“I’m going to go home and relax and do nothing for a little while,” Scheffler said after posting a 5 Under 65 debut on Saturday at the Travelers Championship, a run that pushed him quite far in the standings. to position it as sort of a Sunday factor. “I’m not going to watch golf. I’ve never been a big watcher of golf.

Scheffler worked his way up to 10 under par for Saturday’s tournament. He is seven strokes behind leader Xander Schauffele, tied for 11th with three other players.

There is only a remote possibility that Scheffler can overcome that margin and that many golfers will win on Sunday.

But in a strange week that began with a conversation about the tour’s potential disintegration and continued with a driverless golf cart plunging into a pond, followed the next day by the shooting of Jason Kokrak out out of a bunker and into the space leading to disqualification… who knows?

Perhaps stranger things have already happened.

The biggest win from behind in tournament history came in 2005, when Brad Faxon entered the final round behind leader Justin Rose by seven strokes and posted a 9-under 61 before beating Tjaart van der Walt. in the playoffs.

Chances are Scheffler doesn’t know and probably wouldn’t care.

“Maybe go out and do something crazy tomorrow and see what happens,” he said after his round, not sure what his deficit would be because he played much earlier than Schauffele. “I have no idea what the standings will look like. I would have liked to make a few more birdies and put myself in a better position but I can’t go back in time.

Scheffler doesn’t have to go down in history on Sunday.

It’s good, though, that he spent Saturday making the tournament more interesting. When the world’s No. 1 player looks like the world’s No. 1 player, when you don’t have to scroll far down the leaderboard to find name and fame, it validates the excitement that follows his engagement and precedes his premiere. departure time.

Scheffler received a warm welcome to the 18th green as he finished his round.

“It was a hot day,” he said. “Usually these days it’s not too hot for me, being from Texas, but we’ve been here so long, kind of getting used to the cold. It was really cool to get that ovation. The fans have been nothing but good to me this week. It was a lot of fun playing in front of them and getting their support and that last burst of energy up the hill of 18 was a lot of fun.

Scheffler is staying at a house this week, he mentioned upon arrival. It fell right in the heart of the Cromwell community and that’s pretty cool, he said, especially with the one-minute ride to TPC River Highlands.

A year ago, Scheffler could walk just about anywhere, to Golf Club Road in Cromwell or Broadway in Manhattan, unrecognized.

But now he sits atop the leaderboard, his meteoric rise being the history of the sport before the sport was divided by all the PGA Tour and LIV Golf talk. He is a star player whose image has been splashed all over the tournament advertisements.

Scheffler is playing the Travelers for the third time and for the first time as a household name. He missed the cut on an empty course in 2020 and finished tied for 47th last year. Soon his life changed.

Scheffler made his Ryder Cup debut in the USA’s 19-9 win at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin in September and the laid-back 26-year-old Texan made history in 2022, picking up four wins in two months .

The $1.56 million Scheffler pocketed with a tie for second place at last week’s US Open pushed his season earnings to $12,896,849 – the most ever earned by a player in a season. He won his first tour in February and two more in March. His win at the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play in Austin, Texas, where he went to college, propelled him to No. 1 in the standings.

And he won the Masters in April, three strokes ahead of Rory McIlroy, who earlier this week pointed to all the money Scheffler has made in a bid to explain the PGA Tour’s earning potential, and generally hailed the dominance by Scheffler.

“He’s on a tear, and he’s been threatening to for a while,” said McIlroy, ranked No. 2 in the world. “It doesn’t look like he’s been on tour that long, but he got the best player to never win on tour really quickly, and then he broke that dike earlier this year. He’s so consistent week after week.”

Scheffler improved with every round, shooting 68-67 to enter the weekend under 5, then birding five bogey-free on Saturday.

“I would have liked to make a few more birdies, but no bogeys, that’s always good,” Scheffler said. “Keep the map clean. … I just avoided mistakes. The first two days I missed a few putts that maybe I should have made, some shorter. Today I was much stronger inside 10 feet. Probably the only difference.

Then he went “home”.

Don’t watch golf on the edge of your seat. Just to relax.

“Maybe turn it on in the background,” he said.