Rory McIlroy cracks hilarious Scottie Scheffler joke amid 2025 PGA Tour debut

With Scottie Scheffler returning after his Christmas injury, Rory McIlroy had a little fun at the World No. 1’s expense.

When Rory McIlroy discovered that Scottie Scheffler punctured his hand while making Christmas dinner, he immediately expressed concern and hoped that nothing too considerable had happened.

Once McIlroy realized Scheffler would return to the PGA Tour in due time, he had to ask a simple question.

“I think he made enough money to hire a chef,” McIlroy said Tuesday.

“It’s like, why are you cooking yourself?”

His joke raises a good point. Scheffler won nearly $60 million in 2024, a year that included nine wins overall, another victory at Augusta National, and an epic comeback to secure the Gold Medal in Paris. Scheffler’s season led many to compare it to Tiger Woods and how he went about his business throughout the 2000s.

McIlroy even took it a step further ahead of this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where Scheffler will make his 2025 season debut.

“I’ve never — this is anyone, this is Tiger, this is in the history of golf. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a golfer play as many bogey-free rounds as Scottie. He just doesn’t make mistakes. It’s so impressive,” McIlroy said of Scheffler.

“He plays the right shot at the right time over and over and over again. You obviously need the technical ability to be able to do that, but he doesn’t make mistakes. And when you don’t make mistakes on the golf course, the game can become pretty easy. So super impressive. If he continues to do that, he’s going to be the dominant force that he was last year and the year before that.”

Since his first PGA Tour title at the 2022 WM Phoenix Open, Scheffler has won the Masters twice and The Players in back-to-back years, becoming the first player to ever do so at TPC Sawgrass. Overall, Scheffler has 13 PGA Tour wins to his name, which does not include his triumph in Paris nor the two Hero World Challenges he has won.

Meanwhile, since that first title in February 2022, McIlroy has six PGA Tour wins and four more on the DP World Tour. The Northern Irishman has been pretty good too.

That explains why this week’s Signature Event has so much hype surrounding it. Both Scheffler and McIlroy are making their first PGA Tour start in 2025, a welcome sight for American golf fans everywhere. The golfing world last saw Scheffler in December, when he and McIlroy took down Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka in the Crypto.com Showdown in Las Vegas. Eight days later, Scheffler injured his hand while making ravioli.

“I was hoping it was going to be more of a fun story than that,” McIlroy added.

“We were together in Vegas on the 17th of December and played that match with Brooks and Bryson. Firstly, just concern and hope he was okay. It sounds like he is, it’s good that he’s teeing it up this week.

“Yeah, get a chef.”

Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Follow him on X @jack_milko.