Yahoo Sports How can Xander Schauffele improve on 2024's breakthrough season? Simple: 'My wedges sucked'
KAPALUA, Hawaii – One of Xander Schauffele’s goals is to get to world No. 1. Sitting at the top of the mountain for the 85th straight week since assuming the position on May 21, 2023, is Scottie Scheffler, who has built a significant gap between Schauffele, his nearest competitor.
Schauffele studied the numbers during the off-season and realized that despite winning two majors in 2024, he is closer to the 30th ranking player, who he wasn’t aware happens to be Maverick McNealy, than he is to Scheffler.
“Hat's off to Scottie,” Schauffele said on Tuesday in his pre-tournament press conference ahead of the Sentry. “He's a beast.”
Added Schauffele: “He just kept winning, even in sort of his downtime, he won another event (Hero World Challenge in December), which pushed him even further away. So it's one of my goals that will just have to stay on the calendar for a few more years … it's going to take some time and some patience.”
But Schauffele, who won at Kapalua’s Plantation Course in 2019, can make a dent this week into his deficit as Scheffler was forced to withdraw from the tournament after injuring the palm of his right hand from a broken glass while preparing dinner on Christmas Day.
“Small glass fragments remained in the palm which required surgery,” Scheffler's manager Blake Smith said via the PGA Tour on Friday.
Schauffele expressed his dismay at the news and wished Scheffler, his teammate on the recent victorious U.S. Presidents Cup team in the fall, a speedy recovery.
“It's weird, because we're competitors, but at the same time he's such a nice guy. I just hope he's fine,” Schauffele said. “We're a lot better off with him here in Hawaii than not, so hopefully he gets a full recovery and he's fine.”
Schauffele noted that it’s doubly difficult to try to chase down a guy like Scheffler that he finds hard not to like and who was the last person anyone would have expected to end up spending the morning before the second round of the 2024 PGA Championship in a jail cell but that turned out to be the case.
“I really can't say anything bad about him, honestly, especially after what happened to him last year. I think the true colors show when you're facing a bad spot, like when he got arrested. So he's a 10 out of 10 guy in my opinion,” Schauffele said. “So I got to try and hate him somehow. So if I put him at the very top of the mountain, and he's someone that I need to catch, then maybe that's how I have to put it in my head.”
Part of Schauffele’s emergence into Scheffler’s closest competitor for world No. 1 resulted from swing changes that Schauffele worked on last off-season when he hired Chris Como to be his swing coach. He improved his distance off the tee but there was a trade-off.
“My wedge play sucked. It was really bad. Really, really bad,” he explained. “With my club pitched a little bit more vertical in my back swing it's not catering to the best – it's great for driver, great for long irons, the stats show that – then, with wedges it's, you know, the club's moving around a little bit, it's not ideal for hitting like a distance wedge. It's something I'm trying to work on, still working on it now, still trying to figure it out, get the right feel for it. When my shoulders were a lot flatter, the club was way more laid off and shut, and I was more rotational. I was a really, really good wedge player, really good inside 150. And then the club is moving a different way, up more even across, and now all of a sudden I can, you know, smoke my driver and a 4-iron, but all of a sudden, like a 90-yard wedge is a little bit, at times. So just trying to figure that out.”
And that’s not the only area of his game where Schauffele sees room for improvement. “Around the greens, short game, that's an area that's not bad, just good enough. Those are some spots where I could improve, for sure,” he said.
All of Schauffele’s career wins have come in spurts: two in two months in 2017, two within a few months of each other in the 2018-19 season, three in a three month span in 2022, and his twin majors in May at the PGA Championship and July of 2024 at the British Open. How does he plan to avoid another drought in between his wins? Schauffele didn’t seem too concerned that Tour victory No. 10 wouldn’t be far off.
“They stack up when you're focused on the little things. I think that's what the best players do is you focus on practicing and prepping the right way, and then you focus on small shots with your caddie, and then at the end of the day you give yourself a chance on the back nine,” he said. “In those moments is sort of when you'll feel a little bit more heat and if you're comfortable or not to close. That takes a little bit of practice, and luckily I got a little bit last year.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Xander Schauffele knows he has work to do if he wants to reach No. 1
