Humble Scottie and the Death of Ego
The world's best golfer doesn't think little of himself. He thinks little about himself.
Is it Monday already? Don’t tell Garfield! Ha! He already knows, trust me. He’s already hard at work torturing Odie and systematically destroying his owner, Jon.
Some think Mondays are for transferring their misery onto others, but not us. We take Mondays as a blessing from above. It’s a new week. It’s a new you. Get out there and dance like no one is watching.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve returned to social media toilet X (formerly Twitter) to crack some jokes, do some light trolling, live-tweet the Masters, and see if one of my childhood comedy idols, Michael Ian Black, is still blocking me.
He is.
I won’t go into the details of how that happened, but he and I had some disagreements over his political leanings, and instead of engaging in discourse, he took the coward's path and blocked me.
I now realize I could have handled the situation differently, and for that, Michael, I apologize. You were one of my favorites growing up, and despite what you’ve become, I still think of you and smile.
Childish spats with B-list celebrities aside, I noticed something while perusing X these last weeks that I couldn’t quite put into words until now. Sure, it’s filled with divisive rhetoric from one side of American politics attacking the other, but there’s something more parasitic that’s infested X and, in turn, humanity:
The lack of humility.
Everyone on the platform seems to have an agenda, whether they’re there to spew hatred at anyone who disagrees with them or promote their useless newsletter.
They want to sell you a course you don’t need or market their “foolproof strategy to conquer the crypto market. Everyone is looking out for number one. No one has a shred of humility on X, and it’s symptomatic of what’s happening in the United States.
Not once have I seen a media outlet or a blood-sucking politician get on there and say, “You know what, we were wrong. We had an opinion we stated as fact, and it turns out we were incorrect. Instead of doubling down and attacking anyone who points out our mistake, we take full responsibility and apologize.”
If I saw that, I might collapse from shock. It would never happen because our great nation has become devoid of humility.
Even while writing this, I had to go back and add the apology to Michael Ian Black because I realized that in writing about humility, I wasn’t showing any myself. That’s how difficult it’s become to be humble in 2024.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but then I turned on the third round of the RBC Heritage golf tournament, and there, in all his muted glory, true humility shone through like a lighthouse diligently doing its job on a foggy evening.
His name is Scottie Scheffler, and he’s the best golfer in the world.
Even if you aren’t a fan of the greatest game ever played, you probably know who Scottie Scheffler is. He just won his second Masters, he won his second Players Championship in a row (a tournament I’ve been advocating should be a major) before that, and, barring an Iranian drone strike on Hilton Head, South Carolina, he’s going to win the RBC Heritage, all at the tender age of twenty-seven.
If I had that kind of resume at twenty-seven, let’s say I wouldn’t be around to write this issue of GNM on a delightful April afternoon. I’d have bought a Ferrari, crashed it into another Ferrari, bought one more, picked up Amy Winehouse, drove to Mexico, live-streamed a two-week tequila binge on Facebook, punched the mayor of Puerto Vallarta, gone to Mexican prison, and died of dysentery.
My shenanigans would have been all over the news, and my life would have turned into a tragic joke for late-night talk show hosts. I’d have gone to my grave, never apologizing because I was the best golfer in the world and everyone else can shut it.
Scottie, on the other hand, doesn’t live his life that way. He’s a man of God, a soon-to-be-father, a husband, and a loyal friend, and he plays the game with a steadiness and self-assurance we haven’t seen since Tom Watson. He doesn’t live on social media, has no interest in self-promotion, and lets his game do the talking.
It’s like he took a heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms and achieved ego death on top of a mountain.
He can win major tournaments with less than his best stuff and make golf courses look like pitch-n-putts as he eviscerates them with relentless birdies.
All the while, Scottie maintains a calm demeanor, never getting outside himself and letting the instinct to aggrandize his game take over. Two-time major champion and Elf on the Shelf lookalike Justin Thomas said after Scottie’s third round on Saturday, “I mean this in the best way, but he plays boring golf.”
It’s true.
Scottie goes around the course doing incredible things, but he makes it look effortless and does it with so little emotion that it could bore the casual observer—but not me. I know what he’s doing, and his talent blows my mind.
The greatest trick Tiger Woods ever played was elevating the competition so much that no one could ever match his achievements. I thought it was impossible for someone to be so good in today’s game that they could make Rory McIlroy look like a chump, but here we are.
I came across a quote from C.S. Lewis that said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less.”
The secret to Scottie’s current dominance in golf isn’t his ability to stripe a 4-iron 265 yards to three feet on a windy day (although that helps); it’s his mindset. He doesn’t think about himself when he plays.
He’s not thinking about endorsements, a nine-figure payday if he defects to the Saudi-backed LIV golf league, what he’ll post on X after the round, or how his agents begged him to show more emotion on the course.
He’s only thinking of the shot right in front of him. He doesn’t care what you think because he wants to win; he knows he can and does it with the humility of a Trappist monk.
C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, went on to say:
“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man, he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you dislike him, it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility; he will not be thinking about himself at all.”
This week, and I especially need to heed this advice: Don’t think less of yourself. Think less about yourself. Maybe it’s the key to unlocking potential you didn’t know you had. At the very least, if you watch Scottie Scheffler, it seems like a pleasant way to live your life.
Until next time.