As the sun went down and the rain started to fall, Adam Scott made the putt of his life on the 18th hole at Augusta National. It was April 2013, and Scott had just won the Masters, his first and only major championship.
Going into The Barclays starting Thursday at Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, NJ, that day couldn’t seem further away.
“If you asked me Sunday night at the Masters when I won, if I would win one of the next seven [majors], I could have assured you I would,” Scott said Wednesday. “But it hasn’t happened that way, and that’s not a surprise now. It’s just the way the game is. It’s not easy to win. When you’re winning, you think it’s a piece of cake.
“It does feel like a long time, but I’ve played a lot of good golf in that [time], and I think I’ve become a better golfer off the back of the Masters.”
Winning was something that came to Scott last year at this exact time, taking The Barclays at Liberty National down in Jersey City. He hoisted that trophy after going out early and posting a final-round 66, watching from the driving range as Tiger Woods, Gary Woodland and Justin Rose all blew chances to win down the stretch.
Winning a stop in the FedEx Cup playoffs is nice — and would have been nicer had Scott been able to hold on to his position and take the $10 million cumulative prize, which went instead to Henrik Stenson. But the history and the prestige is what is most coveted at this level of the sport, and that comes with major-championship victories.
“I think the FedEx Cup is still young, it’s developing,” Scott said. “It’s in the early stages. But the value will be at the end of your career to say you’ve won [the cumulative FedEx Cup.]”
Instead, what the 34-year-old Australian has seen in the interim is the game get swept out of his grasp and directly into the hands of 25-year-old Rory McIlroy, who won the British Open and the PGA Championship this season to give himself four career majors. The reins of golf have passed from Woods to McIlroy, leaving Scott on the outside looking in.
“Everyone is extremely reactive to everything now, and what Rory has done is phenomenal and worthy of all the attention he gets, and I think he’s the rightful No. 1 golfer in the world at the moment,” said Scott, who held the No. 1 spot from May 18, 2013, until Aug. 3, 2014, when McIlroy was coming off his British Open win and supplanted him atop the standings.
“It’s funny because the week before the [British] Open, it was ‘The Friday Curse,’ and he’s cursed,” Scott said, referring to McIlroy’s previous trouble in the second round of majors. “Since then, he’s been blessed, I guess.”
The fact is Scott knows he needs to get better if he wants to keep pace with McIlroy and be more than just a historical footnote. Coming into this week ranked 15th in the FedEx Cup standings, Scott has a clear path to get to the Tour Championship in East Lake in five weeks.
And if he could take this year’s FedEx Cup title, it could be a start to catching McIlroy.
“I need to lift my game quickly and get a win here or in the next few weeks and show a guy like Rory — who is kind of stretching away from the rest of us — that someone is going to go with him,” Scott said. “Otherwise, he could get in a real level of comfort, and it would be very tough for all of us to play against him full of confidence, full of fight, and not worrying about everyone else.”