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Xander Schauffele still wins while losing the Fedex Cup
Xander has had an incredible year on the PGA Tour, finishing second overall in the 2023 Fedex Cup Rankings.
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Xander Schauffele of the United States reacts on the 14th green during the final round of the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club on Aug. 27, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia, the United States. (AFP/Getty Images/Mike Ehrmann)
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t is widely known around PGA Tour circles that American Xander Schauffele and world number six experienced an unorthodox upbringing. He is the product of a German-French father and Taiwanese mother who was raised in Japan.
His father Stefan had Xander take a puff of a cigar at age 12 along with a sip of cognac. Stefan commented that the experience turned Xander as green as the leaves of a tree. Xander’s mother Ping-Yi was raised in Japan where she experienced discrimination due to her heritage. She then moved to the United States to attend university where she met Stefan. Stefan, who was once a talented athlete himself in Germany noticed Xander’s athletic abilities at a very young age.
Xander started with soccer but then graduated to golf which suited him best due to the sport’s appetite for absolute self-reliance.
He finished second in the Fedex Cup season ending Tour Championship in Atlanta, Georgia over the weekend with a score of 22 under par to bag an astounding US$6.5 million. He outscored the winner Viktor Hovland of Norway in Sunday’s final round posting a remarkable 8 under par 62 to Hovland’s 7 under par 63.
The 29-year-old Xander commented: “I’ll hold my head up high. It’s the most fun I had losing in quite some time.”
He has a stellar record at the Tour Championship, winning the event in 2017 and has finished runner up three times. Stefan makes no secret regarding their humble beginnings. His advice to Xander regarding attending university was framed as follows: “I told him, Xander, I cannot pay for college, I’m bankrupt. I paid for your brother, and I just don’t have money left. You need to get a scholarship. You must perform!”
Xander took this warning to heart and eventually won a scholarship to play golf for San Diego State University, California. His subsequent journey to seven wins on the PGA Tour has not exactly been a straight line. His putting coach Derek Uyeda early in Xander’s career commented to the San Diego Tribune: “He didn’t even have a car at this time last year because it broke down. He had to borrow his brother’s car.”
In a twist of irony, his most extraordinary victory did not even occur on Tour but was fashioned instead by a gold medal win for the US in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Stefan was an aspiring Olympic decathlete in Germany at age 20 until fate intervened in 1986 when he met with a head-on car crash involving a drunk driver. After multiple surgeries, the tragic episode left him with a permanent loss of vision in one eye. The outcome devastatingly ended any prospect of an Olympic career. However, to highlight his son’s feat, Stefan posed in a photo on X, previously known as Twitter, shirtless and in swimming trunks with Xander’s gold medal around his neck. Needless to say, the post went viral complete with the comic caption: “I might never give this one back to you!” To which Xander replied: "I should've seen this coming.”
Upon his return to the US shortly after his spectacular Olympic performance, Xander was asked regarding the whereabouts of the gold medal. He responded in resignation: "Pops has it. I can't get it off him right now.
“I had a couple of media things to do with the medal, and then I got a phone call shortly after that asking for the medal back. He is taking good care of it as we speak."
As we fast forward to the present, Xander has had an incredible year on the PGA Tour, finishing second overall in the 2023 Fedex Cup Rankings. He is playing some staggering golf and remarked on where his game is: “My team and I were working on the right stuff to get these results. Coming into the [Fedex Cup] Playoffs to peak and really play well at the right time is important and so I think we are working on the right things.” Xander earned a total of US$8.4 million during the 2022-2023 season with 11 top-10 finishes while making every single cut in his 22 starts.
In response to the recent devastating fires in Maui, Hawaii, Xander stepped up to the plate in charitable giving. He announced on his X profile that his foundation along with the Hawaiian Host Group, would match donation dollars up to $100,000 each. Their end goal is to reach $400,000 in total donations to help the victims of the Maui fires.
“The PGA Tour is all about giving back, so felt like it was my responsibility in that sense to do that,” said Xander.
