If you watch enough major championship golf, you’ll notice that an intrinsic logic tends to assert itself over four days at the world’s toughest courses. Anomalies do occur—especially at the Open Championship, where weather and the unusual nature of links golf can produce less-than-household-name winners like Brian Harman in 2023 or Todd Hamilton 20 years ago. (You remember Todd, right? He beat Ernie Els in a playoff in 2004, which is still surprising to type.) But, by and large, a harsh binary governs the four most important events on the golf calendar: You’re either the kind of player who wins major championships, or you’re not.
Xander Schauffele, the 30-year-old Californian, has always been the kind of player who could win majors. His career record in those championships showcases an astonishing model of consistency: Heading into the PGA Championship in May, he had carded 12 top 10s at the big four and was seemingly always in Sunday contention. And yet, until that tournament at Valhalla, he’d failed to win one. As fine and widely respected as Schauffele’s game was, he was in jeopardy of being added to pro golf’s most hellish list: the best players to never win a major. This is a chilling collection of names like Colin Montgomerie and Lee Westwood, whose golf histories are full of what-ifs and if-onlys.
But all that changed in Louisville. Schauffele drained a six-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole to shoot 65 and hold off Bryson DeChambeau by a single stroke. And while that Valhalla triumph was a nervy one that didn’t feel assured until it was over, Sunday at Royal Troon was a far less stressful experience—for Schauffele, at least. Two months after his PGA win, Schauffele fired off another Sunday 65 and won the Open Championship by two strokes.
On a day when the weekend’s wet and windy conditions more or less relented, Schauffele played with precision and panache. He opened his round with five consecutive pars—keeping him in the mix of six players who started the day one shot back of leader Billy Horschel. And then he did what great players do and kicked his game into gear on the closing nine. At the par-4 11th, the treacherous and very cool hole known as the Railway, he hit his approach to two-and-a-half feet and made birdie. He then confidently rolled in birdie putts at 13 and 14, followed by one last coup de grâce at the 16th to put himself three shots clear of the field. If Valhalla was a thrill ride for Schauffele, this was a clinic.
For all of the endless Sturm and Drang surrounding men’s golf the past couple years, 2024 has been a remarkable showcase for a generation of rising talent in the American game. American golfers have now won seven straight majors, going back to the 2023 PGA Championship. Scottie Scheffler, who’s won six times on tour this year, including the Masters, was the betting favorite this week and showed formidable moxie while battling a wonky putter and Saturday conditions that he called the hardest he’d ever faced. The 28-year old never had his A-game this weekend, but he fought tenaciously to finish tied for 7th and showed enough shotmaking ability and strategy to make him a likely Claret Jug contender in the future.
Scheffler’s almost direct contemporary, Collin Morikawa, won this tournament in 2021, marking his second major after he won the 2020 PGA Championship. And while he was never quite a factor this week—he finished tied for 16th—there is every reason to believe that a tantalizing rivalry between Scheffler and Morikawa is on the books for the next 10 years or more. Add to this mix the major championship juggernaut that now is Schauffele, and you’ve got a compelling three-headed hydra. (To say nothing of the massively gifted and fascinating LIV Golf stars Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau. Koepka’s brilliance on the course is coupled with a strange but highly watchable emotional brittleness. Not to mention five major wins. And DeChambeau’s eccentricities have made him popular, then unpopular, and now popular again—plus a two-time U.S. Open champion.)
All of this is deeply exciting, or at least it should be. There has been, you might be aware, a certain amount of public discourse recently surrounding the idea of “passing the torch” in the game of golf. The Tiger Woods–Phil Mickelson generation in the late-’90s and 2000s ushered in massive gains in viewership and sponsorship money to the sport, with Tiger in particular functioning as both a can’t-miss ratings draw and a thrill-a-minute competitor. This has proven to be both an endless boon to the sport, and an ongoing paradox. You can never replace him—it is said that Tiger doesn’t move the needle in pro golf, he is the needle—and yet, at some point, you have to. That time is upon us. For the second consecutive major, Tiger never looked remotely close to making the cut. The greatest golfer in the history of the game by some margin has, with discernable finality, aged out of his competitive window. As recently as a few years ago, it wasn’t clear whether anyone could hold our collective attention again. No one is saying the triumvirate of Schauffele, Scheffler, and Morikawa matches the mega-watt stardom of the Man in Sunday Red, but in terms of a place to start you could do much, much worse.
Now, so much depends on what happens next. It’s been more than a year now since the PGA Tour and LIV Golf ended their war and announced their ostensible intention to enter into a merger. To suggest the process since then has been flawed is to say that Waterloo was a disappointing outcome for Napoleon. There are, we are made to understand, so very many committees and meetings. Tiger himself, who serves on the PGA policy board, explained that his decision to not take over as Ryder Cup captain in 2024 partially came down to the negotiations taking up so much of his time. And yet, there is little to no indication of meaningful progress or a horizon line for a resolution. I’ve watched sports my whole life—I’ve seen strikes, lockouts, work stoppages and no-hope upstart leagues pop-up and flame out. But I’ve never seen anything as silly and tedious as this. Despite the emergence of such exhilarating talent, ratings for the year are down and players and fans alike are demoralized. There is so much opportunity, and so many self-inflicted wounds. At a certain point, you can’t blame people for throwing up their hands and deciding to instead watch something that doesn’t require a working understanding of antitrust law to follow.
But man alive, if they can ever figure their shit out. Can you imagine a slate of events every week which features not only Schauffele, Scheffler, Morikawa, and Rory McIlroy, but also the repatriated Jon Rahm, Koepka, and DeChambeau? Maybe it’s not Tiger and Phil, but it sure does have the makings of a golden age of its own.
This was the year that the PGA Tour’s new standard bearers emerged, at least between the ropes, to lead the game into its next era. Now it’s up to the bankers and bean counters and oil barons and committee chairs to do the right thing and put this long, inane, costly civil war to bed. With his second major triumph of the season, captured in scintillating fashion, Xander Schauffele backed up his first breakthrough, solidified his claim to being in any conversation with the best in the world, and added one more marquee name to what should become, if they are empowered, an emerging generation of future legends. Pass the torch—before it’s too late.