Scottie Scheffler returns from an injury to Pebble Beach

After consecutive weeks of gloomy TV rates such as NFL against programming, a PGA tour shot in the arm is on the way.

His name is Scottie Scheffler.

On Friday afternoon, the world announced # 1 that he would return to golf in next week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which marked his first start of 2025 a little more than a month after a Christmas-boiling accident required surgery.

Scheffler has long-termed Pebble Beach Pro-Am as a staging site for his return to competitive golf after a longer than expected offseason. The two-time great master has been sidelined after cutting himself with a broken glass while making ravioli over the Christmas holidays, an injury that required surgery to have the glass removed. Scheffler has been away from his golf clubs for one of the longest stretches of his adult life in the four weeks since this injury his last public begins to get on Crypto.com -Showdown in Vegas in December.

“I’ve never been great with reflecting and similar things,” Scheffler said at a press conference on Monday. “But since I’ve been sitting around after the operation, I took some time to go back and see some things from the last year, mostly just to help jog my memory.”

Scheffler enters the pitch on Pebble Beach Fresh from the best pro season in the last 25 years, a nine-win-year that included another Masters victory and an Olympic gold medal. The 28-year-old established himself as one of the sports world’s most dominant figures in ’24, and the trip expects him to produce another season of similar size in ’25 to help avert Halte TV rating throughout the sport.

Scheffler’s message comes as the trip prepares for its second ”Signature event”Of the 2025 season at Pebble Beach. The tour’s return to Monterey marks an important guide post for the 2025 season, and not just for those competing in the strongest field in the early season of 2025. Pebble is an important testing place for the tour’s high-paying, limited field signature events Series. The new stretch of eight annual events aims to give fans a number of reliably high watt events each season that recruit the best players on tour to compete under one roof.

Last year, terribly weather forced the event to end after only 54 holes, a big Ratings loss for CBS and a hit for the tour’s hope for the first full season of signature events. The trip is hopeful that this year’s event will contain better weather (the forecast looks promising) and bigger star power is coming on Sunday afternoon, another problem missing in the first year of the series.

If nothing else, Scheffler’s entrance to Pebble marks a remarkable uptick in field strength. World # 1 will be with a colleague Texan, Jordan Spieth, when he returned to golf on the rocks on the Monterey Peninsula. Spieth is returning from a far more complex offseason operation to solve a tendon problem in his wrist that has plagued him in the last several seasons.

It is difficult to exaggerate the tour’s hope for both players in 2025, a year that could have huge branches for the future of Pro Golf. PGA Tour remains the stalemate in the negotiations with the Saudi PIF on an agreement to secure peace in Pro Golf. While there is optimism that an agreement soon arrives, the remaining effects of Pro Golf’s bride have shown cracks in the foundation of the sport. Fans have turned away from golf in hop time, with almost one fifth of the tour’s average weekend audience departure to the sport in 2024 and last weekend’s american express drawing less than half Of the event’s 2024 audience.

Context helps to understand the audience data: The tours of the tour are not helped by cord cutting over the cable world, and AMEX was not helped by a six hour last round without stars. Still, the underlying truth remains bleak: PGA Tour never needs its superstars more than right now.

The good news? Scottie Scheffler is next on tee.