TROON, Scotland — In 2014, in Akron, Ohio, at the old WGC-Bridgestone event, I caught Adam Scott after a round and asked him a question I'd wanted to ask for a long time: Do we—the media, the fans, even the players—put too much of an emphasis on the majors? I thought his answer would be "yes." Scott had won his one and only major a year before, at the Masters, but was still considered an underachiever by the major metric. I thought it would frustrate him enough to argue against the majors, but his answer surprised me.
"No, I like majors,” he said. "That’s just the way the game’s evolved … history has shown that the greatest players have ended up accumulating the most of these tournaments, and I think it’s probably a fair assessment of who the greatest players over time have been in each decade and each era. So I’m happy with the way everyone sees that.”
He was right, and I bring it up now because Xander Schauffele has just won his second major of the year at the Open Championship, and this is quite literally the only result that could have thrown the 2024 Player of the Year debate into complete chaos. Before Sunday at Troon, there was no discussion—it belonged to Scheffler, and it wasn't particularly close. Now that somebody has pocketed two majors, though, we're entering into the muddy debate that I brought up with Scott: Do majors matter so much more that they eclipse week-to-week excellence? Is Schauffele's achievement so historic that it overcomes Scheffler's stellar year?
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In 2024, Schauffele has won just two events, but they were both majors—the PGA Championship and this week's Open. He's been excellent everywhere, with a flood of top-10s and a second-place finish at both the Players and the Wells Fargo. Even before the Open, he was second on the FedEx Cup points list, and was the consensus second-best player of the season after Scheffler. That's important, because it's not like he won two majors and missed a bunch of cuts. He's been phenomenal—second in scoring average, second in total strokes gained, a top-10 putter, best scrambler in the game, third in strokes gained/tee to green. Again, those stats are from before this week. In a world without Scheffler, he'd be the runaway player of the year.
But Scheffler exists, and Scheffler has been phenomenal. He won the Masters. He won the Players, which is as close as you can get to winning a major without winning a major (and he beat Schauffele down the stretch in that one to boot). He won Bay Hill, the RBC Heritage, the Memorial and the Travelers. That's a ridiculous six wins, and the stats back up the trophies—he's No. 1 in almost every category except putting, where he only has to be average to rack up a ton of wins.
So does six wins, including one major and one almost-major beat two majors?
No. The majors simply matter so much more for legacy and history and fan interest and field strength and hype and pressure that they exist in a different stratosphere. Win two in the same year and you're not just bulletproof, you're legend. The list of players who have done it this century is brief and elite: Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, Padraig Harrington, Rory, Spieth, Koepka. If you made a list of the 10 best players of the century, every single one of them would be on it. Xander Schauffele has added his name to that list, and that fact alone trumps any number of lesser wins.
That conclusion would be true in any year, but it's especially true in 2024, when, due to the PGA Tour-LIV Golf schism, the majors are the only time the best players in the world all meet. For instance: Bryson DeChambeau had a brilliant year, is probably third in any realistic ranking and Xander Schauffele had to beat him for both of his wins, while Scheffler only had to beat him for one of his six. It would be the height of stupidity to say that Scheffler's non-Masters wins aren't impressive, but it's undeniable that the degree of difficulty is lower since players like DeChambeau, Rahm and so many others left.
And let's be honest: the way Xander won his two majors also matters. At the PGA, he won a high-scoring horse race and buried the clutch putt of the season to clinch it. At Troon, he passed a very different kind of test, proved he had the creativity and variety on a tough links course that some of his contemporaries lacked, and did it without ever having played the course before. The finale was staggering—he decimated a supposedly invincible back nine under Sunday pressure to the tune of 31. It was the most complete display of excellence in a big event that we've seen this year.
Luke Walker/R&A
He's also a more complete player than Scheffler, for the simple fact that he's one of the game's best putters. Scheffler ranks 90th of 172 on the PGA Tour. That's an improvement from previous years, and it lets him win events due to his unearthly ball striking, but it's still average at best. This week, Scheffler ranked 131st in the field in putting, and there's an easy argument to be made that this deficiency cost him not only a chance to win here, but a chance to win at Pinehurst and Valhalla. There is nothing average about Schauffele's game, even if, like every other player on the planet, his ball-striking is a notch below Scheffler's. The fact that there's no vacancy in his putting game is the reason he won this week and why he won at Valhalla.
I'm not saying that total wins don't matter, but majors matter so much more that when it comes to deciding the player of the year, Schauffele should be elevated above Scheffler. Austin Kaiser, Schauffele's caddie, had thought of the issue even before the Open win and while he called what Scheffler had done "unbelievable" and "bonkers," he too knows how important the majors are.
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"They're obviously valuable if you have a best player that's never won a major," he said, using the title once applied to Schauffele to make the point of how prominent these four tournaments are. "Someone asked me, 'would you rather a claret jug or another gold medal?' claret jug. Your legacy at the end of the day is majors. If you're stacking up majors, that's where you get your footprint in history."
After this win, Schauffele has his footprint in history. The season isn't over, they'll continue to fight through the FedEx Cup finals and one or both may stack up even more wins along the way. None of that matters. Schauffele has done something so special that it already surpasses even Scheffler's achievements and nothing can ever change it. This particular bit of history is written, and no matter what else 2024 brings, he's the player of the year.
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Is it the British Open or the Open Championship? The name of the final men’s major of the golf season is a subject of continued discussion. The event’s official name, as explained in this op-ed by former R&A chairman Ian Pattinson, is the Open Championship. But since many United States golf fans continue to refer to it as the British Open, and search news around the event accordingly, Golf Digest continues to utilize both names in its coverage.
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