CASTLE ROCK, COLORADO | Early Thursday afternoon as they walked together to Castle Pines’ 17th tee in the high-plains Colorado sunshine at the BMW Championship, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele looked like two old friends talking about a game they watched the night before.
They looked at each other as they walked and talked, hands gesturing, and the vibe felt as relaxed as a Sunday morning at the beach.
Whatever urgency there might have been, whatever competitiveness there was burning inside, it appeared buried beneath what Abraham Lincoln referred to as “the better angels” of their nature.
A few minutes later, as they traded places behind side-by-side microphones, Scheffler and Schauffele kibitzed about their afternoon schedules until Scheffler, texting to find out where his wife, Meredith, was, finally told Schauffele to go ahead and eat lunch and he would be along shortly for whatever they had scheduled.
If Arnie had Jack and Tiger had Phil, Scottie and Xander have had each other – for this extended summer anyway.
As the PGA Tour and the FedEx Cup playoffs converge on East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta this week for the season-ending Tour Championship, Scheffeler and Schauffele arrive for one more shootout, this time with a $25 million bonus on the line that, strange as it is for many believe, almost certainly means less to them than the trophy that would come with it.
Scheffler will start the final event with a two-stroke lead over Schauffele and a bigger margin over the other 28 players, a contrivance to add urgency and clarity to the culmination of a long, sometimes surprising and often uplifting season.
Along the way, they have formed a budding friendship, built on mutual respect, and it has given what could be a rivalry a softer edge that is refreshing in this pick-a-side world.
If it comes down to pure golf as it should, Schauffele would seem to have the advantage even though East Lake, where he has never posted a competitive round over par, has been re-engineered by architect Andrew Green.
Over the last three Tour Championships, Schauffele has beaten Scheffler straight up by a combined 30 strokes at East Lake. It’s this week, though, that matters now.
As brilliant as both have been this season – Scheffler has six tour wins, notably the Masters, the Players Championship, four signature events and an Olympic gold medal, while Schauffele won the PGA Championship and Open Championship trophies – their accomplishments have been enhanced by what the other has done.
What the 28-year-old Scheffler has done this year is extraordinary because it comes on top of what he did last year and it is enough to invoke the name of Tiger Woods. In almost any other season, there would be no debate about player of the year, but the 30-year-old Schauffele has been good enough to force everyone to take a breath, if only to admire what he also is doing.
“I’ve won two times and he’s won seven. We both have a lot of top-10s. That’s kind of how I’m drawing it up,” Schauffele said last week when asked his perspective on the player-of-the-year race.
“I feel like we’re all just chasing him. I’ve done probably the best job of getting the closest to him, but it’s still very far away.”
Scheffler, who wears his aw-shucks personality as comfortably as he smiles when he sees his bride, seems as genuine as a west Texas sunset. He’s a walking contradiction, a guy with the outward personality of a golden retriever and a competitive fire inside that could melt steel.
He has talked about how whether it’s pickleball or a board game, he wants to win, but when the subject of who should be player of this year is raised, Scheffler’s soft side wins.
“I don’t think I’ve voted for myself,” said Scheffler, voted player of the year by his peers in each of the past two seasons. “Maybe I haven’t voted in the past couple years when I felt like I had a chance to win. I think maybe I didn’t vote then because I don’t think I’d vote for myself. But just thinking of what I would do this year, I think since I’m in the running I probably would just refrain from voting. I think it would be a bit weird to vote for myself.”
In a “look at me” world, Scheffler and Schauffele don’t chase attention. They’ve earned it and, along the way, become more relatable to fans who have developed emotional attachments to accompany their athletic admiration.
There’s a lesson in there for everyone who can’t avoid the self-promoting temptations of social media.
Given their successes this season, Scheffler and Schauffele could have skipped one of the first two playoff events and still arrived in Atlanta at or near the top of the points race. They could have justified their decisions, especially in an Olympics year, but that’s not how they are wired.
“If I view it that way, why would we play the rest of the season? Why would I show up to Sony if – you know what I mean? In my head, not one tournament is more important than another,” Scheffler said.
Schauffele, on the other hand, acknowledged the idea of taking a playoff week off crossed his mind.
“I thought about it this year, to be completely honest. It came down to the good old, ‘Will I regret it?’ situation, the thing my dad taught me a long time ago,” Schauffele said.
“You assess everything and then you ask yourself that question right at the end, and I asked myself that question, and I slept on it for like two nights, and I would have 100 percent regretted it just because there’s no better way to get tournament ready than playing in tournaments against the best players in the world.”
One more time this year, Scheffler and Schauffele will find themselves looking at each other while likely seeing the other differently than they might have a year ago.
They are not that different. Both are grounded in personal and professional foundational strengths. Both want to share their success. Both are content in who they are and what they are doing.
“At the end of the day, he really is a rock-solid guy,” Schauffele said of Scheffler.
That doesn’t mean Schauffele won’t take what Scheffler has if he can get it, especially becoming No. 1 in the world. It won’t happen soon, if it ever does, but there is a FedEx Cup on the line this week in Atlanta, something neither of them has won.
“I’m just going to keep knocking,” Schauffele said. “That’s what I do.”
And Scheffler will answer the door.
E-MAIL RON
Top: Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele are simply the best.
Brian Spurlock, ICON Sportswire via getty images