Of the many paths to major championship victory, there is one where the mastery seems almost perfect, and that is the one Xander Schauffele took to win the 152nd British Open in complete serenity. It wasn’t just that his final-round 65 and 31 on the back nine were the best numbers of the 80 players at Royal Troon or that they allowed him to win by two shots at 9 under par after starting one shot behind. It was the look and feel of this course, and it looked and felt like something even the imagination wouldn’t dare to imagine. Schauffele found himself disconnected from a tight leaderboard, from his bygone image as a chronic contender who couldn’t reign and from any reasonable limits known to the future.
“The next 10 years will be wonderful,” predicted his father and first coach, Stefan, without any pride or nonsense.
The facts show that Xander Schauffele, who failed to win any of his first 27 majors despite 12 top-10 finishes, has managed two of the last three. They say he became the first male player since Brooks Koepka in 2018 to win two majors in a season and the first since Rory McIlroy in 2014 to win the PGA Championship and the British Open. They say he has joined in giddy haste those of this era who have two major titles — from No. 1 Scottie Scheffler to Jon Rahm to Collin Morikawa, Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Thomas, among others — but, more than that, he has joined players such as Morikawa and Zach Johnson among those whose two major titles include one here on the links, shouting his versatility.
They said all that, but Sunday’s round said something else entirely with its cleanliness. It spoke of a guy whose May breakthrough at Louisville elevated his trademark calm from considerable to powerful. With his game in the clouds on a gray day with fresh air ideal for a long walk on the beach near the course, he found his way to No. 18, where he saw the “yellow leaderboards” of his earlier dreams, asked his caddie Austin Kaiser to accompany him on his walk and thought, “You’re about to have your moment here.”
He led by three points. Two groups behind him still had to finish. It didn’t seem that important. Asked later to rank his round, Schauffele said: “At the top. The best round I’ve played.”
“Oh my God,” Kaiser said. “It just keeps happening. Wow. He played unbelievable. It’s probably the best round he’s ever played.”
Sunday’s back-nine birdies at Nos. 11, 13, 14 and 16, which separated him from playing partner Justin Rose, third-round leader Billy Horschel, newcomer Thriston Lawrence, a fading Scheffler and others, seemed almost light and airy, even from 16 feet (No. 13) and 13 feet (No. 14). They seemed designed to ratify a post-victory conversation Kaiser recalled in May with his friends just after the PGA Championship, when one of them said to Schauffele, “Do you feel lighter?” Schauffele replied, “Yes, I do.” His chip over a bunker to No. 16 looked scary at first and beautiful as he shaped it. He said hello to the hole and huddled four feet away.
Even Rose’s caddie, Mark Fulcher, said it was “nice not to have to pay for a ticket and be able to go to the game because it was fantastic.” He said of Schauffele, “He’s also a really nice guy. You almost wish he was a bit of a jerk,” but he’s “a top-notch guy.”
“He seemed to have everything under control,” Kaiser said of an event in which the wind from the Firth of Clyde left no one in control of anything until it finally subsided on Sunday.
“I thought that decisive victory would help me,” Schauffele said in an on-course interview, “and it did. I felt a sense of calm, a calm that I didn’t have when I played the PGA.” He said in his news conference: “I held on to it, and there was no way I was going to let go.”
Rose shot a superb 67 to tie for second at 7 under par, then said of Schauffele: “He plays with a certain freedom, which tells you as a competitor that he probably doesn’t feel a lot of bad things.” Horschel shot a superb 68 to tie Rose, then said of Schauffele: “He’s the second-best player in the world. » As Schauffele rose, the tournament almost became secondary as Lawrence impressed with a 68 to finish at 6 under par, Russell Henley shot a 69 to finish at 5 under par, Shane Lowry recovered from his painful 77 on Saturday to shoot a 68 to finish at 4 under par, and Scheffler threatened a shot or two back until he reached No. 9 and three-putted from 6 feet, 7 inches to elicit a double bogey and groans of commiseration from the crowd gathered around.
He finished tied for seventh at -1, while he himself, the first player since Arnold Palmer in 1962 to win six tournaments at that point in the year, including the Masters, became an afterthought to Schauffele’s unbroken excellence. Suddenly the subject shifted from Scheffler’s dominance to Schauffele’s completeness.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not,” Schauffele said of the “full” round, “but I’m definitely going to believe it’s true because we’re here. … It’s a completely different style of golf. It forces you to play different shots and ball positions. There’s so much risk and reward when the wind blows 20 mph and it starts raining (like Saturday). There’s so many different variables that come into play. It’s really an honor to win this. For me, it’s huge. For me, winning the Scottish Open (in 2022) was huge because it meant my game could travel. So to double that and win a major in Scotland, it’s even cooler.”
He had won two majors of a much different caliber, one with so many birdies in the sun that it took 21 under to win it and the other with so much wind damage that it spoke volumes about his toughness. He had won one with admirable dampening of the tremors and another with an enviable depth of calm. “We knew it,” his father said. “You see, we knew it because he had seconds in every tournament. So we knew his versatility, didn’t we?” He concluded: “Who is the biggest threat or the biggest potential for the next Grand Slam of his career? I would say, ‘Just look at the numbers.’”
One of the numbers read “65” on that dreamy yellow board Sunday night, its hand-lettered letters bearing the message “WELL DONE XANDER,” and a young man known for being shy and affable held the Bordeaux carafe before a phalanx of photographers. He continued to smile calmly, rather than his electric Louisville grins. It seemed as if, technically, he had come back to earth.