Around five in the morning on a dismal and rainy Friday in Louisville, Kentucky’s downtown, a black SUV pulled out from the four-story AC Hotel on East Market Street. It’s going to Valhalla Golf Club, which is roughly 17 miles straight east. Four on-air personalities, including reporter Jeff Darlington, analyst and former U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy, and play-by-play announcers Dave Fleming and Bob Wischusen, were being driven to the 106th PGA Championship by an ESPN production runner. The usual 30-minute journey was traffic-free for the most part, but as the SUV got closer to the club, that started to change. The primary thoroughfare into and out of Valhalla, Shelbyville Road, experienced traffic congestion due to a police investigation about a pedestrian fatality.
The ESPN runner took the SUV down less-traveled back roads to avoid the traffic jam, and shortly after, he spotted a policeman policing a crossroads about 0.3 of a mile from the club entrance. The policeman let the ESPN team to pass once they presented their identification and parking permit. But when they got closer to the entry, they were again delayed, this time by a bus that was stopped directly in front of the gate. A Lexus SUV identified as a PGA Championship courtesy car drew up in the westbound lane beside them while they waited for the bus to pass.
In a phone interview on Saturday night, Wischusen said, “And that was when the confrontation began.”
Watch & Hear at Valhalla: An Inside Look at Scottie Scheffler’s tumultuous morning
The match, which you have probably already read, heard, and/or meme-ed, featured Bryan Gillis, a detective with the Louisville Metro Police Department, and Scottie Scheffler, the top-ranked male golfer in the world. To put it briefly, Gillis, the traffic controller, stopped Scheffler when he entered the westbound lane and gave him directions. However, Scheffler “refused to comply and accelerated forward, dragging (him) to the ground,” according to Gillis. Scheffler said he had been “proceeding as directed” and that the event was the result of a “big misunderstanding of what I thought I was being asked to do” in a statement released on Friday. After being detained, Scheffler was transferred to the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections, where he was charged with three misdemeanors relating to driving and one felony, second-degree assault of a police offer.
Darlington, who had seen a lot of what had happened, broke the shocking arrest news. Darlington tweeted at 6:35 a.m.: “World No. 1 golfer Scottie Scheffler has been detained by police in handcuffs after attempting to drive past a police officer into Valhalla Golf Club due to a misunderstanding with traffic flow.” Scheffler halted his automobile at the Valhalla entrance after the policeman tried to strap himself to the vehicle. Scheffler was then yelled at by the policeman to exit the vehicle. The cop pushed Scheffler against the automobile as soon as he got out of the car and handcuffed him. Right now, he’s being held in the rear of a patrol vehicle.
45 minutes later, Darlington tweeted a bizarre video of two officers escorting the current Masters champion toward a police car while he was handcuffed. As of this writing, the video has been viewed nearly 20 million times. In the video, an officer tells Darlington, “He’s going to jail, and there aint nothing you can do about it.” Later that morning, when he presented his description of the mind-bending events on SportsCenter, Darlington solidified his position as the star witness to the most astounding sports story of the year, if not the decade.
Here is video that I took of Scheffler being arrested: https://t.co/8UPZKvPCCf pic.twitter.com/9Tbp2tyrJh
— Jeff Darlington (@JeffDarlington) May 17, 2024
But Darlington wasn’t the lone eyewitness. His four traveling companions had also arrived on the scene, observing from the inside of the SUV. Wischusen discussed what he heard and observed with GOLF.com on Saturday. He has not yet made public his account of the events that led to the arrest. While Wischusen’s account supports Darlington’s, it also adds some fresh information.
Wischusen stated that neither he nor his ESPN colleagues could see the identity of the driver as Scheffler drew up to the left of ESPN’s car. Shortly after, a policeman “kind of jumped in front” of what the ESPN team would subsequently discover to be Scheffler’s Lexus. Wischusen described Officer Gillis as “pretty, you know, enthusiastic, let’s say.” Gillis allegedly pointed his flashlight up and down Scheffler’s automobile and screamed, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, who are you?,” according to Wischusen. To what destination are you heading? Reposition yourself in line. You are not permitted to pass through this area.
Wischusen claimed that when Gillis was “scolding” Scheffler for passing the ESPN car on the left, he was unable to hear anything that Scheffler said to Gillis. According to Wischusen, it was unclear to him and his colleagues if the officer and his colleagues were police or tournament security because they were wearing yellow luminous jackets.
Scheffler started to distance himself, according to Wischusen, following their exchange with the officer. At this moment, Gillis “attached himself” to the automobile, as Darlington put it. According to Gillis, whose body camera was not on at the time, Scheffler’s automobile “dragged” him to the ground, causing “pain, swelling, and abrasions to left wrist and knee” as well as “beyond repair” damage to his clothes.
Wischusen remembers that incident as follows: “The policeman became enraged and chased after the automobile when [Scheffler] went past him. It seemed to me that he was sort of jogging beside the automobile, possibly tripping and falling. By the front gate, there was, you know, a sort of outcropping or median. Remember that it was raining as well. Six o’clock in the morning had arrived. It was pitch-black.
When asked about Darlington’s claim that the officer was “attaching” himself to the vehicle, Wischusen replied, “I could see him stumble, but I wasn’t sure exactly how you wanted to classify his interaction with the car.”
Scheffler was traveling at a modest pace, according to Wischusen — “the speed that you would drive a car if you were pulling up to the front gate of a place” — and had covered the roughly ten yards that Darlington had estimated before stopping.
Wischusen reported that Scheffler saw that Gillis was clearly unhappy when he pulled over. “He sprints to the driver’s side and begins yelling, ‘Get out of the car, get out of the car,’ pounding on the glass and saying’shut the engine off, get out of the car,’ with the butt end of his flashlight. I work as a police officer.
According to Wischusen, once the driver “peacefully” got out of the vehicle, the police “put him up against the car and put him in handcuffs.” That’s when we realized—you know, up till then we’re thinking, oh my God, whoever is in this car, there’s going to be an arrest of some kind,” stated Wischusen. Suddenly, I thought, “Oh my God, that’s Scottie Scheffler.”
Immediately recognizing the seriousness and importance of the situation, Darlington put on his reporter’s cap and got out of the SUV to record it. Wischusen, Ogilvy, Fleming, and their chauffeur remained at the rear of the car. “You do realize I’m not an investigative reporter?” stated Wischusen. “I felt that staying in the car, letting Jeff ask questions, and letting the situation unfold was the correct course of action. We should have avoided interfering or trying to take on a role at all,” the speaker said.
How did the occupants in the rear of the SUV feel as they witnessed this unbelievable event unfold before them? Surprise, stated Wischusen. “Just as you would anticipate,” he remarked. “The world’s best player was just arrested while attempting to enter the golf course’s gate. You know, like, what occurred just now? Was what we just witnessed indeed what we saw?
Darlington never made it back to the SUV. According to Wischusen, he wanted to capture as much of the action on camera, so the others passed past the fence and headed to the TV facility without him. The ESPN production crew knew what had transpired by the time they arrived, and they were already planning how to cover what was possibly the strangest event in major-championship history. ESPN’s producers had some time to work with before players descended on the course to finish their first rounds, but not much because tee times had been pushed back due to traffic congestion. Finding out Scheffler’s situation was the most important thing, though.
“We went from an operation of people there to call a sporting event to a news gathering, a news reporting operation in a very fast transition,” Wischusen remarked. And so we eventually became both of us. We arrived on the scene thirty minutes later, and we still had no idea when Scottie Scheffler would be processed or bailed out. Was he about to back off? Was he going to be a prisoner? Would his tee time be missed? Whoa, hold on, we just got out he’s returning. In other words, we were essentially donning two hats simultaneously. How are we going to be the news organization covering the Scottie Scheffler story and simultaneously covering the ongoing golf event, in which twelve groups are playing golf on the course? Telling people and demonstrating what’s happening in the PGA is still sort of our job. And we wore both caps for around 14 hours straight.
It’s uncertain if Scheffler will show up in person for his planned arraignment on Tuesday morning in Louisville. According to GOLF.com, Scheffler’s lawyer, Steve Romines, plans to submit a “not guilty” plea to all of the accusations. Romines stated he did not anticipate the judge making a ruling on the same day. He predicted that “it will probably only be a few days,” at which point “we’ll either go to trial or the judge will dismiss the charges.”
To the best of Wischusen’s knowledge, as of Friday night, no member of the ESPN crew who saw the arrest had received a call from legal teams on either side. “I would think they would probably go to Jeff first because (a) our version of the events is basically identical, and (b) he had more information than any one of us,” Wischusen said if they did get in touch. He got out of the car, took some more pictures, recorded more information, and asked more questions. In my opinion, the fact that neither party has been in touch with any of us suggests that they both intend to deny that this incident ever happened. Let’s just all agree to move on and let the past go. Cooler heads win out.
When asked if Scheffler’s charges will be dropped, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg gave an interview to the Louisville Courier-Journal. “At this moment, our county attorney is handling the case, and we’ll let the legal proceedings unfold,” declared the mayor.
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