After getting lapped by the Rory McIlroy buzzsaw during the final round of the 2024 Wells Fargo Championship last May, Xander Schauffele shook hands on the 18th green with his longtime caddie Austin Kaiser and pulled him in close. “We’ll get one soon, kid,” he said.
It had been 22 months since Schauffele had tasted victory, but none of that mattered at that moment for Kaiser. His spirits were buoyed by his boss’s self-belief.
“I’m like, yeah, Xander truly believes it,” he said.
“Soon” arrived very soon, just seven days later, as Schauffele shattered the narrative that he couldn’t close by sinking a 5-foot birdie putt at the 18th hole at Valhalla Golf Club to end a nearly two-year winless spell. He posted an impressive final-round 6-under 65 to claim the 106th PGA Championship and his first major championship.
“I just heard everyone roaring and I just looked up to the sky in relief,” Schauffele said.
That final birdie was the difference in edging Bryson DeChambeau and shooting a 72-hole total of 21-under 263, the lowest score in relation to par at a major championship. Winning his eighth career PGA Tour title (he added the British Open two months later to improve to nine), demanded patience, perseverance and true grit.
Schauffele entered the week as the only player in the top five of the Official World Golf Ranking without a major championship. He’d had several close calls at big events, including blowing the lead two months earlier at the Players Championship.
“I’ll lick my wounds and right back to it next week,” he said after that disappointment in March. Getting back to it meant not letting what others were saying bother him.
“People begin to talk and the narrative…it’s so easy to listen to that,” said Chris Como, who became his swing instructor in 2024.
Xander Schauffele’s dad is one of the PGA Tour’s great characters
Schauffele had been coached by his father, Stefan, an Olympic decathlete, since he was a kid. Stefan wouldn’t allow Xander to look at video of his swing until he deemed it perfect. But he taught him to swing his swing, a move that looks simple and produced remarkably consistent results.
Stefan became one of the Tour’s great characters amid the traveling circus. “He walks around looking like a Cuban drug lord half the time,” Xander joked of his dad, nicknamed Ogre, who typically wore dark shades and dressed in linen and a Panama hat while smoking his trademark cigar. But over the Christmas break in 2023, Stefan sat his son down and said it was time for him to win a major. To do so, he was ready to take a backseat and just be dad.
“He felt like I was in a good place to just sort of let go of the steering wheel,” Xander said.
Having relocated from the West Coast to Florida, Schauffele began working with Como, who has taught the likes of Tiger Woods and DeChambeau in the past. They didn’t make wholesale changes, just getting the club more on plane and his shoulders steeper. Combined with his gym work, he had added another gear.
“He’s hitting it even further,” Justin Thomas said during last year’s PGA. “As good as he drove it, now he’s doing the same, just 15 yards further.”
What he’d been working on began to click, which made losing the week before the PGA Championship easier to swallow.
“I started to hit some shots where I was like, dang, I feel like I haven’t hit these shots in a long time or maybe even ever,” Schauffele said. “I was super-excited because Valhalla was next week and I heard that if there was a course close to Valhalla it was Quail Hollow. I was jazzed and just trying to focus on what was up ahead and not what just had happened.”
His father may not have been lurking in the shadows during PGA week but he still played a significant role, sending positive texts, including one of his favorite sayings on Saturday night: a steady drip caves the stone. But he wrote it in German—Steter Tropfen hohlt den Stein—and Xander needed a translation.
“Everything that’s sort of up in my brain mentally has been fed to me by my dad, and probably from some sort of German philosopher way back when,” Schauffele said. “I believe that if you put in the hard work and you let yourself do what you think you can do, you’re going to have some fruits to the labor. I’ve felt like I’ve been on this sort of trending path for quite some time. I really had to stay patient and keep the self-belief up, and I was able to do both those things.”
Schauffele is a member of the celebrated “Class of 2011,” but he was often lost in the shuffle as others in that group—such as Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas—got the accolades and collected their majors. Not that Schauffele didn’t have his chances at winning hardware, including finishing T-2 at the 2018 British Open and 2019 Masters, and recording 12 top-10 finishes in majors.
Kaiser had a good feeling about his man’s chances at Valhalla. When Colt Knost, the CBS commentator and podcast host, asked him about a month before who he thought would win the PGA, Schauffele’s caddie, who had been his teammate at San Diego State, named his boss.
“[Knost] said, ‘Why do you say that?’ And I go, ‘Zoysia [grass]. He’s played very well on it, it’s a long-ball hitters’ course and we’re hitting the hell out of it right now.’ And I was like, ‘He’s gonna do it there.’ Colt said, ‘I’m gonna pick you, don’t let me down,’ ” recounted Kaiser.
Schauffele raced out of the gate with a course-record 9-under 62, setting a PGA Championship record and notching just the fourth 62 in major championship history. (Shane Lowry became the fifth in the third round, while Schauffele became the first player to shoot 62 at a major and win.)
“For the rest of our sakes,” Thomas said, “I hope he doesn’t shoot any more 9-unders.”
Schauffele settled for a pair of 68s, closing with consecutive birdies on Saturday to share the 54-hole lead with Collin Morikawa. It was the first time since Tiger Woods, in the summer of 2000, that a player led or co-led after six straight tournament rounds in consecutive weeks.
A bunched leaderboard and soft, receptive greens meant Schauffele knew he’d have to be aggressive on Sunday. He targeted 22-under as the winning score in what turned into a three-horse race between Schauffele, DeChambeau and Norway’s Viktor Hovland, who finished third, three back.
Schauffele opened his final round by walking in an uphill 30-foot birdie putt. He showed a magician’s touch at the fourth, dropping a delicate 54-yard pitch out of thick rough inside 5 feet. He holed a 15-foot par putt at No. 6, calling it “big for me.” At 7, he splashed out of the front greenside bunker at the par 5 and made another birdie putt. His lead grew to two with a birdie at No. 9, hoisting a short iron to 11 feet and sinking the putt to turn in 31.
His only hiccup of the day came at the par-5 10th, the easiest hole on the course, lipping out a 6-foot par putt. When Hovland birdied ahead of him, his third birdie in a four-hole stretch, Schauffele had lost the lead.
“I was like, ‘Oh, boy, is this going to happen again?’ ” Schauffele recalled.
During his winless drought, Schauffele had tried various approaches to looking at the leaderboard. This Sunday, he decided to look at them every chance he got.
“I really wanted to feel everything,” he said.
Playing the 11th hole, he spied a big board and the reality of the moment sunk in. “I thought I had the lead, so when I looked up at the board I was like, oof, I saw Hovie was at 19, so I was back into chasing mode.”
It was time for Schauffele to live another of his father’s positive messages, the type he used to leave in his scorecard as a nine-year-old playing in Southern California Junior events: “Commit, Execute, Accept.” Schauffele bounced back from the bogey with consecutive birdies at 11 and 12 to reach 20 under.
“He showed grit, and that’s who he is as a person,” Kaiser said. “He’s gonna fight until the end.”
So, too, did DeChambeau, who received a fortuitous break at No. 16 when he pulled his tee shot left and the ball spit out of the trees into the middle of the fairway.
“I said ‘thank you’ to the tree,” DeChambeau joked. Then he drilled an 8-iron to 3 feet and made birdie to improve to 19 under and one back. DeChambeau got up and down at the par-5 18th to tie for the lead and broke into celebration.
Meanwhile, Schauffele kept scraping out pars from holes 13 through 17. Drip, drip, drip against the rock. As he walked up to his second shot on the final regulation hole knowing a birdie would win and a par meant a playoff, it was time to commit and execute once again. He refused to accept the alternative of going to extra holes.
“Bryson was making some noise and kept going on runs,” Schauffele said. “I just kept telling myself, man, someone out there is making me earn this right now. I just kept grinding. I get up there and just kind of chuckled. I was like, if you want to be a major champion, this is the kind of stuff you have to deal with.”
Schauffele’s tee shot strayed left into trouble. Standing inside a fairway bunker and with his ball on grass above his feet, Schauffele choked up on a 4-iron and took a baseball-like cut that drew just short of the green on the split fairway to set up a pitch that he hit to 6 feet.
“He knew what he had to make on 18, and that’s what great players do,” said Morikawa, his playing partner that day.
There still was a moment of indecision on the winning putt. Initially, as he walked up from his chip, he determined he should aim for the left edge. But as he settled over the ball he wavered on the read, which suddenly appeared to be right edge. He had a moment of panic.
“Of course, I’d have this moment when I’m trying to win my first major,” he said.
But then he reminded himself that he holed about 80 percent of putts from this range. He told himself to stay in his flow, ignore the fact that his hands were shaking, that the moment wasn’t too big for him. He opted to play it straight, telling himself the longer he mulled it over, the more his percentage of holing it would drop. Off the blade, he thought it might lip out. His heart dropped but luckily it lipped in and suddenly he was engulfed in cheers and the monkey was off his back.
Schauffele spread his arms wide and looked to the sky as the putt slid in. He joined Phil Mickelson (2005) and Payne Stewart (1989) as the only PGA champions to win by one after making birdie on the 72nd hole.
Before returning to the 18th green for the trophy presentation, Schauffele quickly called his father: “Three more to go,” his dad declared, already thinking ahead to the career Grand Slam. It’s among the goals the Schauffeles wrote down long ago. “That’s the way he raised me,” Schauffele said of his dad. “You finally got one, might as well clip off a few more.”
He told wife Maya to hang up for him as his father was bawling into the phone and it was making him too emotional. Maya didn’t grow up around golf, but in the 11 years they’ve been together she’s learned what these big moments mean: She’d seen him celebrate a Ryder Cup win and an Olympic gold medal in Tokyo in 2021, but sensed that winning a major was bigger.
“Winning the gold medal was such an achievement,” she said, “but something about the majors, you know, when I hear all these guys talking about having a major on your belt just is all-time, so I think this means the world to him.”
All those collective drips had finally broken the rock and shut down the narrative that he couldn’t close, that he was too soft to win a major. But Schauffele, who jumped to No. 2 in the world, was already talking about how his work was far from over. There were more boxes to be checked, more mountains to climb.
“I got one good hook up there in the mountain up on that cliff, and I’m still climbing,” he said. “I might have a beer up there on that side of the hill there and enjoy this, but it’s not that hard to chase when someone is so far ahead of you.”
Having validated all his hard work at Valhalla, Schauffele has set his sights on another major peak at Quail Hollow.
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