HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. — Just four days after a second-place finish to Rory McIlroy at the Masters, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler is back to business. On a picturesque Thursday at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head Island, Scheffler carded a first-round 68 at the RBC Heritage, the fourth Signature Event of the season.

"I feel like I did some good stuff out there," said Scheffler after his round. "Conditions were tough late in the day. Yeah, I did a lot of good things. Would have liked to have had a better start, but outside of that, I felt like I executed pretty well."

Scheffler, who won this event in 2024 right after capturing his second green jacket, stumbled right out of the gates, hitting his tee shot on the first hole out of bounds to the right, but ultimately made an 11-foot putt to save bogey.

"It was looking like it was going to hit those trees, and I guess it flew right through them and then hit path and went out of bounds," he said. "Thumbs up for the start. It was a good bogey."

Scheffler struggled off the tee – he was 68th in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee – and was buoyed by his short game. He bounced back with short birdie putts on Nos. 3, 5 and 6. A tee shot in the bunker on the par-3 seventh led to bogey, but he picked up two more birdies for a 3-under 68, five shots back of first-round leader Ludvig Åberg.

Scheffler admitted that he has a "religious process" to approaching tournaments that enables him to recover from an intense week like Augusta. This week has also been his first look at the newly restored Harbour Town, an effort spearheaded by Davis Love III.

"Yeah, I was pleased," said Scheffler on his first impressions of the course. "When you look at a place like this, if you had one of the restoration guys come in, typically what they do is they kind of widen things, they take out some trees, they make the greens a little bit bigger. When we heard this golf course was going to get renovated, I think that was a fear of ours because it's a special and unique place in the sense of you have to control your ball. You have to shape it both ways. You have to do different things with your golf ball, which when you look at modern golf course design, I think it's a bit of a lost art in the way they do things.

"When I got here and was looking at the yardage book to see the changes they made to the course, I had to do a double-take; I'm like, 'Did I get the right yardage book?' This thing doesn't even look any different.

I think Davis has a great understanding of what makes this golf course amazing, and he's obviously had some success here, so he wasn't going to come in and do a bunch of changes. But the things that he did, I definitely liked. But overall, he didn't really do a whole lot, which I think when you have a gem like this is a good thing."

Scheffler was recently named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2026.

"Yeah, I'd much rather try to be a positive influence than a negative one," he said in response. "I think if you do things the right way, and I feel like I can have some sort of influence over people, and being on the other side of things, I dreamed of growing up and being a professional golfer, and being able to achieve my dreams.

"I'm very fortunate to have been able to do that, but at the end of the day, like I said at The Open last year, that's not what satisfies me. If I can be a positive influence on someone's life, that's a great thing.