SOUTHPORT, England — SOUTHPORT, England (AP) — Scottie Scheffler finally heard about the text his PGA Tour friend never sent, a reminder that even the No. 1 player in golf with four majors and more than 20 victories doesn’t know everything.It was a list of things to do on the weekend after missing the cut.“He was like: ‘Hey, you can practice at the facilities. You can still go to the gym. You can also go to the next tournament.’ It was basically all my options,” Scheffler said Tuesday. “He never sent it to me, but he told me about it.”The reason the text was created — without being sent, to Scheffler’s disappointment — was missing the cut at the Scottish Open, his first missed cut in nearly four years, a streak of 78 consecutive cuts that was the longest since Tiger Woods set the record (142) from 1998 to 2005.Frustrating, yes. Despair? Hardly.“You never want to have a weekend off, but going into a tournament when you’re defending, there’s always a bit more stuff to do,” Scheffler said. “So it wasn’t the world thing in the world.”Among his duties was officially returning the claret jug he won last year at Royal Portrush, a ritual the Royal & Ancient has turned into a ceremony. Then, it was playing an exhibition with Jordan Spieth, Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose and others.But key to Scheffler’s early arrival was Royal Birkdale, which has hosted the British Open more than any other links course in England since it first joined the rotation in 1954.He had never seen it. Scheffler had not seen conditions like this — a combination of yellow and brown, which translates to firm and fiery in a links vocabulary. St. Andrews came close in 2022, but Jon Rahm recalls the greens still being soft enough to allow for low scoring.Scheffler ticked off two items on his friend’s list — he went to the gym in Scotland and then headed to the next tournament. That allowed him time to play 18 holes on Sunday, and to limit his energy in sunbaked Blighty to …
