British Open 2024: ‘At the very tip top”—Why Xander’s 65 at Troon outranks the 65 at Valhalla as his career best

TROON, Scotland — There was no hesitancy in his voice in replying to the question, almost as if Xander Schauffele had already asked and answered it privately in the few moments before meeting the press after getting his hands on the claret jug and receiving the title Champion Golfer of the Year. A bogey-free 65 on Sunday at Royal Troon to win the British Open is an impressive accomplishment. It’s just that two months earlier he shot a 65 to win the PGA Championship.

So … where then does this one rank?

“At the very tip top,” Schauffele said emphatically. “Best round I’ve played.”

That’s not meant as a slight to his achievement at Valhalla Country Club, where birdies came in bunches but the pressure of winning a first major title made gathering each and every one of them a challenge. Rather, it was an affirmation of how much the 30-year-old San Diego native has grown as a golfer. Schauffele had proven himself capable of handling burly super-sized American monoliths, having won eight times on the PGA Tour and comfortably beign regarding among the best players in the game. By contrast, mastering a quintessential links course on the west coast of Scotland, a staple of the Open rote yet a venue he had never seen until Monday, wasn’t something Schauffele was predisposed to accomplish.

“It's a completely different style of golf,” Schauffele said of Troon. “It makes you play shots and have different ball positions. There's so much risk/reward when the wind's blowing 20 miles an hour and it starts raining. There's so many different variables that come into play.”

It’s why Schauffele was committed to coming over early, as he has for the past few years, to adjust to the time change, the deep bunkers, the finer sand, the slower greens.

“Literally everything is completely different than what we do over in the states,” he said.

If Schauffele wasn’t convinced he could handle this type of golf before Sunday, he went a long way to doing it on Saturday during a third round that had rain and wind and everything but cats and dogs thrown at the players. Amid the chaos, Schauffele shot 69, walked off the course soaking wet yet uttered 10 memorable words: “I love my job, and I love playing over here.”

On Sunday, he showed he had mastered the game in a way he hadn’t in his previous 629 rounds on tour.

“He played great at the PGA, but it was way more of a challenge today,” said Austin Kaiser, Schauffele’s childhood friend and long-time caddie. “You know the wind out here is not easy to judge. When he’s on, you could kind of get a little more aggressive. That’s something we learned after Valhalla was like, you got to go get it. You can’t just sit around and play for pars out here. These guys are too good, you know, so it was more of like attack.

“You could see it in his eyes. He was just like, all right, what’s this play. It wasn’t like oh, what’s the safe shot here.”

It was a display that impressed Schuaffele’s peers as well, as if winning two majors in 64 days wasn’t enough proof of of his bona vides.

“He has a lot of horsepower, do you know what I mean?” said Justin Rose, who was paired with Schauffele on Sunday and shot a closing 67 that earned him a share of second. “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 ones 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.”

Before Schauffele, just one player has ever shot 65 or lower in the final round to win a major more than once—Jack Nicklaus. It’s never a bad thing to be paired with him.

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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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