PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Scottie Scheffler was attempting to make homemade ravioli on Christmas Day — with limited equipment in a rental home — when he realized he’d made a serious mistake. He decided to use an empty wine glass to shape and slice his pasta dough.
“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,” Scheffler said Tuesday. “Even if you’re like me and you don’t drink wine, you’ve got to be real careful with wine glasses.”
The stem of a wine glass stabbed Scheffler in the upper palm of his right hand. That’s the crux of the incident that led to a surgical procedure and took the 2024 PGA Tour Player of the Year out of his first two tournaments of the season, The Sentry in Maui and the American Express in Palm Springs.
The No. 1 player in the world is making his first tournament start of 2025 this week at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which begins on Thursday. It comes after a two-week long hiatus from golf and physical activity, as well as a steady process of easing back into training and playing. That period was frustrating for a player who thrives in competition. Scheffler doesn’t like to sit back and watch.
“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,” he continued. “Yeah, definitely been a little more careful doing stuff at home.”
Immediately after the incident, a friend of Scheffler’s who happens to be a surgeon came to the rescue and helped stop the bleeding. The next day rolled around and the wound was no longer open, but the pain remained, and Scheffler felt a general lack of range of motion. He decided to reach out to a hand doctor he’d worked with on a thumb injury while in college. They opted for surgery. Scheffler said that he does not expect his right hand to incur any long-term damage.
Scheffler spent his recovery time reflecting and analyzing an historic season that included seven wins on the PGA Tour — the most since Tiger Woods won seven in 2007 — plus an Olympic gold medal and the Hero World Challenge. He re-watched film of his tournament rounds and took his mind back to those cruise-control moments in competition, taking note of both his swing positions and demeanor.
“There’s a few tournaments I looked back at where the thing that stuck out the most was that I never really overreacted to stuff, I kind of stayed in it and kind of waited for my moment to get hot,” Scheffler said.
Now the Texan hopes to resume where he left off in 2024, beginning this week at Pebble Beach and then at Spyglass for the tour’s second signature event of the season. Eight of the top 10 players in the OWGR are here on the Monterey Peninsula, and a healthy Scheffler is ready to get back to beating them all.
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(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images for The Showdown)
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