Xander Schauffele: ‘The majors are what drive me – I’m like a kid in a candy shop’

The best player never to have won a Major spectacularly put that right last year, but then injury struck and disrupted Xander Schauffele’s start to the new season. Now, ahead of his PGA Championship defence, Michael Catling caught up with the World No.3 to discuss his recovery and the frustrations that saw him defy doctors’ orders to make up for lost time

What is it about major championships that brings out the best in you?

That’s a question I’ve asked Xander Schauffele many times over the years, and I’m now asking it again as he hangs on the other end of a telephone line in Florida. He’s never quite been able to come up with an answer, but becoming a two-time Major champion merits a more serious discussion ahead of his PGA Championship title defence at Quail Hollow. His overall record in the Majors is, as I point out in this interview, nothing short of outstanding. He has made 31 starts since 2017, and 16 have ended in top 10s. Eight have been top fives, and two have ended with him clutching silverware.

Compare his percentage of top 20s with other greats of the game, and we start entering unprecedented levels. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger were in the low-to-mid 60s through their first 30 starts. Schauffele? Well, he’s closer to 80%. Which brings us back to my original question: What is it about Major Championships that brings out the best in Xander Schauffele?

“I’m not really sure,” he replies. “I really just enjoy it, I guess. And I think I just enjoy the Majors the most. I’m excited to play them, I’m excited to get on site, I’m excited to prepare. I’m older now, but no matter how old I get – from my first Major to now – it still feels like I’m a kid in a candy store when I’m at these facilities and fighting to win the tournaments.

“Even leading into the two I won last year (the PGA Championship and The Open), I was so excited to see a new venue at Troon and to go back to one (Valhalla) and try and get the job done there. Giving yourself a chance is what’s really fun at Majors. That’s what drives me as a golfer: the adrenaline rush, and that’s exemplified at the Majors.”

A bitter pill

It’s Friday morning in Palm Beach County, South Florida, and the World No.3 would much rather be playing 18 holes or having a kickabout with his wife in the back garden. Pretty soon he’ll be heading off for another check-up at the hospital to assess his recovery from an acute intercostal strain and cartilage tear.

This, he says, has been his life since the turn of the year. Rehab. Scans. And a very disrupted passage of practice and play. In the lead-up to the Masters, his doctor placed a limit on how many balls he could hit on the range – a restriction which proved difficult to follow. He’s learned from sitting on the couch that patience doesn’t come easily for him.

“It’s been my first go at it really, sitting out for a significant period and watching other guys play, so it has been frustrating,” he admits. “But it is what it is. At first, it was a tough pill to swallow. But I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m making these decisions for my long-term health. I’ve been super lucky up until this point.”

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Schauffele’s injury occurred just before Christmas. “There were some (alarm) bells that I ignored,” he admits of the pain, but he kept training and golfing until he made it worse. “It was kind of a perfect storm. My trainer had to go back, renew his visa. I was left on my own, and apparently, I’m still a toddler. I’m used to having someone hold my hand. I didn’t get any help, and I think that is sort of what put my back against the wall.”

He tried to play through the pain at the season opener in Hawaii and then made an ill-advised trip to play in TGL two days later. He shut his season down after that, missing the entire West Coast swing, including two events at his favoured Torrey Pines in his hometown of San Diego. He didn’t hit another golf ball again for seven and a half weeks.

“It’s been a slow recovery, the ribcage seems to be a nagging, slowish recovery area due to a lack of blood flow and the constant use,” says Schauffele. “I just wanted to be 100% before I returned and sacrificed a bit on this front end (of the season) to make sure the back end is safe. I probably should have taken that first TGL match off… maybe I would have been able to come back sooner, but that’s just hindsight. Coaches always used to say to me that any time you are not working, somebody else is getting better than you. And that’s always stuck with me.”

After falling to third, behind Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler in the Official World Golf Ranking, Schauffele played nine holes for the first time on March 1 and made his comeback at the Arnold Palmer Invitational five days later. It was no surprise, therefore, to see him struggling at Bay Hill.

“I got my ass kicked,” was how he described his round of 77 after walking off the course. The next day was better. He made the cut on the number after a one-under 71 and did it again at the Players Championship a week later. Not that he was overly pleased with the performance that got him there.

“Really bad,” he said after his second round. “Just not very good. Not hitting it close enough, to duffing chips, to missing every fairway, to hitting fairways, to missing greens – it’s pretty gross, to be completely honest. The game feels pretty bad.”

He spent the afternoon “blowing out his pitch count” to address the sorry state of his game. It didn’t help. He shot an 81 on Sunday, his worst round since October 2017, and finished 25 shots behind the leaders on 13 over par, dead last among golfers who made the cut.

“I feel like I’m cramming for a test,” was how Schauffele summed up his state of mind recently. “What my dad taught me a long time ago was to look at the ball and react to the ball and not to how your swing looks. I think I’ve gotten a little too nitpicky on swinging the club correctly and trying to get back in a good pattern when I was playing really good golf. Sometimes, when you just focus on the task at hand, versus the result, you can get yourself there.”

There were better signs at the Valspar Championship, where he continued to work overtime between rounds to get “the bad swings” out of his system. It seemed to pay off during the final round as he climbed 28 places up the leaderboard and equalled the round of the day with a five-under 66. But he still wasn’t satisfied.

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“My brain feels like it’s going to explode after some bad days of golf,” was his assessment after extending his cut streak to 60 events. “But it was nice to sort of end this stretch with a 5-under.”

It’s a testament to the standards he’s set himself that his ‘bad’ – a 12th place finish at the Valspar – is still better than pretty much everyone’s good day on tour. Speaking to TG some weeks earlier, Schauffele said he was coming back with low expectations. It took 12 rounds and a scoring average that was four strokes more than last year to blow that out of the water. A bit like his pitch count.

“I don’t want to sit back and be like, ‘It’s OK to play bad because you haven’t played (much),’ he explained. “I want to come back and play well. I expect that of myself.”

So far, that hasn’t happened, but golf has a way of humbling even the best players. The only surprise is that it’s taken this long to hit a bump in the road.

The rebuild

Eighteen months ago, Schauffele was sitting in a steakhouse in West Palm Beach when he decided to make the biggest change of his career. His father Stefan had always been his swing coach, but going 0-27 in Major starts convinced the younger Schauffele that he needed more than just a new physio and personal trainer.

He also needed a new set of eyes to help find the missing piece in his game that would help him get over the line in the biggest events. He started staring into those eyes as he chewed down on his steak, then asked the man across the table to become his full-time swing coach.

Chris Como accepted as Stefan retreated, quite literally, into the jungle where he is building a family compound on a plot of farmland in Hawaii. With his father’s blessing, Como and trainer David Sundberg got to work on some subtle but significant changes that would improve Schauffele’s speed and position at the top of his backswing, as well as his release pattern. 

It was a risky move, given the struggles Viktor Hovland was enduring at the same time, but the pay-off was instant. He was driving it further and hitting it closer. Three top 10s in his first three starts of 2024 gave his coaches the confidence that they were on the right track. The PGA Championship gave Schauffele the validation that he had ascended to the next level.

“That first one at Valhalla, the PGA, was so big for me,” Schauffele says. “It was great to get the monkey off my back. That picture of me at 18 with my hands up, looking up to the sky, that was pure relief to finally get to the top of the mountain. Not winning a Major was hanging over me. It freed me up and gave me the confidence I needed.”

That freedom could be seen in the creativity and variety he then displayed across all four days at Royal Troon. Despite having never played the course before, he gained over 10 shots on the field with his iron play and birdied the Postage Stamp three days in a row. The only day he didn’t was on Sunday, but that was OK as he played the “best round” of his life with six birdies and no bogeys. Perhaps more impressively, he never faced a par putt longer than 2ft 10 inches.

Even his peers were gracious in their praise as he became only the second player, after Jack Nicklaus, to shoot 65 or lower in the final round to win a Major more than once.

“He’s obviously now learning that the winning is easy,” said Justin Rose, who was paired with Schauffele in the final round. “He has a lot of horsepower, do you know what I mean? In the sense of, he’s good with a wedge, he’s great with a putter, he hits the ball a long way, obviously his iron play is strong. So he’s got a lot of weapons out there.

“I think probably one of his most unappreciated strengths is his mentality. He’s such a calm guy out there. I don’t know what he’s feeling, but he certainly makes it look very easy. He plays with a freedom, which kind of tells you as a competitor, that he’s probably not feeling a ton of the bad stuff. He’s got a lot of runway ahead and a lot of exciting stuff ahead, I’m sure.”

In a world without Scottie Scheffler, more would probably be made of just how good Schauffele was last year. He played like he had a season ticket to the leaderboard. Across 22 starts, there were three seconds and 10 other top 10s, sitting alongside the two wins and the joint lowest round in Major Championship history at Valhalla.

On the PGA Tour, he ended the season with the lowest bogey percentage (9.5%) on record. He was also top for scrambling, second for scoring average, sixth for iron play, 10th for driving, and 12th for putting. It was a phenomenal year by anyone’s standards, but not good enough to escape the shadow of Scheffler. When his peers were asked to vote for the PGA Tour Player of the Year, 91% went for his rival. Did that not bother him?

“I’m not really a spotlight guy,” he says, without actually answering the question. “One of the things my dad taught me was to let your clubs talk, and the rest will take care of itself. I like to stay in my lane, and my team and everyone around me keep me super grounded. Whoever’s at the top deserves the attention. And I’m not that person.”

He is entering new territory, though. For so long he was seen as the best player to never win a Major, but now he is two Majors away from completing the Grand Slam. The first thing his caddie, Austin Kaiser, said to him after winning the PGA Championship was, “Let’s go for the Grand Slam.”

Schauffele has previously told TG that he is better suited to winning a US Open or Masters, so by that metric he is already ahead of the curve by winning the other two. A tie for 8th at Augusta National last month means a Green Jacket will have to wait for another year, but it is worth pointing out that he is on a run of five successive top 10s in Major championships. It leads me to ask what would represent a successful season having set such a high bar for himself.

“I do think winning another Major would be extremely special,” he says. “I know how hard that’s going to be, but even if I can give myself a chance in a couple of them, that’d make me super happy. I feel like I’m behind the eight ball, just with this slow start to the year, so 2025 kind of feels like a bit of a chase. I just need to get my act together as quickly as possible.”

It helps that he will be defending the PGA Championship this week at Quail Hollow, a course where he has finished runner-up in each of the last two seasons. It’s not quite a happy hunting ground, but he can at least draw confidence from the fact that Valhalla is seen to be the closest fit to Quail Hollow out of every Tour course in America.

“I mean, last year I did play really well at Quail Hollow, even though Rory rinsed me, by what, five shots at the end,” says Schauffele. “Knowing that Valhalla was the most like Quail Hollow out of all Tour courses gave me confidence, knowing that I just played this monster golf course pretty well.

“This year it’s a case of pulling from good feelings again. It’s a place where I’ve felt comfortable and been close twice before. I haven’t gotten over the hump there yet, but if I can get myself to a nice spot come the PGA, then I’ll feel very excited.”