Texas coach shares story of Scheffler, Hossler almost coming to blows
By all accounts, Scottie Scheffler is a lover, not a fighter. But he’s also super competitive.
“There’s nothing worse on this planet for him than to lose, to anybody in anything,” said Scheffler’s college coach, Texas’ John Fields, who appeared recently on Golf.com’s Subpar Podcast.
And when Scheffler was a freshman, Fields says, he nearly came to blows with teammate Beau Hossler after a careless mistake by Hossler led to Scheffler losing a hole in a match.
“That was an almost fight…,” Fields begins.
Texas was playing a one-day event at Texas Tech in Spring 2015, and Scheffler and Hossler were grouped together for both sessions, though they were playing their own individual matches. Scheffler had already lost his morning match when the two Longhorns hit a drive on a par-5 in the afternoon.
As Fields tells it, he was walking with both players, but was paying more attention to Hossler that match.
“Beau walks by this golf ball and he looks at it, and for whatever reason he thinks that he’s outdriven Scottie by 15 yards. So, Scottie doesn’t think anything — we walked right past the ball and Beau look at the golf ball. Scottie hits his shot, we get up to the [other] ball, Beau’s turn now, and he looks down and goes, ‘This is not my ball.’”
At that moment, things immediately got heated.
“You would’ve thought Mount Vesuvius just went off, like we had a volcano 15 yards below us,” Fields said. “Scheffler got so mad when he figured out that he’d hit the wrong ball, he ran up to the green, 260 yards on a dead sprint, picked up the ball, ran back, and threw it at Beau’s feet. Beau goes ahead and hits the right shot, and Scottie has lost the hole now. He’d just lost a hole, but it’s killing him. And now, they’re jawing against each other on the way up [to the green], and finally on the next hole, on the par-3, I told Beau, ‘We are not going another step farther until you apologize to Scottie for that.’”
Hossler responded, per Fields: “What do I have to apologize to him for? He’s the one that hit the wrong ball.”
Fields continues the story: “And I’m like, ‘Because of the way you walked up to that ball and recognized that it wasn’t your ball, but it was. You made a mistake, and it caused him to make a mistake. Say your sorry.’
“So, Scottie is walking by and Beau’s like, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then we went on.”
Texas went on to make match play at the NCAA Championship that year. The next season, Hossler’s senior year in which he won the Haskins Award, the Longhorns lost in the NCAA final to Oregon after Hossler was forced to withdraw with a torn labrum in his shoulder, which he’d suffered in the semifinal.
Fields was then asked who would’ve won a fight between Scheffler and Hossler.
“That’s a battle of the titans,” Fields said. “They’re both 6-foot-3. But I would say at that time, Scottie Scheffler was the athlete. I wouldn’t want any part of Scottie Scheffler.”