Using a wine glass to roll dough was a case of the wrong tool for the wrong job
Scottie Scheffler: Stadium Course makes it hard to defend a Players title
Scottie Scheffler will defend his title at The Players Championship next week at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. No one has won two in a row.
Scottie Scheffler said the raviolis were good.
“They weren’t that good, but pretty good,” the world’s No. 1-ranked golfer said of his family’s Christmas Day dinner.
But they came at a cost.
Scheffler, appearing at his first pre-tournament news conference on Tuesday at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, explained how he cut his right hand on the palm, just below his middle finger, on Christmas Day, keeping him inactive for the first four tournaments of the PGA Tour season. He’s making his debut on Thursday in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
The two-time defending Players Champion, who will go for three in a row March 13-16 at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, said his family was on Christmas vacation at a rental home and he decided to make ravioli from scratch. The problem was that the house didn’t have a rolling pin.
Scheffler offers warning about wine glasses
“So when you make raviolis, we wanted to make them from scratch, so you’ve got to roll the dough and you’ve got to cut the dough … but we didn’t have the right tools,” he said from the Pebble Beach media center. “The only thing there was a wine glass that we found.”
When he was rolling the dough with the wineglass, it broke and the stem buried itself in his palm.
“Side note,” he said. “I’ve heard nothing but horror stories since this happened about wine glasses, so be careful. Even if you’re like me and you don’t drink wine, you’ve got to be real careful with wine glasses.”
Fortunately for Scheffler, there was a doctor in the house. A guest for dinner is a surgeon and Scheffler got immediate medical attention. He said his friend got the bleeding to stop in about 15 minutes.
He said he didn’t go to the hospital that night but the next day, when he had trouble moving his hand, he went to the hospital and eventually had surgery.
“Immediately after it happened, I was mad at myself because I was like ‘gosh, that’s so stupid,'” he said. “But you just don’t think about it when you’re in the moment.”
Scheffler said he doesn’t regret trying to expand his cooking skills.
“I can’t live in a bubble,” he said. “[I’ve] got to live my life and accidents happen.”
Rory McIlroy’s advice: ‘Get a chef’
Rory McIlroy, who also appeared for a news conference on Tuesday at Pebble Beach, had some advice for Scheffler.
“I think he made enough money to hire a chef,” McIlroy said. “It’s like, ‘why are you cooking yourself … yeah, get a chef.”
Scheffler said he has one.
“Her name’s Meredith … she’s pretty cute,” he said of his wife.