Xander Schauffele led the PGA Tour in bogey avoidance this past season.
But Thursday at the Zozo Championship, he admittedly got a bit stubborn.
After his tee shot nestled near a tree on the ninth hole, the world No. 2 compounded the error by taking two swipes in the span of five seconds, barely advancing the ball before he eventually decided to take an unplayable lie. He walked off with a quadruple-bogey 8, his only dropped shots during an opening round of 3-over 73 that matched his highest score on Tour since June.
Schauffele is tied for 70th in the limited field of 78 players.
“If it was Sunday, I’d be pissed,” he said afterward. “Today, I’m just trying to brush it off. I’ve got three more days in front of me.”
Schauffele had made eight straight pars before his travails on the ninth. Approaching his ball, he said the lie was so poor, sitting in a “crevasse,” that he even thought about taking a picture to laugh about it later. He believed, at worst, that his shot would just ricochet off the tree in front of him.
“For me to think I could do anything definitely got me in a hole there,” he said. “I should have just taken an unplayable, but I was an idiot and tried to hit it.”
Not once, but twice – all in a matter of just a few seconds.
“Then I was stubborn and tried to hit it again,” he said. “I was going to hit it a third time too, just because, but yeah – it was a bad spot.”
Schauffele, universally praised by his peers for his steadiness between the ropes, said it’d probably been over a year since he “had a meltdown like that.” He still laughed it off in the moment.
“Just a combination of being overconfident and being really stubborn,” he said. “Sometimes it pays off for me in tournaments. And today, it bit me in the ass.”
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