Xander Schauffele’s victory in the PGA Championship changes the story forever

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – He says it so many times you don’t believe him anymore. At first it was ‘just Thursday’. Back then it was ‘only 36 holes’. Then it was ‘just another result’. No, Actually, it’s just a different result. Xander Schauffele really cares so little, or cares so much that he has to push it deeper and deeper so that no one in the world will ever know how much he wants to win this thing.

He walks every hole as if it were just another hole. He plays the course like it’s just a tournament. Step. Wave one arm. Step. Wave the other arm. Schauffele is so good because he operates this way, a thirty-year-old golf robot who keeps his head down and treats golf like an Excel sheet, and for some he can’t win more than he does for exactly the same reason.

Until he steps up to the six-foot putt with his legacy on the line. He’s nervous, he admits. He sees a break from left to right. Wait, no, is it from right to left? He goes back and forth. “Oh my god, this is not what I want for a winning putt,” he thinks. If he makes it, he will win the PGA Championship. If he misses, he makes a short par putt and goes to a playoff. If he loses that, he’ll be cemented as this era’s quasi-Greg Norman, closing in without a major and giving away a two-shot lead on the back nine.

He plays it right and it goes left. So it hits the edge of the hole to the left, and from there Schauffele almost hits black for a moment, without even processing the putt of his life as he falls. He simply hears the roar of the Valhalla Golf Club crowd and feels nothing but relief. He throws his arms in the air.

“A huge relief,” he says.

And then the robot breaks. He smiles. He can’t stop smiling. The edges of his teeth are pushing out of the side of his face and it just won’t go away. He turns, turns, and throws his fists back up at the crowd, the smile going nowhere.

This was not just a result. Xander Schauffele wanted this.

Schauffele went to shake hands with his caddy Austin Kaiser seven days earlier in Charlotte, after Rory McIlroy finished destroying them in the landmark Wells Fargo Championship.

“We’re getting one soon, son,” Schauffele said.

The well. The moment. The victory. 🏆#PGACamp | @XSchauwelle pic.twitter.com/C6aT7BMvfv

— PGA Championship (@PGACampionship) May 20, 2024

For the rest of the golf world, Sundays became Schauffele’s thing. Look, Schauffele has been perhaps the most consistent golfer in the world over the past seven years. He’s only 30 and has more than 100 top 20s to his name. He finishes between second and tenth place seemingly every week. He won the Tour Championship as a rookie and just stayed there, always among the top 5-10 players in the world.

But he couldn’t win more. Not just majors. Something. Schauffele played more tournaments than almost any of his peers towards the top of the rankings, but for whatever reason there were two or three years between victories. He had just six career PGA Tour victories as of Sunday. Consistency was both Schauffele’s superpower and the hurdle that made him a perennial disappointment. Any way you looked at it, Schauffele was the best player without a major. And it was not received as a compliment.

In the beginning, he was just the guy who didn’t quite take advantage of his opportunities, not necessarily a choker. But recently the story changed. He won twice in his eight career events with all or a share of the lead. Three times this season – at Riviera, the Players and Quail Hollow – he teed off in the final group on Sunday. In all three cases he blurred the trajectory.

“All those calls from me, even last week, that kind of feeling, it happens to you at some point,” Schauffele said Sunday night. “It just makes this sweeter.”

On Saturday evening, his father, Stefan, texted him a variation of: Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein. It is the German translation of the old idiom: “Constant dripping wears away a stone.” Because according to Schauffele, every loss was more experience. It was another step towards getting better. As he kept saying, the finishes were all just results, and he claimed that sixth place or twentieth place was just a result. He focused much more on the actual golf he was playing.

Minutes before his tee time on Sunday, Schauffele was still on the driving range, ripping drives into the Kentucky sky. And the disks continued to be missing on the left. His playing partner, Collin Morikawa, who was tied with Schauffele for the lead at 15 under par, had walked to the first tee two full minutes earlier. Schauffele kept swinging. The left miss just kept coming. The time was approaching and Kaiser was ready to take the bag to the tee. But Schauffele said, “One more.” So he set down another tee, laid down a ball and took one last crack.

Right in the middle.

Oh no. It happened. It happens in the way you might feel on the spot. Except for maybe twenty minutes on Saturday afternoon, Schauffele led the PGA Championship all week, and on Sunday he went to the back nine with a two-shot lead at 19 under par. But he misplayed the par-5 10th and ended up with the missing a six-foot putt for bogey and falling to 18 under.

Schauffele walked up the hill towards the 11th tee in a daze. He stared at the ground in front of him, but no activity appeared behind his eyes. Here was a difficult par 3 with a pin tucked away to the left, behind a tight bunker. Look, Schauffele is something of a “data golfer.” He opts for a cautious approach. He doesn’t take unnecessary risks without clear reward. One just assumed he would go medium green for par.

But Schauffele went for the pin. And he secured it.

“In those moments you can kind of feel it,” Schauffele said, “and if I didn’t do it in the past, it just wasn’t there, and today I could feel it was there.”

However, that is not the story. The story is about what happened as Schauffele approached the putt. There’s a huge scoreboard overlooking the 11th green, and he was looking straight at it. Norwegian star Viktor Hovland was lying on the radiator and Schauffele suddenly saw Hovland having a stroke. He understood he had to make that putt. He had to chase.

Schauffele made the birdie putt. A hole later he fired straight at another tightly tucked pin and stuck it. Another easy birdie to regain the lead.

Schauffele had tried everything before. He had tried not to look at the rankings until the last nine. He tried not to look early. He tried not to look at all. Guess what? He hadn’t won in two years. It did not work.

“Today I looked at them,” he said. “I’ve been looking at them all day. I really wanted to feel everything. I wanted to address everything I was feeling at that moment.

He didn’t want to go to a play-off. Not against Bryson DeChambeau, who he knew was at 20 under thanks to a glance at the scoreboard. Not on a distance course against one of the tallest drivers in the world. Schauffele knew he had to win it over 72 holes. Right there on the 18th at Valhalla he needed a birdie.

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But when he completed a seemingly perfect ride, all he could do was laugh. He even turned to his caddie after the swing and said, “Okay, yeah?” But no, it just landed on the first rough cut directly to the right of a bunker. The only way to hit him is to stand in the bunker and take a quasi-baseball swing at a ball well above his feet. When he went downstairs and saw it, he turned around and took ten steps further and stared ahead as he collected himself. “Man, someone out there is making me earn this,” he thought, laughing.

“If you want to be a great champion, these are the kinds of things you have to deal with,” Schauffele said later.

But what Schauffele missed was the silver lining. Here was a golfer known not so much for his collapses as for his lack of winning. He didn’t choke. He just didn’t make the famous clutch shots and let others take the victory out of his hands. Here it was: his chance to change the conversation in real time.

Xander Schauffele had to make a difficult second shot on 18 on Sunday. (Jon Durr / USA Today)

He hit a nice shot and stayed in the fairway, 36 yards from the green. The course went quiet because of his chip with the kind of silence that sinks into your brain, and Schauffele placed the ball six feet from the hole. You know the rest. The putt went in. Schauffele ended the story. He won his first major, recontextualized his entire career and cemented himself as the second-best player in the world after Scottie Scheffler.

But when Schauffele talks about overcoming this hurdle, he downplays it as much as possible, just as he did when the victories failed to materialize. “It’s just a result.” Because nothing really changed for Schauffele on Sunday. It was always a matter of probability. If he played well and pushed himself to the top, there would be some chance that it would eventually go his way to win. It’s just golf.

Kaiser said after the win: “You just look at it statistically, if you keep beating, it will work out in the end.”

Those who were there in Louisville on Sunday, even those who opposed him, saw the difference.

But Schauffele’s brain just doesn’t work this way. He sees it as a positive step, but still only thinks about how much better he can become. He thinks about the man he still pursues.

“I think if you try to climb this mountain here, we have to put Scottie Scheffler on the very tip of it, and everyone else somewhere on the hill hanging on for dear life, that’s what it feels like,” he said. Saturday.

But could he just enjoy it?

“I got a good hook up there in the mountain on that cliff, and I’m still climbing,” he said Sunday. “Maybe I’ll have a beer over there on that side of the hill and enjoy it.”

(Top photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images)