Xander Schauffele wins British Open, capturing his second major of the year

TROON, Scotland – On a course adjacent an airport, a 30-year-old golfer from San Diego seemed to leave the ground Sunday and commence gliding above as if oblivious to the fray below. His back nine, so artful and tranquil, felt almost as though he had used the runway just behind No. 10 to start floating overhead like one of those lazy-day planes, the engine barely audible but its hum clearly untouchable. In a callous sport with a furious week of weather, the clear winner wound up looking downright pristine.

Among the many paths to winning golf majors, there’s the one where the mastery looks just about spotless, and that’s the one Xander Schauffele took to his deeply calm win at the 152nd British Open. It’s not just that his final-round 65 and his back-nine 31 stood as the best numbers of the 80 players at Royal Troon, or that they provided the two-shot win at 9 under par after he had started one shot back. It’s how it looked and felt, and it looked and felt like something even the imagination wouldn’t dare entertain. Schauffele wound up disconnected from a bunched leader board, from his bygone image as a chronic contender who couldn’t quite reign and from all known reasonable limitations going forward.

“A wonderful next 10 years,” his father and first coach, Stefan, predicted without committing hubris or nonsense.

The hard facts said Xander Schauffele, who couldn’t snare any of his first 27 tries at majors despite 12 top-10 finishes, has gone and snared two of the past three. They said he became the first male player since Brooks Koepka in 2018 to win two majors in one season and the first since Rory McIlroy in 2014 to win the PGA Championship and the British Open. They said he has joined with a dizzying haste those in this era with two major titles – from No. 1 Scottie Scheffler to Jon Rahm to Collin Morikawa to Bryson DeChambeau to Justin Thomas, among others – but, better than that, he has joined players such as Morikawa and Zach Johnson among those whose two major titles include one here on the links, shouting his versatility.

They said all that, but Sunday’s round said something else with its outlying cleanliness. It told of a guy whose breakthrough in May in Louisville had taken his trademark calm from considerable to mighty. With his game in the clouds on a gray day featuring cool air ideal for a long walk on the beach by the course, he found his way to No. 18, where he saw the “yellow leaderboards” of his prior dreams, asked caddie Austin Kaiser to join him in his walk and said to himself, “You’re about to have your moment here.”

He led by three. Two groups behind him still had to finish. This did not seem all that relevant. Asked later to rank his round, Schauffele said: “At the very tiptop. Best round I’ve played.”

“Oh, my God,” Kaiser said. “It just keeps coming. Wow. He played unbelievably. This is probably the best round he’s ever played.”

The back-nine birdies Sunday on Nos. 11, 13, 14 and 16, separating him from playing partner Justin Rose, third-round leader Billy Horschel, upstart Thriston Lawrence, a fading Scheffler and the rest, looked almost light and airy even from 16 feet (No. 13) and 13 feet (No. 14). They looked as if they were designed to ratify a post-win conversation Kaiser recalled from May among his buddies just after the PGA Championship, when one said to Schauffele, “Do you feel lighter?” Schauffele replied, “Yeah, I do.” His chip over a bunker to No. 16 looked frightening as he began it and gorgeous as he fashioned it. It said hello to the hole and cuddled four feet away.

Even Rose’s caddie, Mark Fulcher, found it “nice to be able to not pay for a ticket and to watch it because it was fantastic.” He said of Schauffele: “He’s also quite nice, too. You’d almost like him to be a bit of a wanker,” but he’s “a top-notch guy.”

“He seemed he was in control of everything,” Kaiser said of an event where the wind off the Firth of Clyde left nobody in control of anything until it eased Sunday at last.

“I thought (the breakthrough win) would help me,” Schauffele said in an on-course interview, “and it actually did. I had this sense of calm, a calm I didn’t have when I played the PGA.” He said at his news conference, “I kind of grabbed on to it, and there was no chance I was going to let go of it.”

Rose shot a fine 67 to finish tied for second at 7 under, then said of Schauffele, “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.” Horschel shot a fine 68 to tie Rose, then said of Schauffele, “He’s the second-best player in the world.” As Schauffele lifted off, it almost became a secondary tournament as Lawrence impressed with a 68 to end up at 6 under, Russell Henley had a 69 to make 5 under, Shane Lowry recovered from his aching 77 of Saturday to shoot 68 and get to 4 under, and Scheffler menaced one or two strokes back until he reached No. 9 and three-putted from 6 feet, 7 inches to draw a double bogey and commiserating groans from the crowd bunched around.

He wound up tied for seventh at 1 under as even he – the first player since Arnold Palmer in 1962 to win an unthinkable six events by this point of the year, one of those the Masters – became a muffled sideshow set against Schauffele’s undisturbed excellence. Suddenly, the subject went from Scheffler’s dominance to Schauffele’s completeness.

“I don’t know if that’s true or not,” Schauffele said of the “complete” part, “but I’m definitely going to believe that’s true because here we are. … It’s a completely different style of golf. 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 (as it did Saturday). There’s so many different variables that come into play. It truly is an honor to win this. To me, it’s big. To me, winning the Scottish Open (in 2022) was big because it meant my game could travel. So to double that up and win a major in Scotland is even cooler.”

He had gone and won two majors of completely different tenor, one so sick with birdies in the sun that it required a score of 21 under to conquer and one so rife with windy inconvenience that it told something about sturdiness. He had done one with an admirable quash of trembling and one with an enviable depth of calm. “We knew that, though,” his father said. “See, that we knew because he had seconds in everything. So we knew the versatility, right?” He concluded: “Who is the greatest threat or potential for the next career Grand Slam? I would say, ‘Just look at the numbers.’ ”

One of the numbers showed “65” on that dreamy yellow leader board late Sunday, its hand-placed letters carried the message “WELL PLAYED XANDER,” and a young man known as shy and affable held the claret jug before a phalanx of photographers. He kept smiling calmly, rather than his electric grins of Louisville. It appeared that, technically, he had come back to earth.