Beneath Scott's easygoing exterior—his favorite hobby is surfing and he speaks dreamily of "moving with nature"—there is a great golfer coming together, perhaps the only 20-something with the mental equipment to challenge the Chosen One. Since joining the PGA Tour in 2003, Scott has won five tournaments, including the Players and the Tour Championship, and though he has not yet gotten his major, he has finished in the top 10 four times. Greg Norman, the paterfamilias of Australian golf, tells anyone who'll listen that he's the next Tiger.
While proclaiming a young golfer the next Tiger has become an exercise in cruelty, a setup for certain failure, in Scott's case there is more than a passing resemblance; he arrived on this continent looking like Tiger's carbon copy. As a teenager, Scott studied Woods's swing and appropriated his wide arc, his fast hips, his deliberate follow-through. When Scott played in the 1998 Junior World Golf Championships at Torrey Pines, his future college coach at UNLV, Dwayne Knight, was there watching with Woods's friend and sports psychologist Jay Brunza. "We walked out to the 13th hole and watched him from afar," Knight says. "I asked Jay, 'Who does that look like?' He said, 'It looks just like Tiger.'" When Scott met Butch Harmon, Woods's former swing coach, Harmon was struck by the same thing. "That's pretty much his natural swing," says Harmon, who has been coaching Scott since 2003 and claims to have done only a minimum of tweaking. Though they sit near each other atop the rankings—Scott is now ranked fourth in the world—Woods and Scott have provided only one tantalizing glimpse of the rivalry to come: At the Accenture Match Play Championship in 2003, the Australian pushed the American to the limit, only to miss a two-and-a-half-foot putt on the first playoff hole. "I think I outplayed Tiger that day," he says, "but his experience won him the match."
On tour, Scott is part of a freewheeling group—Sergio Garcia, Justin Rose, Geoff Ogilvy, and Luke Donald—that stows the clubs on Sunday nights and goes about the business of finding a place in Shreveport that serves beer. And it's not exactly uncommon for Scott to be approached by women with strange ideas. At the Booz Allen Classic a few years back, one woman handed him a note implying that he should feel welcome to, as he put it to me, "come by for a little night-putting." Scott is now dating a Swede (yet another echo of Tiger), Marie Kojzar—a relationship that had ended a few years ago but is back on again—and he is using his spare time on airplanes between tournaments to learn Swedish.
