Xander Schauffele smiles through his laptop screen from his holiday in Portugal, but there is sleepiness in his eyes. The story of cause and effect is encapsulated in the object on the table behind him.
It’s been a week since the American won the Open and a night since he last reused the Claret Jug.
“My father is quite a traditional guy,” Schauffele told Mail Sport. “My father thinks red wine is served in the claret jug and nothing else. Well, it’s not here, is it? Maybe some tequila got into it last night.”
This is Schauffele’s pause for breath in an astonishing season. He will soon travel to Paris to defend his Olympic title, but for now he has the warm satisfaction of knowing he will never have to answer those same questions about the victories he came within a whisker of at majors. Winning the U.S. PGA Championship and the U.S. Open in the space of nine weeks put that conversation to rest pretty decisively.
“I’m very, very, very happy,” he says, and with that comes a Tiger Woods story. It’s been a running joke in the sport that you need to win a major to get a text from Woods, and the messages from Schauffele are piling up.
In the space of nine months, Xander Schauffele (pictured) has silenced rumors about his near misses.
His victory at Royal Troon last week summed up what has been a sensational season.
After waiting so long to win a major, Schauffele (pictured) would go on to claim the PGA Championship in May before reigning victorious at Royal Troon.
‘Tiger sent one that said, “Champion Golfer of the Year, take it.” Isn’t that cool?
‘At Troon I played my first two rounds with him. I didn’t see him at all on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so the first time I saw him was on Thursday, and he looked at me and said, “How do you feel?” At first I wasn’t sure what he meant, and then I thought, “Oh, he’s talking about the fact that I’ve now won a major.”
“I laugh just thinking about it. I feel like I’m over the moon sitting here with two and I mean, he’s 15. It’s pretty humiliating when you start comparing yourself to someone like that, to one of the best to ever touch a stick. But again, I’m very happy.”
That Schauffele has so quickly turned the debate on Scottie Scheffler’s dominance around over the past two years demonstrates golf’s habit of rewarding hot streaks on a packed schedule. No one is quicker than Schauffele to put that notion to bed – “I always say it, but Scottie is at the top of this mountain and he’s way ahead of us on the lateral climb” – but with his two majors enough to equal Scheffler’s two Masters titles, the 30-year-old has presented a credible challenge.
One symptom of Schauffele’s low-key public presence is that his rise in the game may have taken casual viewers by surprise. A bigger mistake would be to think he’s boring. In golf, that mislabel doesn’t exist around an attractive individual, who finished in the top 10 in 12 of his 24 majors before winning the U.S. PGA in May and whose arrival at this point is largely the work of a gregarious man who refers to himself as the Ogre.
This week, the American will be out to defend his Olympic gold medal at Le Golf National in Paris.
Schauffele was seen hugging his father, Stefan, after winning at Royal Troon last week, a former decathlete
The golfer and his father have planned their rise meticulously, and Schauffele added that the two smoked a cigar after the Open.
That is Schauffele’s father, Stefan, a former decathlete who often wears a Panama hat and has been present at almost every swing of his son’s career, as guru, swing coach and father. The exception was the victory at the US PGA Championship in Kentucky: Schauffele senior was 4,000 miles away building a self-sufficient compound on 20 acres of land in Hawaii and living in a shipping container without a television. He was in tears in Troon when his son took hold of the pitcher.
“He’s been a key part of my career,” Schauffele says of his father, who introduced him to cognac and cigars on his 12th birthday. They’ve fought and argued and together they’ve meticulously planned this rise.
‘When we came home after the Open, we sat there and smoked a cigar together. We had the trophy there and he gets emotional every time he looks at it. Sometimes he seems a bit cheeky and mean, but he’s just a big teddy bear.
“He’s done a lot of driving for me.”
In fact, it was at Schauffele Sr.’s instruction that his son began listing what he wanted to achieve in the game as a teenager. One of those goals is halfway to being realized for the world number two.
Under his father’s instruction, Schauffele began listing what he wanted to accomplish in golf.
Her goal is to win the Grand Slam of her career, something she has wanted since she was 13, and she is now just two titles away from achieving it.
The American Ryder Cup star also spoke about winning gold in Tokyo, saying: “It was huge for me.”
“I’ve always written that I wanted to win the Grand Slam,” he says. “To get two after not winning one for so long is something that makes me feel really good. Expectations can be a bad thing and I think every person who is involved in sport has a certain amount of cortisol in their body. You get stressed, you get anxious, you go through tough times. I’ve done it. So to get two Grand Slams is great, and it makes me think back to when I was writing these things with my dad when I was 13 or 14 – the world’s number one player, the majors, all that stuff.”
Seeing it pay off at Troon was spectacular in the way Schauffele dismantled one of golf’s toughest tests. His 69 in filthy weather on Saturday was a masterclass; a bogey-free 65 to defeat Justin Rose on Sunday was one of the best final rounds in recent history. Winning on the golf course in those kinds of conditions is rightly a point of distinction when talking about the game’s best players.
“That Saturday, wow!” he says. “It was a bloodbath. It was mental golf, dogfight golf, as I call it: It’s ugly, you’re going to feel bad, you’re going to look bad, and you just need to do a little bit better than everyone else’s bad. I felt like I was going to fight my way through these 18 holes in the rain and the wind.
‘In a way, I got in touch with a different part of my brain and I’m glad I proved I could do it. Everything worked out. It’s a technical aspect, but my ball helped. I switched at the beginning of the year, used a Callaway Chrome Tour and this thing just didn’t wobble. I’m just watching this ball go through the windows that I visualized and it’s right there on the line. What I’m saying is about confidence and a lot went into that.
‘Going into Sunday I was calm. I had a huge weight lifted off my shoulders after winning the PGA and when I got to Troon I told myself that my advantage would come if I was in contention on Sunday. On Sunday, on the back nine, I felt calm and I knew I could do it.’
His father “desperately wanted to be an Olympian” and Schauffele says he “understands what the Games mean”
The first round of the men’s tournament begins on Friday, but Schauffele will be competing against a field packed with talent.
But given the wisdom of his decathlete father, Schauffele’s approach to golf has yielded remarkable results and could lead to another Olympic medal.
The next challenge is an intriguing one. Golf only returned to the Olympics in 2016 after a 96-year absence, so it cannot be mistaken for a central priority in a sport where major tournaments are king. For Schauffele, the link is a little closer because of Stefan, who aspired to compete at the Games for Germany until a car accident left him blind in one eye at age 20.
“Winning gold in Tokyo was very important for me,” Schauffele says. “It was one of those times when I wasn’t winning many tournaments and suddenly I beat a big field. I have the picture of the podium – obviously it was because of COVID, so I’m there with my medal and wearing a mask.”
‘As my father desperately wanted to be an Olympian, I grew up knowing what the Games meant. There’s a big family bond for me – I think my father’s grandfather even competed in the hammer throw. Sharing that win with my dad in Tokyo was great, but the decathlon has played a big part in my golf.
‘My father’s philosophy is based on that. He explained to me that my golf game was like that of a decathlete, that you don’t have to be a genius at just one thing. You just have to be good, solid at all things, which is the decathlete’s approach.’
For Schauffele and his accompanying Ogre, it’s an approach that has resulted in a remarkable year and a tequila-scented decanter.