Scottie Scheffler has had the most successful year of his career, racking up six PGA Tour wins before claiming his maiden FedEx Cup title at the Tour Championship.
That inevitably meant the financial rewards followed thick and fast, with his success at East Lake earning him a bonus payout of $25m alone, taking his earnings for the year to over $62m.
A byproduct of that success is that his caddie, Ted Scott, has also cashed in with life-changing earnings thanks to the structure of payments. Typically, the winner of a tournament hands the caddie 10% of the prize money, with 7% for finishing in the top 10 and 5% beneath that.
Overall, Scott is estimated to have made around $5.2m this year thanks to his partnership with Scheffler. However, the World No.1 has admitted that he wasn’t the one working out the payments.
Scheffler appeared as a guest on the Pardon My Take podcast, where he explained that, even though he regularly shows world-class ability on the course, that isn’t the case when it comes to crunching the numbers.
He said: “We have a girl that helps us pay bills basically because I’m a child and I can’t keep track of all that stuff. She quickly took over that job and texts me at the end of every week, and is like, 'Hey, this is how much we’re paying Ted.' I’m like, 'That’s great. Perfect.'"
Scheffler even admitted that he only found out how much he had earned this year after reading an article. When it was put to him that he’d made $62m, he replied: “I did read that, yeah. I think so.
“It’s been a fun year, I don’t really think about the money that much. I think that kind of becomes a big deal with the FedEx and everything, but at the end of the day I’m just playing golf and the money is just a gift on top of that.”
He added: “I remember playing my first PGA Tour event as a pro and I didn’t play great. I finished maybe 40th place. It was, like, two weeks after graduating college, and I made 30 or 40 grand or something like that.
“I remember looking at Meredith when I got home, and I got the text - you get a text from the Tour after each tournament telling you how much money you made, and I looked at her and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just got paid for that? That’s insane!’”
Since then, it’s safe to say Scheffler has become very used to receiving the text, and it has had a huge knock-on effect for Scott’s bank balance.
The veteran caddie teamed up with Scheffler after his 15-year spell with Bubba Watson came to an end in September 2021, and the pair have barely looked back since.
Scheffler made over $14m in the 2021/2022 season with over $21m of earnings in 2023. As we now know, Scheffler was just getting started and his prize money for 2024 has taken him close to $100m in total since the pair began working together.
