With the wind gusting, the second round of THE PLAYERS got underway. Lady Luck arrived at the course, bringing bad luck for Scottie Scheffler and good luck for Wyndham Clark.
Scheffler got to the second hole in his morning round and had pain in his neck area.
“I hit a shot on my second hole today, and I felt a little something in my neck, and then I tried to hit my tee shot on 12, and that's when I could barely get the club back,” he explained. Scheffler started on hole 10.
“I got some treatment, maybe it loosened up a tiny bit, but most of the day I was pretty much laboring to get the club somehow away from me,” he explained.
The world No. 1 said he did what he could to loosen it up while playing. He did finish out the round and then went for treatment.
“I did enough I felt like today to keep myself somewhat in the tournament, and so that's really all I could ask for,” he said in a statement provided by the PGA Tour. Scheffler is at 8-under par, six shots back of leader Wyndham Clark who is at 14-under par, in fourth place.
Clark was shocked to hear about Scheffler’s issue and said Scheffler is actually his measuring stick.
“He's pushed me to be better, and it's fun to watch him, and so I'm really trying to catch him,” Clark said. “I really owe a lot to him to some of my good golf of late.”
But of course, that doesn’t mean Clark is going to donate any strokes to Scheffler or anyone else.
In fact, until the Valspar last year, Clark’s results were middling at best. The occasional seventh or 10th were his highest finishes.
Then he added a mental coach to team Clark and that made the first big difference.
“My mental game was getting a lot better leading into Quail Hollow (in 2023), and I had a lot of good finishes. I made 19 cuts in a row and had a chance to win a few times, but I wasn't putting good,” Clark said.
Before the Quail Hollow tournament, he switched putters to the Jailbird. His finishes improved tremendously and then, at Quail Hollow, he won.
“I started really seeing a lot of putts go in, and then all the work that I did off the course in my mental game I started seeing it on the course because I started making putts,” he explained.
He kept improving and won the U.S. Open.
He noted that most golfers get what he called lulls in their games, and they have to figure out what the issue is.
“I don't usually try to switch clubs or do anything, but I think that was the change I needed was just a little bit of getting rid of the line (alignment line on his putter) and going left hand low,” he said.
The biggest issue he had earlier this week was changing hotel rooms. Apparently, management had given him twin beds, which didn’t work for him.
Equipment note: Clark’s putter these days is the Odyssey Ai-One Jailbird Cruiser.
