Hevel on the Back Nine

There is an image of Scottie Scheffler that I cannot stop thinking about.

It is 6:30 in the morning in Louisville, Kentucky. It is May. The sky is that bruised gray-purple it gets before dawn in the Ohio Valley. A man has just been killed by a shuttle bus outside Valhalla Golf Club. Traffic is rerouted. There are flashing lights. And the best golfer on the planet — the number-one player in the world, a man who has won nineteen times in four years, who has four major championships and an Olympic gold medal, who has earned over a hundred million dollars hitting a ball into a hole — is standing in an orange jumpsuit in the Louisville Metro jail, getting his mugshot taken.

He will be released in two hours. He will arrive at Valhalla with less than an hour before his tee time. He will shoot 5-under 66.

All charges will be dismissed with prejudice. Three officers will be found to have violated policy. The arresting detective will be disciplined for not activating his body camera.

I keep coming back to this image not because it is funny — though it is absurd in the way only real life can be — but because it captures something about Scheffler that I think most people are missing. There is a book that explains him. It is not a golf book. It is 2,300 years old, and it predicted him almost perfectly.

The book is Ecclesiastes. The verse is 9:11.

I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … but time and chance happen to them all.

This is the most directly athletic verse in the Bible, and it is also the most annoying. The Teacher — the author, traditionally identified as Solomon — is not saying that speed and strength don’t matter. He is saying they are not sufficient. Something else intervenes. He calls it time and chance. What happened to Scheffler outside Valhalla was time and chance in its purest form: a shuttle bus, a predawn traffic pattern, a detective without a body camera.

And then Scheffler went out and shot 66. Because the race is not always to the swift — but it usually is. The verse holds both truths. That is the genius of Ecclesiastes. It refuses to simplify.

Here is the thing about Scheffler that makes him different from every other dominant athlete I have watched.

He keeps saying it doesn’t matter.

Not in the defeated way, not in the false-humble way you hear from athletes who have been media-trained to say “I’m just blessed.” He says it in the specific, detailed, almost clinical way of a man who has examined his own experience and is reporting his findings. Like a scientist describing an experiment that produced an unexpected result.

At the 2025 Open Championship — days before he would win the Claret Jug by four strokes — Golf Digest called his press conference the deepest answer they had ever heard from a professional athlete. He described winning the Byron Nelson, his hometown event outside Dallas, where he had shot 31-under. He described the feeling that followed. You work your entire life for a moment like that. You celebrate, you hug your family, your sister is there. And then immediately the thought shifts to something like what to have for dinner.

Life just goes on.

He said he wasn’t out there to inspire someone to become the best player in the world, because what would be the point of that? He described professional golf as fulfilling in a sense of accomplishment, but not fulfilling in the deepest places of the heart. He said winning doesn’t fill the deepest wants and desires. He said golf doesn’t define him. His faith does. He said if golf ever started affecting his home life or his relationship with his wife or son, that would be his last day playing for a living.

Then he went and won the Open.

After lifting the Claret Jug, he said it again: this doesn’t fulfill the deepest desires of his heart.

I want to be very precise here. The man who has everything his profession can offer — four majors, world number one for 141 consecutive weeks, a gold medal, a hundred million dollars, four straight Player of the Year awards, a résumé that only Tiger Woods can match in the modern era — is saying, on the record, to the assembled global sports media, that none of it is enough.

And he means it. I am fairly certain he means it. Which is what makes it so interesting.

There is a Hebrew word for what Scheffler is describing. It is hevel.

If you have read Ecclesiastes in English, you have almost certainly encountered a bad translation of it. The King James gives you “vanity.” The NIV gives you “meaningless.” Both are misleading in a way that matters.

Hevel literally means breath. Vapor. Smoke. It appears 38 times in Ecclesiastes, five times in the famous opening line: hevel havalim, hevel havalim, hakol hevel. Vapor of vapors, vapor of vapors, all is vapor.

The difference between “meaningless” and “vapor” is not cosmetic. It changes the entire book. If everything is meaningless, Ecclesiastes is nihilism, and the Teacher is a depressive who needs therapy, not a sage worth reading. If everything is vapor, Ecclesiastes is something else entirely — a clear-eyed account of what it feels like to live inside time, where every beautiful thing is passing.

“Meaningless” makes the book sound like it debunks life. “Vapor” makes it sound like weather. Something real that you live inside. Beautiful and impossible to hold.

The Teacher conducted a systematic experiment in achievement. He pursued wisdom, pleasure, wealth, and labor. He got them all. His conclusion was not that they were pointless. His conclusion was that they were ungraspable. Real, warm, beautiful — and they slipped through his fingers like smoke.

This is Scheffler’s dinner moment. The Byron Nelson win happened. It was real. It was warm. His family was there. And within minutes it was vapor.

Scholars fight about this book, and the fight is worth knowing because it determines whether Ecclesiastes is a warning or a guide.

Tremper Longman, in his commentary for the New International Commentary on the Old Testament, reads the Teacher as a foil. A brilliant pessimist whose raw honesty the epilogist — the narrator who appears in the final verses, 12:9–14 — ultimately corrects. On Longman’s reading, the Teacher pushed human wisdom to its absolute limit and discovered it could not hold him. The epilogue then reframes everything: fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. The Teacher’s words are true as far as they go, Longman argues, but they do not go far enough. They are the testimony of a man reasoning “under the sun” — within the bounds of what observation can reach — without the full revelation that comes from above it.

Duane Garrett, writing in the New American Commentary, disagrees. He reads the Teacher not as a foil but as a believing sage who is doing theology, not merely complaining. And the key evidence, on Garrett’s reading, is the seven “enjoy life” refrains scattered through the book. They are not consolation prizes. They are not the Teacher reluctantly admitting that things could be worse. They are his positive theology. His actual answer.

And they escalate.

The first refrain, at 2:24, is resigned. Passive. There is nothing better for a person than to eat and drink. The language sounds like a man who arrived at this conclusion by process of elimination rather than enthusiasm. By the third, at 3:22, he is slightly more confident: there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work. By the sixth, at 9:7, resignation has given way entirely to imperative: Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. And by the seventh, at 11:9, he is speaking directly to the young: Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you.

Garrett reads this progression as the Teacher arriving at his answer. Not through syllogism. Through lived experience. The answer is not that achievement is bad or that toil should be avoided. The answer is that joy is not earned by achievement. It is received as a gift from God.

Derek Kidner, in The Message of Ecclesiastes, offers a structural insight that holds Longman and Garrett together. He identifies a two-voice architecture: the Teacher provides the raw testimony — the honest, sometimes brutal, first-person account of what it feels like to achieve everything and find it vapor — and the epilogist provides the frame that makes the testimony bearable. Kidner’s key point is that the book needs both voices. Without the Teacher, the epilogue is a platitude. Without the epilogue, the Teacher’s words are despair. Together they produce something neither voice can produce alone: a realistic faith.

Peter Enns, in his commentary for the Two Horizons series, pushes this further. Ecclesiastes is not finally a pessimistic book, he argues. Nor an optimistic one. It is an honest one. It names the experience that every high achiever knows but few will say out loud: that the thing you gave your life to get, once you have it, cannot hold you. The value of the book is precisely that it refuses to resolve the tension cheaply. It does not say achievement is bad. It does not say try harder. It says: this is what it is. Now — given that — how will you live?

Here is what is remarkable about Scottie Scheffler, and the reason I think Ecclesiastes explains him better than any sportswriter has managed to: he is both voices at once.

When he describes the dinner moment — the vapor-quality of winning, the inability of the highest accomplishment to fill the deepest places — he is the Teacher. Raw testimony. First person. No theological gloss. Just the observation: I won everything, and within minutes I was thinking about dinner.

When he says his identity is not a golf score, that his faith defines him, that he would quit tomorrow if the game harmed his family — he is the epilogist. The frame. The voice that says: fear God, because everything else is passing.

Most athletes who talk about faith sound like they are adding a disclaimer. A footnote. The thing you say because you are supposed to say it. Scheffler sounds like he is reading from Ecclesiastes without knowing it. The dinner moment is hevel — not as a philosophical abstraction, but as lived experience described with the specificity of a man who has actually felt it. The win was real. It was beautiful. It was warm. And it could not hold him.

There is a verse near the end of the Teacher’s testimony that I think about whenever Scheffler talks. Ecclesiastes 5:20:

He will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.

This is perhaps the strangest verse in the book. The person who receives joy as a gift from God “will not much remember the days of his life.” Not because the days were bad. Because he was too occupied with gladness to grip them. He held them loosely. They passed. He was, somehow, fine.

Scheffler keeps winning. He keeps saying it doesn’t satisfy. He keeps playing. He seems — by every account from people who know him — content. Not despite the vapor-quality of his achievements. Inside it.

The question Ecclesiastes poses is not whether achievement is vapor. That is stipulated. The race is not always to the swift. Time and chance happen to them all.

The question is what you do once you know.

The Teacher’s answer — which Scottie Scheffler is living out on the PGA Tour in real time, nineteen wins deep and counting — is that you keep playing. You enjoy the toil. Not because it will satisfy, but because the enjoyment itself is a gift, received from a hand that is not your own, in a life that is passing like breath.

And sometimes, on the way to the tee box from a jail cell, you shoot 66.

Sources and Further Reading

Golf reporting: PGA Tour, ESPN, NBC Sports, Golf Digest, CBS Sports, Sportico, Sports Spectrum, The Gospel Coalition, Religion Unplugged.

Ecclesiastes commentaries cited:

• Longman, Tremper III. The Book of Ecclesiastes. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Eerdmans, 1998.
• Garrett, Duane A. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. New American Commentary. Broadman & Holman, 1993.
• Kidner, Derek. The Message of Ecclesiastes. The Bible Speaks Today. InterVarsity Press, 1976.
• Enns, Peter. Ecclesiastes. Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary. Eerdmans, 2011.

Disclosure

This blog post was written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). Claude helped with research, commentary synthesis, and drafting the narrative text. All theological interpretation and editorial judgment are the author’s.