Arya News - Scheffler caps his season with a $10 million paycheck.
ATLANTA — There are moments in golf when you just know something special is happening, when the combination of moment and shot and gallery and course combine to produce magic. On the 211-yard par-3 2nd hole at East Lake Golf Club, in the final round of the Tour Championship, Scottie Scheffler stepped up to the tee and did this:
That set an immediate tone for Scheffler as he tried to chase down Viktor Hovland — Scheffler started the day trailing by 3 — and cap the season off with a third victory in 2026. By hole four, Scheffler had caught him, and by the time he walked off the 18th green, having done what has made him the No. 1 player in the world — dialing things up when the pressure is at its highest — he was three shots clear of the field, and on his way to another massive payday.
On a day at East Lake when birdies were finally hard to come by, Scheffler came home with a 4-under 66, tied for the low round of the day. Behind him, Hovland came home with a 2-over 72.
With the victory, Scheffler now stands as the FedEx Cup champion and, on a broader scale, the leading money winner in PGA Tour history.
Scheffler officially passed Tiger Woods for that title on Sunday. With a $10 million paycheck Sunday, Scheffler is now at $130,390,661 to Tiger"s $120,999,166.
Although Scheffler has enjoyed much larger purses than Woods did in his prime, the overall trend is accurate. Scheffler is now competing against more than his fellow players, he"s competing against previous generations.
A "championship" in name only
In theory, the Tour Championship should stand as the crowning event of the PGA Tour"s season, the culmination of eight months" worth of competition all over the country (with the occasional detour to Canada and the United Kingdom). In practice, the Tour Championship has struggled to find its identity as both a concept and a tournament. Formats come and go, motivations wax and wane, but through it all, the destination was always the same: East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, home course of Bobby Jones.
Not for much longer, though. In one of two major off-course stories that overshadowed whatever would happen inside the ropes, the PGA Tour announced on Tuesday that East Lake"s tenure as the home of the Tour Championship ends after next year. Starting in 2028, the PGA Tour will roll out a new playoff format heavily weighted toward match play — the final two events of the season will be match-play events, with fields narrowing from 32 to 16 to 1. It"s a much-needed way to juice the creaky playoff format, but it will cost East Lake its spot at the end of the season"s schedule.
On Sunday, as with most every non-Tiger-Woods day at the Tour Championship, the gallery was enthusiastic if not necessarily deeply engaged. Copious merch and hospitality tents line the course, and until late Sunday afternoon, galleries rarely gather more than one deep around any hole. Plus, from a historical perspective, the 30-man Tour Championship, while lucrative, doesn"t quite carry the weight of a full-field major.
All these factors combine to make the Tour Championship less of a must-see golf event and more of a lovely place to hang out while golf goes on nearby. The abundant food and drink options, sponsor giveaways and general chill vibe are designed to appeal to the changing sensibilities of modern golf fans, which is usually — though definitely not always — a good idea.
The other big story
Which leads to the second major non-golf story that sucked up the oxygen at East Lake this week: the reputational self-destruction of Good Good Golf . The YouTube golf lifestyle brand released, and quickly pulled, a controversial ad in partnership with Callaway last Friday, and then spent the next few days attempting to stem the PR damage. But by Thursday, the brand wound had festered; Callaway cut ties with Good Good, and soon afterward, Good Good withdrew from its planned sponsorship of a PGA Tour event. The Tour did not exactly express regret at the brand"s departure.
Back to the course
Combined, the off-course action vacuumed up the majority of the golf coverage throughout the tournament"s first few days. On the course, though, players took advantage of the wide fairways and enormous greens at East Lake to post some borderline-ridiculous scores. The three last-place finishers on Thursday stood at even par, and only Gary Woodland at +2 finished the week over par.
Nearly a quarter of the field — Scheffler, Hovland, Chris Gotterup, Min Woo Lee, Ryan Gerard, Collin Morikawa and Cameron Young — finished at least one round within two strokes of the lead.
No one quite ran away from the field at East Lake on Sunday, but no one outside of Scheffler could keep the pace set through the first three rounds.
Starting three strokes back of Hovland, Scheffler quickly carved into the lead with that near-ace on the second hole. Another birdie at No. 4 put him into a tie for the lead. Nine holes later, a birdie on the 13th gave Scheffler solo possession of the lead, and even a bogey on the next hole didn"t harm him, as Hovland bogeyed the 13th behind him.
Ultimately, the difference came down to the back nine, where Scheffler was 2-under, while Hovland was over 2-over par. And that proved to be the difference.