Teeing off in Thursday’s featured morning group at the 107th PGA Championship, the world’s top three players — Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, and Xander Schauffele — arrived at a rain-soaked Quail Hollow Club with lofty expectations and major pedigree. But on a damp and demanding layout, the trio encountered a rude welcome from “The Green Mile,” and particularly the par-4 16th, where all three made double bogey in stunning succession.
For Scheffler, currently ranked World No. 1, the round was a rollercoaster of momentum shifts. The Texan carded everything from chip-in eagle to water-ball double, ultimately grinding out a two-under 69 that kept him well in contention at T20 despite the chaos.
“I kept the honor with making a double on a hole,” Scheffler quipped afterward. “I think that will probably be the first and last time I do that in my career — unless we get some crazy weather conditions.”
Trouble on the 16th of the PGA Championship 2025: A Shared Collapse
Coming off an electric eagle on the par-5 15th — a 35-foot chip-in from short and right of the green — Scheffler appeared poised to climb the leaderboard. Instead, the 16th handed him an unwelcome dose of reality. After a perfect drive into the fairway, he found his approach shot sinking into the water, citing a muddied ball as the culprit.
“I hit it in the middle of the fairway, you’ve got mud on your ball, and it’s tough to control where it goes after that,” Scheffler explained. “You spend your whole life trying to learn how to control a golf ball, and due to a rules decision, all of a sudden you have absolutely no control. But I don’t make the rules. I just have to deal with the consequences.”
He wasn’t alone. Playing partners McIlroy and Schauffele also found disaster on the 535-yard hole. McIlroy’s drive hooked left into thick rough, leaving him with a steep sidehill lie. Attempting to escape, he slipped in the mud and barely advanced the ball, leading to a scrambling double bogey. Schauffele’s approach also found water from the fairway, undone by a similar mud ball — a rare display of collective vulnerability from golf’s elite.
“It’s not every day that one hole brings the top three players in the world to their knees,” one broadcaster aptly put it.
A Debate Over Mud and Rules
The conditions at Quail Hollow, already softened by days of heavy rain, led to significant player frustration over the decision not to allow preferred lies — colloquially known as “lift, clean, and place.”
Scheffler didn’t hide his dismay: “In American golf, it’s significantly different. When you have overseeded fairways that are not sand-capped, there’s going to be a lot of mud on the ball,” he said. “When you think about the purest test of golf, I don’t personally think hitting the ball in the middle of the fairway should get you punished for it.”
He later emphasized, however, that he wouldn’t let the ruling derail his tournament. “It cost me two shots today, and if I let it bother me, it could’ve cost me five more. But I didn’t. I just moved forward.”
