TROON, Scotland – Count PGA Championship winner Xander Schauffele among the American golfers who love crossing the pond to play some authentic links golf, that band of earth where land and sea come together, in the summertime.
Schauffele, 30, is set to make his seventh appearance at the British Open this week here at Royal Troon. His best result is T-2 at the 2018 Open at Carnoustie. When the landscape is a links course, the mysteries are many, and the bounces good and bad, but rarely anything in between.
“I think links golf, there’s a certain attitude that you need to have to play at a high level. That comes with playing links golf. That’s sort of the first thing I learned when I was here,” Schauffele said on Tuesday during the pre-championship interview. “When you play parkland golf a lot, you feel like you need to be perfect and on. Not that you need to be perfect or on, but on a typical links golf course, there’s always several ways to play a hole. If the weather gets really bad, you just have to, as always, take the bunkers out of play and really try and plot your way around the property. It doesn’t have to be super pretty. You don’t have to hit the center of the face all the time. When it’s 50 degrees and raining, center contact doesn’t even feel like it anyways.”
Schauffele was asked to describe his first experience playing links golf and recalled a visit he made to Bandon Dunes in Oregon, which is home to five of the top 25 modern designs on Golfweek’s Best Modern list.
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“That’s probably the closest thing to links that I’ve ever played. Maybe it’s a little bit better now since it’s a lot older. I played it – shoot, I’m old now – probably 15 years ago. Makes me feel really old saying that,” he said. “Bandon Dunes was rather new when I went. You played the ball down, and the ball was running and Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes were the two courses built. Now there’s 10.
“It was cold and rainy, and I remember playing every hole in the wind and rain. My rain gear was completely irrelevant at some point, and I just kept going. I was 13 or 14 or 15 years old-ish and had the time of my life. It was something that I’d never experienced. I just expect it when I go to play links golf. I expect bad weather for it to play tough and for people to complain and whine. If you have a good attitude, you get that edge.”
Indeed, Bandon is about as good as it gets on this side of the pond.
Schauffele, the world No. 3, is one of two players along with Bryson DeChambeau to finish inside the top 10 in the first three majors this season – he also finished T-8 at the Masters and T-7 at the U.S. Open to go along with his victory at the PGA at Valhalla. Schauffele’s fondness for links golf makes him an ideal candidate to share the sentiments of five-time British Open winner Tom Watson.
“I’ve always hoped,” Watson once said, “that the last day of golf I play before I die will be 36 holes on the links of Scotland.”
