Culture
Xander Schauffele and the moment a narrative changes forever
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — He says it so many times you stop believing him. First it was “just Thursday.” Then it was “just 36 holes.” Then it was “just another result.” No, really, it’s just another result. Xander Schauffele either truly cares this little or cares so much he has to push it away deeper and deeper so nobody in the world ever knows how much he wants to win this thing.
He walks each hole like it’s just another hole. He plays the course like it’s just another tournament. Step. Swing one arm. Step. Swing the other arm. Schauffele is this good because he operates this way, a 30-year-old golf robot who keeps his head down and treats golf like an Excel sheet, and to some, he can’t win more than he does for the very same reason.
Until he steps to the 6-foot putt with his legacy on the line. He’s nervous, he admits. He sees a left-to-right break. Wait, no, is it right to left? He goes back and forth. “Oh my gosh, this is not what I want for a winning putt,” he thinks. If he makes it, he wins the PGA Championship. If he misses, he makes a short par putt and goes to a playoff. If he loses that, he’s cemented as this era’s quasi-Greg Norman coming closer and closer without a major, giving away a two-shot lead on the back nine.
He plays it straight, and it does go left. So left it catches the lip of the hole, and from there Schauffele practically blacks out for a moment, not even processing the putt of his life falling. He simply hears the roar of the Valhalla Golf Club crowd and feels nothing but relief. He throws his arms into the air.
“Just so much relief,” he says.
And then the robot breaks. He smiles. He can’t stop smiling. The edges of his teeth are pushing out the side of his face and it just won’t go away. He turns away, turns back and throws his fists back up with the crowd, the smile not going anywhere.
This was not just another result. Xander Schauffele wanted this.
Schauffele went to shake his caddie Austin Kaiser’s hand seven days prior in Charlotte, after Rory McIlroy had finished annihilating them in the signature event Wells Fargo Championship.
“We’re gonna get one soon, kid,” Schauffele said.
The putt. The moment. The victory. 🏆#PGAChamp | @XSchauffele pic.twitter.com/C6aT7BMvfv
— PGA Championship (@PGAChampionship) May 20, 2024
To the rest of the golf world, Sundays were becoming a thing for Schauffele. See, Schauffele has arguably been the most consistent golfer in the world the last seven years. He’s just 30 and has racked up over 100 top-20s. He seemingly finishes between second and 10th every week. He won the Tour Championship as a rookie and just stayed there, always among the 5-10 best players in the world.
But he couldn’t win more. Not just majors. Anything. Schauffele was playing tournaments toward the tops of leaderboards more than almost all his peers, yet, for whatever reason, he’d go two or three years between wins. He had just six career PGA Tour wins entering Sunday. Consistency was both Schauffele’s superpower and the hindrance making him a perennial disappointment. No matter how you spun it, Schauffele was the best player without a major. And it was not received as a compliment.
At first, he was just the guy who didn’t quite grab his opportunities, not a choker, per se. But recently, the narrative changed. He won twice in his eight career events with either the lead or a share of it. Three different times this season — at Riviera, the Players and Quail Hollow — he teed off in the final group on a Sunday. In all three, he faded down the stretch.
“All those calls for me, even last week, that sort of feeling, it gets to you at some point,” Schauffele said Sunday night. “It just makes this even sweeter.”
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Saturday night, his father, Stefan, texted him some variation of: Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein. It’s the German translation of the old idiom, “Constant dripping wears away a stone.” Because in Schauffele’s mind, each loss was more experience. It was another step toward getting better. Like he kept saying, the finishes were all just results, and he maintained that a sixth-place finish or a 20th-place finish was just a result. He focused far more on the actual golf he played.
Minutes before his tee time Sunday, Schauffele still stood on the driving range, ripping drives into the Kentucky sky. And the drives kept missing left. His playing partner, Collin Morikawa, tied with Schauffele for the lead at 15-under-par, had walked to the first tee a full two minutes earlier. Schauffele kept swinging. The left miss kept coming. Time was getting close, with Kaiser ready to take the bag over to the tee. But Schauffele said, “One more.” So he placed one more tee down, put down a ball and took one last rip.
Right down the center.
Oh, no. It was happening. Happening in the kind of way you could feel on the premises. Other than for maybe 20 minutes Saturday afternoon, Schauffele led the PGA Championship all week, and he entered the back nine Sunday with a two-shot lead at 19-under par. But he misplayed the par-5 10th, ending with missing a 6-foot putt to bogey and fall to 18-under.
Schauffele walked up the hill toward the 11th tee in a daze. He stared at the ground in front of him but no activity appeared behind his eyes. Here was a difficult par 3 with a pin tucked left, behind a tight bunker. See, Schauffele is something of a “data golfer.” He takes the prudent approach. He doesn’t take unnecessary risks without clear reward. One just assumed he’d go center green for par.
But Schauffele went at the pin. And he stuck it.
“In those moments, you can kind of feel it,” Schauffele said, “and in the past when I didn’t do it, it just wasn’t there, and today I could feel that it was there.”
That’s not the story, though. The story is what happened as Schauffele approached the putt. There’s a massive scoreboard overlooking the 11th green, and he looked right at it. Norwegian star Viktor Hovland was on a heater, and Schauffele saw Hovland suddenly ahead of him by a stroke. He understood he needed to make that putt. He needed to chase.
Schauffele made the birdie putt. A hole later, he fired right at another tightly tucked pin and stuck it. Another easy birdie to regain the lead.
Schauffele had tried everything before. He’d tried not looking at leaderboards until the back nine. He tried not looking early. He tried not looking at all. And guess what? He hadn’t won in two years. It wasn’t working.
“Today I looked at them,” he said. “I looked at them all day. I really wanted to feel everything. I wanted to address everything that I was feeling in the moment.”
He didn’t want to go to a playoff. Not against Bryson DeChambeau, whom he knew had tied him at 20-under thanks to a scoreboard peek. Not at a distance course against one of the longest drivers in the world. Schauffele knew he had to win it in 72 holes. Right there on 18 at Valhalla, he needed a birdie.
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But when he hit a seemingly perfect drive, he could only laugh. He even turned to his caddie after the swing to say, “Good, yeah?” But no, it landed just on the first cut of rough directly to the right of a bunker. The only way to hit it would be to stand in the bunker and take a quasi-baseball swing at a ball well above his feet. When he walked down and saw it, he turned around, took 10 steps away and stared forward as he composed himself. “Man, someone out there is making me earn this right now,” he thought with a laugh.
“If you want to be a major champion, this is the kind of stuff you have to deal with,” Schauffele said later.
But what Schauffele was missing was the silver lining. Here was a golfer known not for collapses as much as not being a winner. He didn’t choke. He just didn’t hit the famous, clutch shots and let others snag victories from his hands. Here it was — his chance to change the conversation in real time.
Xander Schauffele needed to hit a difficult second shot on 18 on Sunday. (Jon Durr / USA Today)
He hit a nice shot to lay up in the fairway 36 yards to the green. The course hushed for his chip with the type of quiet that sinks into your brain, and Schauffele placed the ball 6 feet from the hole. You know the rest. The putt went in. Schauffele ended the narrative. He won his first major, recontextualized his entire career and solidified himself as the second-best player in the world right now behind Scottie Scheffler.
But when Schauffele talks about overcoming this hurdle, he downplays it as much as he can, the same way he did when the wins weren’t coming. “It’s just a result.” Because to Schauffele, there wasn’t anything that truly changed Sunday. It was always a matter of probabilities. If he played well and put himself toward the top, there would be a certain chance that eventually things would fall his way for wins. It’s just hitting golf shots.
Kaiser said after the win, “You just look at it statistically, you keep knocking it’s gonna hit eventually.”
Those there in Louisville on Sunday, even those rooting against him, they saw the difference.
But Schauffele’s brain just doesn’t work this way. He sees it as a positive step, but still he just thinks about how much better he can get. He thinks about the man he’s still chasing.
“I think when you’re trying to climb this mountain here, let’s put Scottie Scheffler at the very tip top of it, and everyone else sort of somewhere down on the hillside grabbing on for dear life is what it feels like,” he said Saturday.
Still, could he just enjoy it?
“I got one good hook up there in the mountain up on that cliff, and I’m still climbing,” he said Sunday. “I might have a beer up there on that side of the hill there and enjoy this.”
(Top photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself — or have a lasting influence on an author. With that in mind, this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the final stops for five authors after a life of writing. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
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