fans who occupy it, and while there was no shortage of knee-jerk reactions to it all, one overarching analysis I saw simply has to be mentioned courtesy of Tweeth Mitchell on X.
We live in this strange time when everything moves at a pace no one can keep up with, and analytics in the form of likes, shares, and engagement rule all. Good Good, and Grant Horvat, are the prime examples of a group and, frankly, a generation who know nothing else. It’s not their fault; one doesn’t choose when they are born, but it’s just the fact of the matter.
Horvat, who does not have children, diving headfirst into the kids’ golf space and selling clubs that very much appear to be made of plastic for two hundred American dollars is strange and presents the image of a guy looking to get rich in what he sees as an opportune, never-ending market with humans continuing to create little humans looking to get into golf.
You can’t fault someone for taking a chance in business, but in Horvat’s case, it’s not taking a chance given he’s at the top of the Golf YouTube pyramid, and that’s why it comes across as a money grab. As Mitchell noted on X, there is no north star.
