Xander Schauffele won the Travelers Championship on Sunday for many reasons, but the most impactful may have been the ultimate unpredictability of golf.
What will appear on the pages of history as a not terribly surprising victory by one of the PGA Tour’s most consistent players was in actuality a Sunday afternoon reminder of what makes tournament golf so intriguing.
How else to explain the fact that Schauffele didn’t have to outplay his best mate Patrick Cantlay, who was coming off four consecutive top-20 finishes, but he needed some 72nd-hole help from the telegenic Sahith Theegala to capture his first individual tour title since the 2019 Sentry Tournament of Champions.
Not only that, 20-year old amateur Michael Thorbjornsen, pushed his way into the closing storyline as did J.T. Poston, who needed a good finish to help assure his full tour privileges next season.
Meanwhile Cantlay, the reigning FedEx Cup champion, played like a man just getting acquainted with the pressure of a Sunday afternoon. One day after he shot 63, Cantlay posted a scattershot 76 that included just three pars and seemed as out of character as James Taylor playing heavy metal.
All of which led Schauffele to the 72nd hole trailing Theegala by a stroke in an event Schauffele had led at one point by five. Then Theelgala, in the group ahead of Schauffele and Cantlay, made a questionable play off the 18th tee, hitting driver into the face of a fairway bunker and compounding his mistake with a massive blunder that left his bladed second shot in the same bunker, the building blocks of a crushing double bogey at the last hole.
“It’s really going to hurt,” Theegala said.
Suddenly, there was Schauffele winning his sixth PGA Tour event, ending what couldn’t fairly be called a drought because he won the Olympic gold medal last summer and teamed with Cantlay to win the Zurich Classic earlier this year.
“I talk to my team a lot about how I’m feeling, and it’s been a year that my stats have been very solid. I just haven’t really put in four good rounds of golf,” Schauffele said.
“Without really knowing, I think I was getting a little impatient. This week, I was trying to stay as patient as possible. If I can do what I’ve been doing and focus a little more … it will pay off in a big way, and today it did.”
Ron Green Jr.