It’s been another pretty busy week in golf.
The FedExCup Playoffs are underway, Scottie Scheffler is (perhaps unsurprisingly) sitting exactly where everyone expected him to be, Rory McIlroy is back after skipping the opening playoff event last year, and there are yet more questions being asked about what’s going on at LIV Golf.
There was also a great story over on the DP World Tour, where Jeff Winther managed to win his national open in Denmark after a pretty chaotic final round.
So, if you haven’t had time to follow everything this week, here’s what you need to know.
The Big One: Scheffler Leads the FedExCup Playoffs
It feels like we’re reaching the point where seeing Scottie Scheffler at the top of a leaderboard barely qualifies as news anymore.
The FedExCup Playoffs kicked off this week at TPC Southwind in Memphis for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, and Scheffler went into Sunday with a two-shot lead over Sam Burns and Sungjae Im.
It hasn’t all been completely straightforward.
Scheffler had a difficult start to his third round on Saturday but, as he seems to do more often than not, found a way to turn things around. He eventually signed for a two-under 68, which was enough to keep him in control heading into the final round.
His Friday round was a completely different story.
Scheffler shot an incredible 61, tying the course record at TPC Southwind and putting himself right into the middle of the tournament.
The slightly different thing about this week is that it isn’t just another PGA Tour event.
This is the first week of the FedExCup Playoffs.
Seventy players qualified for Memphis after the regular season finished at the Wyndham Championship last weekend. Once the FedEx St. Jude is finished, only the top 50 in the standings move on to the BMW Championship.
That basically means there are two tournaments happening at once.
At the top, you’ve got Scheffler, Burns, Im and the other contenders trying to win the actual tournament.
Further down the leaderboard, there are players who probably have very little chance of winning but are desperately trying to scrape together enough points to keep their season going for another week.
A couple of shots here or there can literally end someone’s season.
That’s what makes this part of the year quite good to watch. Even if the tournament at the top starts to get away from someone, there’s still plenty happening further down the leaderboard.
And then there’s Scheffler himself.
His consistency at this point is getting a little ridiculous.
Golf is a sport where even the best players in the world can disappear for a few weeks. Your putting goes cold, the driver stops behaving or you simply get a couple of bad breaks and suddenly you’re nowhere near contention.
Scheffler just keeps turning up.
It doesn’t mean he wins every week, obviously, but the frequency with which he gives himself an opportunity on Sunday is probably the most impressive thing about his game.
As the FedExCup Playoffs get underway, everyone else may once again find themselves trying to chase him down.
Once Memphis is finished, the top 50 head to the BMW Championship. From there, the field gets cut again before the Tour Championship decides the FedExCup winner.
So we’re essentially into the PGA Tour’s end-of-season sprint now.
And Scheffler is already at the front.
Rory’s Back: And That’s Probably Good News for the Playoffs
Rory McIlroy is also back in Memphis this week after deciding to skip the opening FedExCup playoff event last year.
His absence last season caused a fair bit of discussion.
The FedExCup Playoffs are supposed to be the PGA Tour’s postseason. The whole selling point is that you get the best players from the season competing against each other over a condensed run of tournaments.
When one of the biggest names in golf decides not to turn up to the first one, it obviously takes something away from that.
This year, McIlroy has changed his mind.
He’s spoken about conversations with PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp playing a part in the decision, alongside his own schedule and preparation.
Whatever the exact reason, it’s good for the tournament.
If the PGA Tour wants people to genuinely care about the playoffs, you need players like McIlroy and Scheffler in the field.
It sounds obvious, but that hasn’t always been the case.
For us watching at home, it should mean the next few weeks feature some seriously strong fields as the PGA Tour season reaches its conclusion.
So… What’s Going On With LIV?
Another week, another slightly confusing LIV Golf story.
Tyrrell Hatton, Tom McKibbin and Adrian Meronk have all committed to playing in the British Masters.
On its own, that’s not particularly interesting.
The problem is that the British Masters was supposed to clash with LIV Golf’s Team Championship in Michigan.
Reports have since suggested that the LIV event is no longer going ahead, with players reportedly being told about the cancellation and ticket sales unavailable.
At the time of writing, LIV hadn’t formally confirmed the cancellation, but having several of its players suddenly available for the British Masters certainly doesn’t do much to quieten the speculation.
It raises another question about what LIV actually looks like going forward.
The team element has always been a big part of what LIV has tried to do differently. Rather than simply creating another individual golf tour, they’ve pushed the idea of franchises, teams and a season-ending Team Championship.
If one of the biggest events in that format disappears, it’s naturally going to lead to questions.
Add that to all the ongoing discussion around the future of LIV’s biggest names, its relationship with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, and the wider attempt to somehow bring professional golf back together, and there’s still an awful lot that needs sorting out.
A few years into all of this, professional golf still feels strangely unsettled.
We’ll see what happens next.
A Brilliant Home Win for Jeff Winther
One of the nicer stories of the week came from Denmark.
Jeff Winther won the Danish Golf Championship at Great Northern, taking his national open in front of a home crowd.
And the final round was anything but boring.
Eight different players held at least a share of the lead at some point on Sunday, so for a long time it really could have gone to anyone.
Eventually, Winther was the one who managed to get it done.
The 38-year-old picked up the second DP World Tour victory of his career, and you’d imagine this one will take some beating.
There’s always something a little different about winning your national open.
Obviously there are ranking points, prize money and everything else that comes with winning on the DP World Tour, but doing it in front of your own crowd is a completely different experience.
More pressure, more attention, but a much bigger celebration if you actually pull it off.
Winther did exactly that.
A great result for him and a pretty good weekend for Danish golf.
Buying a Gift for a Golfer Is Weirdly Difficult
Away from the professional game for a minute, there’s something we’ve learned fairly quickly from running Clubhouse Goods:
Golfers are annoyingly difficult people to buy presents for.
Ask one what they want and there’s a decent chance they’ll point you towards a £500 driver.
Even when you decide to buy something golf-related, there are loads of ways to get it wrong.
Clubs have different specifications. Clothing has sizing. Gloves have sizes and hands. Then you get to golf balls and discover that the person you’re buying for will happily explain for 20 minutes why they only play one particular model.
It’s actually one of the main reasons we started building golf mystery boxes.
Instead of trying to guess the one specific golf gift somebody wants, you can give them a box full of golf gear and make the unboxing part of the present.
Depending on the box, that can include golf balls, gloves, caps, tees, ball markers and other golf accessories.
And unlike another random golf ornament that ends up sitting on a shelf somewhere, they’re things golfers actually use.
Golf balls disappear at an alarming rate.
Gloves eventually wear through.
Tees snap.
Caps get filthy.
There’s always room in the bag for more.
So if you’re looking for a birthday gift for a golfer, a Christmas present, a golf gift for Dad or something for the golfer who seemingly already owns everything, a golf gift box gives you another option.
You can see our current golf mystery boxes here.
What Do You Buy a Golfer Who Already Has Everything?
This is probably the hardest version of the question.
Someone who has played golf for years probably already owns the obvious stuff.
They’ve got clubs.
They’ve got a golf bag.
They’ve probably got more golf clothing than they realistically need.
That’s where consumables become quite a good gift.
Rather than buying another big piece of equipment, you’re giving them things they’ll actually get through during the season.
Golf balls, tees, gloves and accessories aren’t particularly glamorous when you write them out as a shopping list, but put everything together properly in a golf gift box and it becomes a completely different present.
There’s also the mystery element.
You’re not just handing somebody another dozen golf balls they could have ordered themselves. They actually get something to open and discover.
That’s the bit we really like about it.
If you’re currently looking for a golf gift for someone who already seems to own the entire pro shop, you can see what we’ve put together here.
From the Clubhouse
There’s been a fair bit happening with us this week too.
We recently contacted eligible members to confirm the Clubhouse Goods store credit available on their accounts. If you think you should have received store credit and haven’t seen the email, just get in touch with us and we’ll have a look.
The other new thing is, well… this.
Our weekly golf digest.
We spend enough time following golf anyway, so we thought we might as well start pulling the genuinely interesting bits together each week.
PGA Tour, DP World Tour, LIV Golf, new equipment, strange stories and anything else we think is actually worth knowing about.
The idea isn’t to bombard you with every minor golf story from the last seven days.
It’s basically the opposite.
We’ll go through it all and give you the bits we think are worth your time.
If you’re subscribed to Clubhouse Goods, you’ll get the shorter version delivered each week, and we’ll put the full roundup here for anyone who wants to read a little more.
Don’t Forget Our Golf Giveaways!
We’re also running our monthly Clubhouse Goods giveaway over on Instagram.
Every month we put up a new prize and give someone from the CHG community the chance to win it.
If you haven’t entered before, head over to our Instagram or Tiktok on Monday for more info!
We announce the winner at the beginning of the following month, and then we go again with another giveaway.
Good luck.
See You Next Week
That’s about it from us this week.
Scheffler is once again setting the pace, Rory is back for the playoffs, LIV has another few questions to answer and Jeff Winther has a national title to celebrate.
Not a bad seven days.
We’ll be back next week with whatever the golfing world throws at us next.
Until then, good luck out there.