The impact usually takes form slowly. But by the time anyone realizes its presence, it has already fully overtaken.

Scottie Scheffler won his fourth straight Jack Nicklaus Award on Monday, given annually to the player of the year on the PGA TOUR. Scheffler has now won the award more times than any player not named Tiger Woods (who won it 11 times), surpassing three-time winner Rory McIlroy.

That on-course dominance didn’t sneak up on anyone. Scheffler is the bar that every other player is chasing. In that sense, his 2025 season wasn’t much different than the previous three. Scheffler won in bunches, including two majors, and hardly finished outside the top 10. He was the best ball-striker by a wide margin again. As crazy as it sounds, it was a status-quo year inside the ropes for the sport’s unquestioned best golfer. Sure, it will be remembered as the first year Scheffler won multiple majors. Some may even recognize it as the season in which Scheffler’s putting issues were solved.

What Scheffler’s 2025 should be remembered for is the year he began to shape this era of pro golfers. The biggest testament to Scheffler’s dominance is not what he’s doing. It’s what his peers are doing and saying because of him.

Look no further than Scheffler’s biggest competitor. After McIlroy shot a sterling bogey-free 65 in nasty conditions during the third round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in January, he said of his performance: “Just really try to limit the mistakes and play smart golf and be a little more like Scottie Scheffler basically.”

McIlroy won the event the next day.

The following week, then-amateur Luke Clanton looked to earn his PGA TOUR card at the WM Phoenix Open. When asked why he loved golf, Clanton pointed to his own competitiveness, then quickly steered the conversation: “But golf is not my identity. I learned that one from Scottie.”

A few months later, just days before Scheffler would go on to win the BMW Championship, his fifth victory of the season, Akshay Bhatia was tucked away in a hospitality area discussing his mental struggles.

“There’s a lot of reflection I need to do with just my life and not having golf dictate my happiness,” Bhatia told PGATOUR.COM. “When I see Scottie Scheffler, I see great balance.”

Scheffler is now more clearly than ever the center of the golf universe, around whom everything and everyone revolves. When a truly transcendent player comes along, the sport begins to mold in their image. Scheffler undoubtedly became golf’s guiding principle in 2025.

Tiger Woods’ persona overwhelmed the sport and influenced several generations that came after him. Woods’ intensity, drive and ruthlessness inspired the next wave of golfers. And though nobody could dream of replicating his talent, they could set out to replicate his focus and his work ethic. Ask any pro golfer over the age of 30, and Woods was their beacon. He shaped the sport. What he said carried weight, and a lineage of younger golfers fell in line.

In the vacuum of the post-Woods era, no player grabbed a stranglehold on that role. Incredible talents emerged like McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Brooks Koepka and Justin Thomas. Each embarked on periods of domination, trading places at the top of the sport and showing the tantalizing potential that led the golf world to throw the undesirable and unasked-for “next Tiger Woods” label on them. They never reached that level, but that’s the fault of those who thrust the unfair expectation on them.

Scheffler has publicly sidestepped any assertion that he is next, though with every passing accomplishment, it becomes harder not to compare the two on the course and how they affected the sport off of it. In any event, even as his number of accolades pales in comparison to Woods’, Scheffler’s impact on his peers has reached a Woods-like level.

Simply, Scheffler’s gravitational pull is bringing the rest of the PGA TOUR closer to his persona. On the course, it’s materialized in his play style, which McIlroy set out to mimic. Off the course, it’s come in how Scheffler can separate golf from life. That mantra was clearly laid out back in 2022 when Scheffler won the Masters and famously said: “My identity isn’t a golf score.”

He’s expanded on it in the years since, becoming increasingly comfortable opening up. Not known for his media appearances, perhaps the most profound moment of the entire season came with Scheffler in front of a microphone at The Open Championship in July.

"Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I've literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport," Scheffler said during a five-minute soliloquy on why life as a pro golfer isn’t fulfilling. "To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I'm not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I'm not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what's the point?

"This is not a fulfilling life," Scheffler continued. "It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart."

Now players from every walk of life are sharing similar viewpoints. From the youngest, most impressionable future stars, like Clanton and Bhatia, to McIlroy and Jordan Spieth.

“He just wants to get away from the game and separate the two because I know that he – at one time, he felt it was too much, that he was taking it with him," Spieth said at The Open. "And whenever he made that switch, I don't know what it was, but he has hobbies. He's always with his family. They're always doing stuff. I think it's more so the difference in personality from any other superstar that you've seen in the modern era and maybe in any sport. I don't think anybody is like him.”

Oh, plenty are trying to be like him at present. That’s the sign of a true generational superstar … the company Scheffler is keeping now.