KAPALUA, Hawaii: Winning two majors only made Xander Schauffele that much more eager for the next one. The only downer about winning the claret jug at Royal Troon was knowing it would be more than eight months until the next one.
Also on his agenda is reaching No. 1 in the world.
That might take a little longer.
The PGA Tour embarks on a new season without Scottie Scheffler, who cut open his right hand on broken glass preparing Christmas dinner. Even without the No. 1 player at The Sentry, Schauffele feels a lot further away than his No. 2 ranking might suggest.
“It’s a wild time,” Schauffele said. “Winning two majors and being closer to the 30th-ranked player than the first ... hat’s off to Scottie. He’s a beast.”
Schauffele, of course, is no slouch. Both put together a season of remarkable consistency. Schauffele had 15 finishes in the top 10 out of his 21 starts in individual play on the PGA Tour. From May until the end of the season, he went 11 straight events no worse than 15th.
That included a birdie on the last hole to win the PGA Championship at Valhalla, and a command performance in the rain and wind of Royal Troon to win the British Open.
It was the latter that got the attention of Chris Kirk, the defending champion at Kapalua.
“You cannot accurately describe how horrible it is to play golf in that conditions,” Kirk said. “That was one where — obviously, I have a lot of confidence in myself, I believe in my game, I’m a top-50 player — I watched that and was like, ‘There’s no way in hell I could do that.’”
The difference in seasons was Scheffler converted more of those top 10s into titles — seven on the PGA Tour, Olympic gold, and the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas, all of them boosting his lead at No. 1 to the largest gap since Tiger Woods in his peak years.
“It’s one of my goals that will just have to stay on the calendar for a few more years,” Schauffele said with an easy smile. “If I get there I’ll be very happy. But just based on looking at the numbers, yeah, it’s going to take some time and patience.”
Now he’s on island time, where no one is in a rush.
The 60-man field gets started on the mountainous Plantation Course at Kapalua, which is playing longer than ever with a steady dose of overnight rain.
The Sentry also starts a new structure on the PGA Tour in which only the top 100 players in the FedEx Cup keep their full cards, and the size of fields is shrinking to make sure those who have cards get into more tournaments.
This is the second year that a tournament once limited to only winners has been expanded to include anyone who finished in the top 50 in the FedEx Cup. Of the 60 players, 29 of them failed to win a tournament last year.
That includes Justin Thomas, who at least would appear to be on the upward trend. He missed out on the postseason in 2023 and made it back to the Tour Championship. It was a better year, but not enough for him to be picked for the Presidents Cup.
Consider that to be a big motivator this year with a Ryder Cup on the horizon. The first step is winning, which Thomas hasn’t done since the PGA Championship in 2022. Before that, he piled up 15 wins on the PGA Tour in a seven-year stretch.
“I truly felt like I was going to win multiple times every season pretty much, until I lost it a little bit,” Thomas said. “It’s just so hard to win out here. Naturally, the better player that you are, you can get away with more mistakes, but come the end of the week on Sunday, you have to win the golf tournament.
“I was fortunate where I was doing it quite often and I still feel like I’m fully capable and expect to do that more,” he said. “But I definitely felt like it should have happened regularly.”
Schauffele can appreciate the feeling. He also had gone two years without winning until he ended that drought in the best way possible — not one major, but two.
It starts with chances, and that has become his hallmark, much like it is for Scheffler. Schauffele comes into Kapalua with the longest active cut streak on the PGA Tour at 56 in a row, which will increase because there is no cut this week.
The record is 142 in a row by Woods. That might be even further away than his goal of replacing Scheffler at No. 1 in the world.
