GHIN
Earlier this year, I grabbed Xander Schauffele as he was leaving the driving range at Riviera Country Club and asked him what must have felt like a random question: What’s the most memorably bad shot he can remember hitting?
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He thought about it for a few seconds before landing on a definitive answer.
“I remember I was trying to get a college scholarship and I topped my tee shot in front of like six college coaches,” Schauffele said. “I remember looking up at them, trying not to stare at them, being like ‘This is really embarrassing. I probably just blew my chances of getting a scholarship anywhere.’”
The road to becoming a great golfer is rarely a linear path, and Schauffele is a good reminder of how silly it is to make definitive statements about someone’s potential, even though that kind of punditry plays better than nuance or restraint.
Schauffele didn’t exactly blow his chances of getting a scholarship, but for whatever reason, the biggest programs in college golf did shy away. He ended up at Long Beach State for a year, then transferred to San Diego State, where he became a third-team All-American. He was a decent prospect, eventually ranking in the Top 10 of the World Amateur Golf Rankings before he turned professional, but hardly a prodigy. In the first round of the 2014 U.S. Amateur, Schauffele lost 7&6 to Justin Tereshko, someone who ultimately never even tried to turn professional, and is now the head coach at Eastern Kentucky University.
Schauffele, however, gradually got better, earning his way onto the PGA Tour (just barely) in 2016 through the Web.com Tour Finals. He won twice that year and was the PGA Tour Rookie of the Year in 2016. He won the Tour Championship in 2017, a gold medal at the Olympics in 2020, and he finished in the Top 10 in nine of the first 18 majors he played in.
But along the way, something interesting happened: He started to take heat for being good, but never great. His consistency was weaponized against him.
Here is what one moronic pundit had to say after Rory McIlroy boat-raced Schauffele in the final round of the Wells Fargo earlier this year:
“I would go home right now if I were Xander and I would say ‘I don’t know if I’ve got it. I don’t know that I’m good enough to win against the best of the best. It would be kind of deflating and humiliating. I don’t want to pick on Xander, but he just never shows me something special.”
By the way, that moronic pundit? That was me.
I’m a big believer that if you offer a fiery take about someone, you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist when it is no longer supported by evidence.
This summer has been a necessary reminder that we probably shouldn’t shit on golfers when they are consistently good, but fail to break through and win. It wasn’t a character flaw that Schauffele didn’t win a major until this year, but it was frequently framed as one by people like me for the sake of argument.
“I don't think I'd ever look at it as lacking,” Schauffele said after he won the PGA Championship. “I looked at it as someone that is trying really hard and needs more experience. All those close calls for me, even last week, that sort of feeling, it gets to you at some point. It just makes this even sweeter.”
There are echoes of that fallacy in the idea that LeBron James' record in the Finals (4-6) can only be held against him in the GOAT debate. Michael Jordan, after all, went 6-0 in the Finals. He never lost, and James lost six times. But once you think about the logic of it, it falls apart. Wouldn’t Michael Jordan have loved four more chances at a ring? Why are all those times he lost to the Boston Celtics or Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference playoffs not held against him?
Putting yourself in contention is a good thing, even if it means it hurts a little more when you don’t finish first.
If anything, McIlroy might look at Schauffele’s two majors this year and feel like he’s on the right path, despite mounting criticism. He keeps putting himself in contention, and with a few different bounces, he could easily have won three majors (St. Andrews, LACC, Pinehurst) where he came up just short. Does that mean it will happen? Certainly not. In fact, Schauffele might be a better bet at this point to win the career Grand Slam than McIlroy. But McIlroy could also smash through a decade of disappointment and win two majors next year, and it wouldn’t feel all that surprising. Suddenly, all those near misses would feel like context.