DUBLIN, Ohio – Things weren’t going very well for Xander Schauffele, but they never should’ve gone that badly.
The last time Schauffele took the course was at the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island Golf Course near Charleston, South Carolina. He had posted top-15 finishes in each of his three previous competitions, a stretch that began with a third-place finish at the Masters.
But at the PGA, he shot 6-over and failed to make the cut.
“My missed cut at the PGA was a bit of a bummer,” he said Tuesday at Muirfield Village. “Wasn’t really in the right frame of mind. Game was okay, a little exposed by some severe winds at times.”
Not in the right frame of mind?
“Honestly, I had somewhat of a bad attitude about the golf course,” he said. “I just didn’t really like it. I’m not saying I had enough game to win that week, but I definitely had enough game to compete, and for me to miss the cut was a bit reckless and kind of stupid.”
His first chance for atonement begins Thursday as part of the Memorial Tournament. With four PGA Tour victories since turning pro in 2015, Schauffele, 27, comes to town in search of some more consistency, another strong finish and another step closer to that elusive first major win.
He’ll do so by embracing the role of an underdog, albeit one that seems a little ill-fitting for a golfer who sits sixth in the FedEx Cup standings. Most recently, he won the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions and Sentry Tournament of Champions in 2019.
It requires some mental gymnastics for a player always looking to push himself despite being near the top of the standings more often than not. Doing so requires what Schauffele described as trying to reprogram how his brain works, focusing not on what he has to do but how he has to do it.
“Once you’re at the top of a leaderboard, you can’t chase a ghost, you know what I mean?” he said. “So there’s no one in front of you to sort of bite at and so I think mentally it’s such a new realm for my brain that I’m just trying to process it all and really get more comfortable and think differently, once I’m at the top.”
Dating to the 2020 U.S. Open played last September, Schauffele has six top-five finishes, including consecutive runner-up finishes earlier this year at the Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego and the Waste Management Phoenix Open one week later.
But then there’s the missed cut at the PGA Championship.
“It was a good time to sort of reboot and kind of recheck where I’m at kind of midway through the year,” he said. “This is always a decent time of year for me, usually when I kind of catch my stride.”
His next chance starts Thursday.