If you are married to a PGA Tour pro, and he won nine tournaments last year, like Scottie Scheffler did, including THE PLAYERS and the Masters, never let him cook in the off-season. Something is bound to go wrong. A slip and fall accident on the kitchen floor that tweaks his back for months, if not years. A knife fight, because you disagree about which holiday guest gets the biggest filet. A burn when you are trying to make twice-baked potatoes. A good skewering when trying to remove the cork from a wine bottle. The kitchen is rife with danger. Whatever you do, do not let the Player of The Year anyplace near it. Lock the door. Better yet, go out to dinner or do take out.
And whatever you do, don’t cook Italian. Especially don’t cook ravioli. Just ask Scottie Chef-fler what happened to him.
Around Christmas, Scottie and his wife Meredith decided they wanted to have handmade ravioli. The kind where you roll out the dough, put the filling on it, put the second layer of dough on top of that and then cut out the individual ravioli (or raviolis, if you prefer). They didn’t have a ravioli maker because they were not at home when the ravioli inspiration and subsequent “incident” occurred. They needed something to cut out the ravioli bits.
“The only thing there was a wine glass that we found,” Scheffler explained. “I had my hand on top of it and it broke, which side note, I've heard nothing but horror stories since this happened about wine glasses, so be careful. Even if you're like me and you don't drink wine, you've got to be real careful with wine glasses. It broke and the stem kind of got me in the hand.”
Scheffler said he has since talked to someone who had the same thing happen, but that guy had the stem go right through his hand. Yee-ouch!
“It's one of those deals where, immediately after it happened, I was mad at myself because I was like, gosh, that's so stupid, but you just don't think about it when you're in the moment,” Scheffler admitted.
The bleeding didn’t last long, he noted. About 15 minutes. Unfortunately, all this happened on Christmas Day.
They immediately reached out to a doctor who had helped Scheffler with a thumb issue in the past. He was, of course, out of town, but told them what to do and referred them to another person to do the surgery on his ravioli-wine-glass-injury because there was still glass stuck inside Scottie’s hand. Ee-oowww!
Have these people never heard of the stemless wine glass? Were there no highball or old-fashioned glasses in the house? How about a nice cookie cutter?
“I was able to heal pretty quickly,” Scheffler added.
After his self-inflicted hand injury, Scheffler was out of golf commission for nearly two months. The AT&T Pro-Am was his first tournament back. The Genesis, which was moved to Torrey Pines due to fire damage in the Pacific Palisades area around Riviera Country Club where the Genesis is usually held, was his second. His results were just a little off the top spot. Rust had formed on the No. 1 player’s game.
And guess what. In spite of everything, the ravioli was good, according to Scheffler. Not the best ever, but nothing is good when your hand is throbbing in pain.
Now everyone waits to see how long the Julia Child Chef-fler Diversion will keep Scheffler out of the winner’s circle. (THE PLAYERS is three weeks out as this is written.) So, before you run to Draft Kings or Fan Duel to bet on the three-peat, put the Julia Child Chef-fler Diversion in your calculations.
Rory McIlroy suggested Scheffler might want to think about getting a chef.
Scheffler replied, “I've got a chef. Her name's Meredith. She's pretty cute.”
How can you not love this couple? Meredith and Scottie, not Rory and Scottie.
