The Harder the Better For Xander Schauffele, and Hopefully This Week Is His Best

The Californian's U.S. Open finishes: T5, T6, T3, 5th, T7. And he's in form statistically. So will this be the week for his major breakthrough?

BROOKLINE, Mass. — When your worst finish at a U.S. Open is seventh, it says a lot about what you love about the game of golf, in the case of Xander Schauffele it’s all about the harder the better.

That is why the 28-year-old figuratively salivates when he walks The Country Club grounds, a U.S. Open property he hasn’t been back to since the 2013 U.S. Amateur won by Englishman Matthew Fitzpatrick.

A property where Francis Ouimet as a 19-year-old amateur shocked the golfing world when he beat Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in a U.S. Open playoff.

When Schauffele was a 19-year-old amateur playing at The Country Club, his most vivid memory of that week in August was when he hit a screamer on the 16th hole, left and over the fence on to Clyde Avenue that borders the course. The ball fell just short of hitting Ouimet’s house on the other side of Clyde.

Knowledge is not an issue for Schauffele, 10 years removed from a loss in the third round of match play to Oliver Goss.

A gold medalist in the Tokyo Olympics last year, Schauffele still has the same if not better form he had in Tokyo, but is working and hoping to regain the results he had when he last won in Tokyo.

“I actually think it's such a tee-shot-and-who-can-hit-the-most-greens kind of competition,” Schauffele said of this week’s U.S. Open setup. “The greens are so small and the pin locations seem to be kind of few on certain greens, so if you hit a lot of surfaces you’re going to have a reasonable look.”

With a career scoring average of 70.4 in his 20 rounds in the U.S. Open, it is worth listening to Schauffele.

Sitting ninth in strokes gained: total this season, Schauffele seems to have everything working in combination. But with his only win being a team win at April's Zurich Classic since Tokyo and his last individual PGA Tour win coming in January 2019 at the Sentry Tournament of Champions in Hawaii, it does start to weigh on your psyche how you can continue to play well without results.

“It's a small sample size, but my overall stats are probably the best they’ve ever been in my entire career,” Schauffele said. “And I've just had kind of zero output ... not zero, but not the output that I would like to see.”

A different mental approach or an additional amount of patience is what Schauffele looks to implement this week.

Understanding the need to let things run their course over four days, Schauffele knows that forcing the result or getting uneasy at a U.S. Open venue is a recipe for disaster.

The desire is to just let everything come to him and if he continues to do what he has done all year statistically, and just hang back and be cool-headed, Schauffele believes things will click for him.

Which all sounds good, but can you do that in the heat of the moment?

“It's really frustrating,” Schauffele said. “I was joking with some guys in the locker room that I'm tired of congratulating everyone else every week. It's just a cycle. One season is such a small sample in the big scheme of things that I've just got to really stick to my old roots of just being as patient as possible and letting it come to me.”

Two weeks ago, at the Memorial Tournament, winner Billy Horschel talked about patience and how he needed to take a beat before pulling the trigger.

Schauffele understands that process, and while he isn’t near as impatient or capable of running as hot as Horschel, he does tend to not take the proper time and needs to take the necessary beat at times as well.

“I think that the only time you can really get upset, or that I get really upset, is when I make a really poor decision,” Schauffele said. "Whether it's something as small as pulling the wrong club to not assessing a shot correctly to picking the wrong club on a chip or something like that. I think those are like the small things that we can control.”

One of the things that a traditional U.S. Open venue does is at times takes the decision out of your hands.

With long rough and difficult lies, many times the right decision may feel like the wrong one, which is why the U.S. Open is such a mind game and the ultimate test when it comes to majors.

A fight inside yourself, that sometimes you win and sometimes the course wins.

With the level of success at the U.S. Open, Schauffele knows the pitfalls of U.S. Open competition and that may be his biggest strength this week.

“I think if you're playing normal courses, there's a chance that you sort of get lost in the sauce of thinking you can pull off more than you can versus when you're here,” he said. “It's very straightforward. You know, the decision's already made for you half the time on what you can and cannot do, dumbs it down into your decision-making category of like, well, you had a really good shot. If you don't, then you can either go for the green or you can't and then you play from there.”

More U.S. Open Coverage From Morning Read:

> LIV Golf Questions? Brooks Koepka Is Not Here for It
> Rory McIlroy Reaffirms Commitment to the PGA Tour
> Jon Rahm Is Concerned About Ryder Cup Ramifications from LIV Golf
> Latest Betting Odds, Favorites and Sleeper Picks for The Country Club
> The Best U.S. Open Bet is a Rising Star Whose Odds Are 28-1 This Week
> Boston’s Other Green Monster
> Listen: NBC’s Dan Hicks on Brookline, His Favorite U.S. Open and Ryder Cup Moments

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