If you’re worried about where to sit on Thanksgiving, imagine how you might feel as a still-young Masters winner approaching the table at the fabled Dinner of Champions and deciding where to put up a chair. There are no place cards or seating charts – just various legends and multiple big winners looking up from their vodka sodas and dinner noodles and saying with their eyes, “Sure, kid, you’re gonna sit here?”
“There’s no assigned seating, but a lot of people sit in the same seats,” Adam Scott, 2013 champion, said in 2023. “I like that, to be completely honest. I like the fact that you feel like it’s your place.”
Well, yes, once you have established that place.
The first year is easy, because as the reigning champion and host, you sit at the top of the table by default, surrounded by dinner host, two-time champion Ben Crenshaw and Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley. Year 2 gets trickier. Scott navigated his second dinner appearance by pacing an open spot next to his junior golf buddy Trevor Immelman, a pocket of the table where Nick Faldo is also a regular.
Other players have formed their own table cliques: Zach Johnson alongside Jordan Spieth, with the likes of Bubba Watson, Dustin Johnson and Patrick Reed and veterans Larry Mize and Bernhard Langer also in the region. Three legends – Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Tom Watson – gravitate to the seats to the left of the header. of late Fuzzy Zoeller used to favor the far end of the table, which is a bit like sitting in the back of the school bus. And so it goes. Call them comfort zones.
It may seem like Scottie Scheffler has been winning green jackets (and a lot of other things) for decades, but he, in fact, didn’t attend his first Champions Dinner until 2023. “It’s your first time in that room, you don’t really know what to expect,” Scheffler said Wednesday of Bay Hill. “The only thing I really knew was where I was going to sit. That’s basically the only thing I knew, sitting next to Mr. Crenshaw and the chairman.”
Scheffler said he arrived early and “stuck” his wife, Meredith, in the room to show her a dinner she had helped organize (among the menu items: cheeseburger sliders and tortilla soup).
A year later, at a dinner hosted by 2023 winner Jon Rahm, Scheffler was less certain about his moves. “There’s a little protocol,” he said of where players tend to sit, or, for that matter, NO sit down “I’m definitely not going to sit in the area where Tiger and Jack sit. For example, there are some spots where you feel like you’re going to flow naturally.”
Cozying up to fellow Texan Spieth would be a logical move for Scheffler, but Scheffler knew better than to try it, saying with a laugh, “I definitely didn’t ask Jordan to sit next to him because he would have done something to make sure I didn’t have a place to sit.” Instead, Scheffler turned to Zach Johnson and said, “Hey, where are you sitting this year? And he told me, and he was nice and let me join him.”
 at the Masters Champions Dinner.){kind=link}