Scottie Scheffler picked up his PGA Tour leading 6th win of the season on Sunday, besting Tom Kim in a playoff at the Travelers Championship.
Scheffler, who has already set a PGA Tour record for most money earned in a single season, further padded his record by taking home $3.6M from the tournament purse over the weekend. The 28 year old finished the tournament at 22 under par at TPC River Highlands in Connecticut.
The win wasn’t without drama however. Beyond the usual theatrics of a playoff, climate change protesters stormed the 18th green, briefly disrupting the tournament as they were arrested and removed from the course.
“Fortunately for Tom and me we’re great friends so we were able to kind of relax each other because you don’t really know what’s going on,” said Scheffler after the round. “You don’t really understand the situation, there’s people running around everywhere and you don’t really know what’s going to happen so it’s a bit confusing.”
Once the unexpected visitors were cleared, and play resumed Kim and Scheffler would go on to have a playoff, albeit on a modified pin location after the hole on 18 was moved due to a foreign substance being thrown on the putting surface by the protestors.
In typical Scheffler fashion, the American stuck his approach to within 11 feet, while Kim was faced with an unfortunate “fried egg” bunker shot. The South Korean native ran his shot well past the hole, leaving the World’s number 1 ranked golfer with an easy two-putt for victory.
The win gives Scheffler 6 on the year, 4 of which have come in the PGA Tour’s signature event series. The victory marks the most wins on tour prior to July 1st since 1962, and tied Tiger Woods for the 3rd most wins in a PGA Tour season. A mark that seems likely to increase by season’s end given how well the former Texas Longhorn has been playing of late.
Rounding out the top 5 were Tom Hoge and S.J. Kim who both finished at -20 for the weekend, followed by a group of 4 players who carded -18 rounds for the tournament (Akshay Bhatia, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, and Tony Finau).
Up next for the PGA Tour is the Rocket Mortgage Classic from the Detroit Golf Club which will feature a $9.2M purse beginning on June 27th.
Photo: NickB1717. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.