Tag: 2024 British Open

TROON, Scotland – After Xander Schauffele won his first major championship at the PGA Championship in May and finished all of his media obligations, he and his caddie and wife and some close friends retired to their rental house to celebrate. Nothing was open at that hour so they found two bottles of whiskey and nearly polished them off between the six of them.

“It was a rough next morning,” Schauffele’s caddie Austin Kaiser said. “But we’re having drinks afterwards and one of our buddies is like, ‘You feel lighter?’ And he smiled. He was like, ‘Yeah, I do,’ ” Kaiser recalled Schauffele saying.

Victory at Valhalla removed the proverbial monkey from his back. No longer stuck with the label of being the best golfer never to win a major, Schauffele said he felt relief. At the 152^nd British Open, Schauffele doubled his pleasure and validated his major moment, shooting 6-under 65 in the final round at Royal Troon Golf Club on Sunday to win the Claret Jug by two strokes over Justin Rose and Billy Horschel.

“I mean, it’s a dream come true to win two majors in one year. It took me forever just to win one, and to have two now is something else,” Schauffele said.

In doing so, he became the first player since Brooks Koepka in 2018 to win two majors in a season. Schauffele carded four birdies on the final nine to turn a taut competition in which any of seven golfers seemed capable of hoisting the trophy to sucking all the drama out of the closing stretch and claiming his ninth career PGA Tour title with a 72-hole total of 9-under 275.

“Best round I’ve ever played,” said Schauffele, whose score was the best round of the day by two strokes and one of only two bogey-free rounds on the day.

“Now that he’s won two, it’s all up from here,” Kaiser said. “I told him, we got the lid off. Let’s just stack’em.”

BRITISH OPEN: Leaderboard | Photos

Kaiser and Schauffele, 30, both transferred to San Diego State at the same time in 2012 and Kaiser has been on his bag since he turned pro in 2015. Kaiser remembers their humble beginnings when they were playing mini-tour events on the Golden State Golf Tour and traveling together in Kaiser’s Honda Accord, staying in Candlewood Suites and cooking sausage and eggs on a hot plate.

Schauffele quickly proved to be a player of great promise but as he piled up 12 top-10 finishes and six top-5s in his first 27 major starts without a victory,  questions emerged whether he was a closer. In 2018, Schauffele was tied for the lead heading into the final round of the 2018 British Open at Carnoustie Golf Links in Scotland but carded a 2-over 72 in the final round and lost to Italy’s Francesco Molinari by 2.

“There’s calmness and super-stressful moments when you’re trying to win a major championship. I felt them in the past, the ones I didn’t win, and I let them get to me,” Schauffele said. “Today I felt like I did a pretty good job of weathering the storm when I needed to.”

In tricky conditions all week that turned Troon into a survival of the fittest, Schauffele was a model of plodding consistency, shooting rounds of 67-72-69 before his final-round brilliance. Conditions turned nastiest on Saturday afternoon with wind whipping and rain falling, but Schauffele managed to card four birdies in his first 10 holes before giving back shots at Nos. 11 and 18 to join a six-way logjam in second place, one stroke back.

On Sunday, with a brisk southwesterly wind blowing off the Firth of Clyde and gray skies, Schauffele showed great patience, starting with five pars before he went on the attack.

With nine holes to go, South Africa’s Thriston Lawrence held the lead, which was all the more remarkable given that he started the weekend 10 strokes back before shooting 65 on Saturday, tying for the low round of the week. He played his way into the final group and surged into the lead at 7 under with four more birdies on the front nine. But  the 27-year-old cooled off on the back nine, losing the lead with a bogey at No. 12. The four-time winner on the DP World Tour settled for his best career finish in a major, a solo fourth that earned him a spot in next year’s Masters.

The 43-year-old Rose was attempting to win his second major more than a decade after winning the 2013 U.S. Open. He had to go through final qualifying just to make the field and put up a valiant fight until he made bogey at No. 12. He closed with a birdie at the last and posted 4-under 67.

“I left it all out there,” Rose said. “I’m super proud of how I competed.”

Horschel, the 54-hole leader, pictured himself hoisting the Claret Jug before he went to bed but hit into a pot bunker off the tee at the third, found the sand at the famed Postage Par-3 eighth and short-sided himself at No. 10, leading to bogey each time.

“Ah, Billy, Billy, Billy, you’ve made three mistakes today,” he said to himself aloud as he headed to the 11^th tee. “Let’s clean it up.”

He did, signing for 68, but birdies on the final three holes came too late. Still, his T-2 finish is his best result in 43 majors.

Callum Scott won the Silver Medal for the low amateur at the Open, the first Scot to win the award since 2018.

But it was Schauffele who outshined the field, picking apart Troon’s vaunted back nine with birdies at the 11th, 13th, 14th and 16^th to seal the deal. Kaiser labeled the birdie at No. 11, the second-hardest hole of the day, as the turning point. That’s where Schauffele uncorked a drive that veered left and had Kaiser praying for a good break.

“Please cut, please cut or get a good ground kick,” he recalled thinking. “Luckily it did a little bit, I guess.”

Schauffele took advantage, planting a wedge inside 3 feet and knocking in the birdie putt — he was the only player in the field to make birdie there on Sunday — to climb to 6 under. He jarred a 16-foot birdie putt at 13 to reach 7 under and never relinquished the lead once Lawrence made bogey.

“Winning the first one helped me a lot today on the back nine,” Schauffele said. “I had some feeling of calmness come through. It was very helpful on what has been one of the hardest back nines I’ve ever played in a tournament.”

Until this season, Schauffele’s most notable title had been capturing a gold medal at the Olympics held in 2021 in Toyko. In May, he canned a 5-foot birdie putt on the 72^nd hole to outlast Bryson DeChambeau and win the PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky. With Scottie Scheffler, who finished T-7 after shooting 72, winning the Masters in April and DeChambeau the U.S. Open last month, this marks the first time since 1982 that all four majors were won by Americans and the first time since Tiger Woods won consecutive Opens in 2006-07 that Americans went back-to-back in the Open Championship. (Brian Harman won in 2023.) Schauffele said he watched the highlights of the last time the Open was played here in 2016 as motivation and it proved effective.

“He’s obviously now learning that the winning is easy,” said Rose, who played alongside Schauffele on Sunday. “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.”

Added Rose’s caddie Mark Fulcher: “When you see a round that good you take your hat off. He didn’t put a foot wrong. It was nice to be able to watch it and not have to buy a ticket because it was fantastic…You’d almost like him to be a bit of a wanker but he really couldn’t be nicer.”

In just a matter of nine weeks, Schauffele has flipped the narrative from being the nearly man who can’t close to being a serious contender for PGA Tour Player of the Year and bona fide Hall of Fame candidate. He possesses both the Wanamaker Trophy and the Claret Jug and earned the distinction of Champion Golfer of the Year. The lid is off and now Schauffele and Kaiser are going to try to keep stacking majors.