Return to Xander: How a major dude did it again
His emphatic Open Championship victory was his second major in three months.
Too late for Tom Weiskopf to actually see them, the Open Championship put up tributes to the 1973 winner at various places around Troon. Weiskopf died two years ago. At the time he won that Open he was the top player in the world, a world that was inhabited by Jack Nicklaus, the big brother and fellow Ohio Stater that Weiskopf could rarely beat. It also was a reminder that Weiskopf, for all his talent and accomplishment, won only that one major title.
Whenever a golfer wins his first, the intelligentsia begins speculating on all the glories to come. “This won’t be his first time,” someone in a booth will say. Of the 233 men who have won majors, ninety-eight have refused to stop at one. But that leaves a vast array of one-trick Duvals, Loves, Leonards, Days, Coupleses, Scotts, Furyks, Garcias and Bolts who had to learn that nothing is guaranteed.
After Rich Beem startled the world by winning the 2002 PGA Championship, he seemed unsettled by the presence of larger galleries. He later said he felt like telling the new fans that nothing had really changed, that he was the same very good golfer that he had been, but the PGA win had not given him new, spectral powers. Ian Baker-Finch, champion golfer of 1991, ran into the same thing. Then, of course, you fall short in that bid for a second major and you run into the “validation” question, as if a major was a way to earn two free hours of parking. Remember this: Nobody can remove anybody’s major, no matter what happens later. It does not need to be certified, signed, sealed, delivered or otherwise validated.
However, the second major is a big one. Tiger Woods had to wait 10 majors between No. 1 and No. 2. Hubert Green had eight years between majors, Greg Norman seven. At Troon on Sunday, an earnest fellow from San Diego decided that two months between champagne baths was enough.
Xander Schauffele noticed the claret jug was being left in the tall, wet rough. He decided he would pick it up, then hide it and run with it. He shot 65, six-under-par, on Sunday, two shots better than anyone else, and shot 31 on the back nine. He was the only player to birdie the 13th hole in the fourth round, where he took a 2-shot lead, and he birdied three out of four, and suddenly Justin Rose, Billy Horschel, a game South African named Thirston Lawrence, and all the rest had to revise their dreams. Schauffele ended at 9-under-par, winning a tournament in which only eight others broke par.
In May Schauffele set a majors record by shooting 21 under par, but he had to, because Bryson DeChambeau was on the march at the PGA Championship at Valhalla. Schauffele had to make a tough birdie putt on the 72th hole to avoid a playoff. At Troon he remained unbothered by the daily challenges, the switching winds and the rain and the course setup that actually insisted today’s strongboys actually worry about wide-left and wide-right. He was certainly gratified by the victory but didn’t act surprised. Rory McIlroy left the premises on Friday night and has now played 40 tournaments in search of his fifth major. Scottie Scheffler had another nightmare putting week. None of the other betting favorites made a serious run, leaving it up to old pros like Justin Rose and Billy Horschel. They’ve been around long enough to know what they’d seen.
“He’s got a lot of horsepower,” Rose said, after he had played alongside Schauffele and tied Horschel for second. “One of the unappreciated things is his mentality. I don’t know what he’s feeling, but he is making it look very easy.”
“And he’s quite nice,” said Mark Fulcher, Rose’s caddie. “You’d almost like for him to be a bit of a wanker.”
Nice guys finish. In 29 majors, Schauffele has made 26 cuts. He also has 15 top ten finishes. This year he didn’t finish lower than eighth in any major and was 32-under overall. Only 13 players survived all four major cuts. Scheffler was 17-under and Collin Morikawa 15-under.
This brings up the PGA Tour Player of the Year award, and the value of the majors themselves. Scheffler won the Masters, the Players and four other events. Schauffele’s only wins were the two big ones. But the gap between major fields and routine tour-stop fields is bigger because the LIV gang, which includes DeChambeau, Joaquin Niemann, Brooks Koepka and Cam Smith among others, only shows up at the majors.
It’s likely that the Olympic gold medal will settle this issue, and Schauffele won the most recent one, three years ago in Tokyo. Then comes the FedEx Cup playoff, also known as Accountants Delight. It’s an artificial money grab that was supposed to give the PGA Tour a proper coda, but was moved up to August, and away from the NFL’s runaway TV-ratings train. It shouldn’t really be a factor in recognizing who played the best when it meant the most.
Seven time zones away, Nick Dunlap won the Barracuda Championship in Nevada. That’s the Stableford-scored consolation prize for those who didn’t qualify for the Open Championship. But it had a decent field, and it’s a PGA Tour event, and it is the second win for Dunlap, who won the American Express (Bob Hope, for most of us) in January. Eleven months ago Dunlap, from the U. of Alabama, won the U.S. Amateur championship.
At the John Deere Classic two weeks ago, Davis Thompson was the winner and Luke Clanton and Michael Thorbjornsen tied for second. None of them clearly remember the Tiger Woods era. Thompson is 25 and was at Georgia in 2021. The other two were carrying their own bags and wearing Florida State and Stanford golf shirts just seven weeks ago.
They and other TikTok pros see no reason why they should wait to win. If they watched a 30-year-old march through Scotland on Sunday, they learned why they might have to.