In a digital age fueled by micro-doses of dopamine, it’s not often that a five-minute monologue goes viral. At what was an otherwise mundane press conference at Royal Portrush ahead of this week’s Open Championship, the world’s No 1 golfer, Scottie Scheffler, gave a startlingly honest speech on what it feels like to win a trophy. Elation, he said. And then it’s gone.
“It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for a few minutes – it only lasts a few minutes, that euphoric feeling,” said the 29-year-old. “To win the Byron Nelson Championship at home [in Texas], I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf, to have an opportunity to win that tournament. And you win it, get to celebrate, hug my family, my sisters are there, it’s such an amazing moment. And it’s like: ‘OK, now, what are we going to eat for dinner?’ Life goes on.
“What’s the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad? That’s something that I wrestle with on a daily basis. Showing up at the Masters every year, it’s like: why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly? I don’t know. Because if I win, it’s going to be awesome for two minutes. Then we’re going to get to the next week and it’s: ‘Hey, you won two majors this year, how important is it for you to win the FedExCup play-offs?’ And we’re back here again.”
Scheffler’s speech was interpreted in some quarters as a kind of personal crisis: he’s burnt out, he’s lost his desire, he’s quitting golf. Yet his point wasn’t to reveal some great personal turmoil, but instead to lay bare the realities of what it’s really like to achieve your dreams.
What he was describing was “arrival fallacy”, the misplaced belief that reaching a particular goal will bring lasting happiness and fulfilment. In his book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar explains arrival fallacy as the feeling of disappointment or emptiness that follows success, which comes as a shock in itself. There is an expectation that the goal will make you feel fulfilled and satisfied, but once you arrive, that sense of completion is brief or even non-existent.
Many athletes have experienced similar feelings to Scheffler, albeit few have ever voiced it with such clarity. The “Olympic blues” is a common phenomenon felt by athletes after the Games, a crash after the high of the event, and that kind of reality-comedown is a feeling that extends to the very greatest to have ever played sport, when their entire purpose is suddenly stripped away by success. “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me?” Tom Brady asked in 2005. “I think: God, it’s gotta be more than this.”
You do not have to be an athlete to know that feeling, of finally getting the salary or promotion or house that you have been striving towards, and then realising it wasn’t the answer after all. But professional sport comes wrapped up in its own layer of existential crisis. What is it all for?
To us – the spectator – sport offers a world to escape to, a rich tapestry full of heroes and villains, of tension and jeopardy, all held together by rituals and traditions and the comfort that the azaleas will bloom at Augusta, Wimbledon will be played on freshly mown grass, and everyone will play each other twice in the Premier League. Sport is a kind of group therapy, a safe space for big feelings like pride and heartbreak and ambition to run free.
And perhaps we too often assume the people in it are just characters in the story, or that they feel just like we do. Being great at sport is inherently weird. There are 8 billion people on the planet, and Scheffler is the best at hitting a little ball into a little hole 500 yards away. And although he insists he still enjoys it, perhaps he is entitled, even obliged, to ask: Why? What is this for? Or as he put it, four times: “What is the point?”
“To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
He doesn’t draw real fulfilment from what people might expect – trophies and prizes – but everything else. He gets his kicks from the grind, the process of working hard and striving to improve so that he can deliver for his family.
“Every day when I wake up early to go put in the work, my wife thanks me for going out and working so hard. When I get home, I try to thank her every day for taking care of our son. That’s why I talk about family being my priority, because it really is. I’m blessed to be able to come out here and play golf, but if my golf ever started affecting my home life or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or my son, that’s going to be the last day that I play out here for a living.”
Scheffler isn’t disillusioned with golf. Actually, he was telling us something simpler: that, like everybody else, he is searching for meaning and purpose in life, and he has found it – not at the top of world rankings, but in his work, and in his family. He is telling us, from the top of the world, to go look for happiness somewhere else.
