PGA Championship 2026: Scottie Scheffler's salty side is more visible, but also not new

When it comes to Scottie Scheffler getting chippy at simple questions, it’s my fervent wish that we skip the entire athletes vs. media discourse. That framework applied last year when Collin Morikawa was shirking his press duties and then getting into arguments about it, and we covered it on those terms .

This, to me, doesn’t feel the same. Scottie Scheffler is showing up, he’s answering questions, and the way he answers those questions is a reflection not on the broken media ecosystem, but on one person: himself. So let’s talk about Scottie in his Irritable Era.

In the last year and change, I have witnessed either firsthand or secondhand a good deal of mildly unpleasant Scheffler interactions with the press. At the Players in 2025, he refused to answer a question about course conditions, implying that it was some kind of clickbait (note: writing about how rain softens greens is basically the opposite of clickbait), and then seemed annoyed when another writer asked a question about "getting back" to his previous form. This year at the Players, he was asked about changing his driver, and he gave a snappy response citing his strong play in 2024 and 2025, as if the writer had insulted his performance instead of asking a simple equipment question.

At the Masters, after saying he left a few shots on the course in a TV interview, he responded with "terrible question" to a reporter asking how good the round could have been. Most recently, he responded dismissively to a question about LIV Golf and suffered by comparison from a more considered response by Jordan Spieth. In these examples and others I've left out, Scheffler will often chuckle or make some vaguely apologetic offering in the aftermath.