Bryson DeChambeau is friends with Ryder Cup teammate Scottie Scheffler. Despite being adversaries during that biennial competition, Scheffler has a plenty cordial relationship with Rory McIlroy.
But DeChambeau and McIlroy can’t seem to play nice — or perhaps to be fair, McIlroy is “not particularly fond” of his 2025 Masters final-pairing partner. McIlroy made that clear after DeChambeau’s reaction to a two-stroke penalty at the 154th Open Championship last weekend.
Scheffler was asked about off-field drama driving interest to other sports and whether he perceived the personal jabs that McIlroy levied at DeChambeau to be good for golf.
“Golf’s different in a sense of a lot of other sports because my biggest rival week in and week out is the golf course that we’re playing,” Scheffler told reporters ahead of the 3M Open outside of Minneapolis on Wednesday.
“I could never stop somebody from doing anything in golf,” Scheffler explained. “I felt like when I played basketball, there would always be rivalries because you’re going to play defense against a person and that is much more personal in a sense like because I’m actively trying to stop — like if you and I were going to go out and play one-on-one, like it would turn into a rivalry because I’m actively trying to stop what you’re doing, but in golf, we’re always competing against ourselves on the golf course.”
The world’s top-ranked player emphasized that he has never been a big fan of personal jabs. Throughout his comments, he never named DeChambeau or McIlroy specifically.
When asked for his thoughts on the penalty after his final round at Royal Birkdale, Scheffler did come to the defense of DeChambeau.
“I think maybe we need to be a little bit more strict in the way that we are policing guys, but it’s a little bit of a balance because you’ve got certain guys like a Bryson who every shot he hits is going to be shown on TV,” Scheffler said at The Open. “When you have camera angles that are far away, things can look different than they do when you’re right there.
“We’ve done a good job of — I don’t know, I hate saying stuff out here because I don’t want anything to get taken out of context. All I’ll say is Bryson, I’ve known him for a long time, and he’s a lot of things, but he’s definitely not a cheater. I’ve never seen him cheat once, whether we were having a putting contest on the putting green or chipping contest, or anytime we played amateur golf, I never saw anything suspicious. When you’re watching him there from that camera angle, maybe he was a touch careless around his ball, but I don’t think he did anything intentionally.”
