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

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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.”

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)

Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.

It was the weekend when we closed the lid on another long and eventful Premier League campaign. Manchester City were crowned champions, Arsenal came up short, and Liverpool said goodbye to Jurgen Klopp.

Here, we will ask whether we should expect City’s record-breaking dominance to continue, if Arsenal can take any crumbs of comfort from finishing as runners-up once more, and if we should all have been paying more attention to Jean-Philippe Mateta.

What chance Manchester City make it five in a row?

It’s basically that old Gary Lineker quote, isn’t it? Premier League football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a football around over 380 matches and in the end, Manchester City win the title.

It is not only six titles in seven seasons for City, but now four in a row, an unprecedented level of dominance in English football history, let alone the post-1992 era. Jack Grealish flicking sky blue ticker tape out of his hair during a jocular Sky Sports interview now comes around as regularly as Christmas.

“This is our period,” declared Pep Guardiola in response to his side making history. Nobody can argue with that and most worryingly of all for City’s rivals is the sense that they could quite easily extend this era of dominance further. After four in a row, what chance five?

That is not a foregone conclusion. City always experience bumps in the road along the way in a title race and even when they are ultimately triumphant, there are sliding door moments for their closest challengers to look back on and curse.

This season was no different in that respect. One win in six between November and December, following on from back-to-back defeats in the autumn, left room for doubt to creep in. All season long, City’s performances have only occasionally equalled the level of those during the run-in towards last year’s treble.

And yet following that wobble in the winter, Guardiola’s side took 57 of a possible 63 points. They once again overcame a momentary mid-season blip to ultimately reclaim their spot on top. And each time they do, it becomes that little less surprising.

City have established this pedigree over more than a decade. This is the sixth genuine Premier League title race involving them — following 2012, 2014, 2019, 2022 and 2023. City have triumphed each and every time.

That Guardiola’s side have been pushed close in the last three years consecutively is the strongest argument against the idea that a league once widely viewed as the world’s most competitive has become a procession. The swings in fortune witnessed this season prove that is not yet the case.

But even so, the end result was predictable. Ever since that first triumph under Guardiola in 2017-18 — their imperious, record-breaking 100-point campaign — most would have picked City out as title favourites before each following season and, five out of six times, they would have been correct.

With Guardiola committed for at least another season, only minor business necessary in the summer market and no timeframe for a decision on the 115 alleged breaches of Premier League financial regulations (all of which they deny), who would bet against yet another celebratory Grealish interview this time next year?

What was harder for Arsenal — collapsing or coming up short?

There is no good way to lose a league title, no easy way to do so either, but there are some ways that are better than others. Not that Arsenal’s players particularly wanted to hear that once the final whistles had sounded at the Etihad and the Emirates.

Mikel Arteta’s players took their fate hard, understandably so. Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz and Oleksandr Zinchenko joined many of those in the stands by shedding a tear at coming up short.

Their tally of 89 points equals the record for a runner-up in the pre-Guardiola era — the same total as Manchester United in 2011-12. Only Liverpool have taken more and still come second, with a remarkable 97 points in 2018-19.

But like Liverpool that year, Arsenal can console themselves with the fact they pushed City hardest at the most critical stage of the campaign. As many expected, Arteta’s side needed to be perfect down the stretch. They almost were, winning 15 of their final 17 games and dropping only five points.

Can Arsenal recover to finally win the league next season? (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

Last season’s disappointment was of an altogether different character — a lead lost, then a slow death measured out over two wins in eight games and 15 points dropped at the decisive stage. The sense of doom set in gradually.

This time, the knowledge they would not be champions came sharply and suddenly upon learning of City’s victory. That will always hurt more in the moment.

But until the very last, there was hope. And with this season’s stronger finish, there can be greater cause for optimism. This is the third-youngest squad in the league, founded on a core of developing talent, led by a brilliant coach who has learned at the knee of the master.

As hard as it is to back against Guardiola, even the City manager himself said this week that he is convinced Arsenal will be his closest challengers for the foreseeable future. It is hard not to agree after watching Arteta’s side take the champions to the wire.

Is Mateta’s magnificence in danger of being memory-holed?

Did you know that Jean-Philippe Mateta is the Premier League’s joint-top scorer since the turn of the year?

The only players to have matched the Crystal Palace striker’s 14 goals since the start of 2024 are Phil Foden and Cole Palmer, who were named the top flight’s player of the year and young player of the year respectively this weekend.

Now, nobody is suggesting that Foden’s gong should be sitting on Mateta’s mantelpiece instead, but the 26-year-old’s late bloom is the sort of thing that can easily go unheralded in the long run, memory-holed because it happens after the voting ballots have been handed in, the awards have been dished out and the narrative of a season has already been written.

No player has scored more Premier League goals this year than Mateta (Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

That is especially the case on the final day when, with so much happening at once, it is easy for events like Mateta’s hat-trick against Aston Villa and surge up the scoring charts to be overlooked.

There were two goals in Sunday’s games worthy of consideration as the best of the season, with Moises Caicedo scoring from the halfway line at Chelsea and Mohammed Kudus’ acrobatic overhead kick against City.

By setting himself up for the goal, there is an argument to say Kudus’ strike was even superior to Alejandro Garnacho’s against Everton back in November.

At least the Premier League’s official goal of the season award is typically only handed out once all is said and done, which should give Kudus a chance to pip Garnacho to the prize. As for Mateta, he may just have to settle for the 2024-25 Golden Boot.

Coming up

• On Tuesday, Gareth Southgate will announce his England squad for this summer’s European Championship. It is only a provisional squad for now, but we’ll know which players on the fringes have a hope of a place on the plane and which will be watching from their sofa this summer
• Of course, the far bigger deal on Tuesday will be The Athletic’s end-of-season awards, celebrating the best of the best across the Premier League, Women’s Super League, EFL and European football. Mateta may or may not be a winner
• On Wednesday it’s the Europa League final at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium between Atalanta and treble-hunting Bayer Leverkusen, with Xabi Alonso’s side fresh off the back of completing an unbeaten Bundesliga campaign this weekend
• Once the small matter of a Manchester derby FA Cup final is out of the way on Saturday, we can get down to what everyone’s looking forward to over the coming weeks — rampant, relentless speculation on the future of Erik ten Hag
• Defending champions Barcelona will be hoping to win their third Women’s Champions League title against Lyon on Saturday
• And on Sunday, it is what we’re legally obliged to refer to as the most lucrative game in football — the Championship play-off final between Leeds and Southampton

NEW YORK — As ever, Knicks Nation was cogent and discerning watching its team lose Game 7 at Madison Square Garden to the Indiana Pacers.

“(Bleeping) scrubs,” one well-reasoned fan said as he exited MSG in the closing minutes of the 130-108 loss.

The home fans were bitterly disappointed. No one on this island believed the Pacers could come in here and big boy the Knicks, depleted though they may have been, in a winner-take-all tilt for a conference finals spot, as long as Jalen Brunson was healthy and New York could keep grabbing fistfuls of offensive rebounds. ESPN certainly seemed clear in its coverage plan. But the Pacers bowed their necks to show what they’d learned and how they’d grown during the last few months. They woofed at the Knicks and their well-heeled fans on celebrity row. They noted how few national reporters had been around much this season. Their coach seemed to delight in pointing out the disrespect his team had endured.

And Tyrese Haliburton came to the postgame news conference wearing a Reggie Miller hoodie, with Reg in classic “Knicks choked” mode, a tribute to the franchise’s all-time greatest player and enfant terrible in Gotham.

“I just like to be comfortable on the plane,” Haliburton said, tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Tyrese Haliburton in a Reggie Miller sweatshirt after winning Game 7 at the Garden 😈 pic.twitter.com/TKuOc3t1zu

— Indiana Pacers (@Pacers) May 19, 2024

Even as they shattered the previous record for the highest field goal percentage by a team in a Game 7, shooting an NBA playoff record 67 percent for the game – 53 of 79!! – and made 13 of 24 3-pointers, Pacers coach Rick Carlisle came back, again and again, to the defense his team played when it mattered the most.

“They have flipped the script,” Carlisle said. “They won the series with grit and guts and physical play. Pressing 94 feet. And that’s how we beat Milwaukee (in the first round), too. You have to give these guys a lot of credit for, not a total change, but a very significant change in the attitude toward defense, the defiance about, the importance of defense, and what they did today. I don’t want to make things about shot making.”

Indeed, the Pacers’ metamorphosis since the first month of the season, when Indy was cosmically bad at the defensive end, has been profound. It required the grunt work of getting connected and louder on defense. But it also required Indiana to get out of its comfort zone and put all its chips to the middle of the table, acquiring Pascal Siakam from Toronto in mid-January in a three-team deal that also included New Orleans, with no guarantee after these playoffs that the two-time All-Star and rising, unrestricted free agent will stay.

“My focus coming into the game was just settling everybody in,” Siakam told The Athletic. “I came in aggressive, just making sure everybody calmed down. Once everybody calmed down, (Haliburton) took over. And he can do that with the best (in) the game. And, obviously, the back and forth gets you going.”

Siakam made his first five shots from the floor en route to 20 points. Haliburton hunted 3s in the first quarter, including a dead sprint to the left wing for a 26-footer in transition, giving him 11 points in less than two minutes. Indiana scored 39 in the first quarter and led 70-55 at halftime. The Pacers’ offensive output was stunning in its completeness.

“It’s just the old-school way of thinking, that you can’t play this fast in the playoffs,” Haliburton said. “But I think, opportunistically, you can do it. If we can get stops, of course we can.”

But, Carlisle was right. Indiana may have had better defensive nights numerically against the Knicks in the series, but given the stakes of a Game 7 on the road, this was Indiana’s finest defensive hour. Before Brunson left the game in the second half after breaking his left hand, he was just 6 of 17 from the floor. T.J. McConnell, again, was disruptive off the bench. And after getting beaten decisively on the glass in the first two games of the series, Indy outrebounded New York in four of the last five games and won all four of those games.

(Speaking of which: Man, the NBA is so bad at rigging games! It had Boston-New York on a platter, chock-a-block full of potential sweet ratings gold, featuring the No. 1 and No. 8 TV markets. And it let the Pacers run roughshod over the Knicks! It didn’t foul out Haliburton or Siakam. And this continues a troubling trend. The league never gave us a LeBron-Kobe NBA Finals; it put the ratings-sapping Spurs in the finals six times, with San Antonio winning five titles between 1999 and 2014; it hasn’t gifted New York a championship in more than five decades! If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times — because so many of you spout off and yell “conspiracy” this time of year: If the NBA’s mission is fixing playoff games so that it gets the biggest superstars from the biggest markets every postseason, it truly, and uniformly, sucks at it. Get better writers, people. What’s Eric Bischoff doing these days?)

Indiana’s defensive metamorphosis began with its run to the In-Season Tournament final in December, as Haliburton’s star rose nationwide. But even then, Indy came crashing back to earth, getting smashed in Las Vegas in the IST final by the Lakers. The Pacers got L.A.’s best shot and learned what they were doing wasn’t good enough. The Lakers’ attention to detail defensively, how much they stayed locked into the scout on Indiana’s team, impressed Haliburton.

“I think the biggest thing was experience,” Pacers center Myles Turner said. “We had a lot of guys who hadn’t played high-level basketball or games that mattered. The In-Season Tournament, it was like a heightened sense of urgency in all those games. We know how we started the year defensively, but we all came together, and we told ourselves, if we could just go from 30 to average, we can be a hell of a team.”

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Tyrese Haliburton, Pacers stay true to themselves to set up matchup with Boston

Carlisle blew up his starting lineup the day after Christmas, putting Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith and Jalen Smith in alongside Haliburton and Turner. That group had a net rating of  minus-4.6, with a defensive rating of 120.8. Not great by any stretch, but at least the defensive bleed wasn’t as profound as it had been for the first two months. Once Siakam came aboard, the Pacers’ D really took off; in 25 games of Haliburton-Nembhard-Nesmith-Siakam-Turner, Indiana’s defensive rating was 107.2, with a net rating of 6.4.

There was a lot of soul-searching, McConnell said.

“I think it was being masked by the hellacious offense that we were playing with, but it just wasn’t good enough,” McConnell said. “You don’t get to this point without turning things around defensively. Credit to the coaching staff and everyone for … just looking in the mirror at getting better at that end.”

Getting Siakam not only meant trading three first-round picks to Toronto — two this season, one in 2026 — but also moving veteran forward Bruce Brown, whom Indiana had signed last offseason to great fanfare after Brown had helped the Denver Nuggets win the title. Brown didn’t fit with Indy hand in glove, but he had a champion’s pedigree. So does Siakam, of course, having helped the Raptors get a ring in 2019. But Brown is under contract for next season. Siakam isn’t.

Siakam has been impressed by the Pacers’ way of doing things, beyond Haliburton’s rise (though that, too, matters). With president of basketball operations Kevin Pritchard and general manager Chad Buchanan, Indy has veteran front-office stability and a definite vision for how to build around Haliburton. In Carlisle, the Pacers have one of the game’s great tacticians, who always seems to get the absolute most out of his roster.

“After the In-Season Tournament, we just made a decision as a staff that we needed to be better,” Carlisle said. “… I just told our guys, we are going to make a stand, and we’re going to get better. We were on a historic pace offensively, but to get where we are at this moment and where we want to get in this next round and in the future, what we were doing offensively was not sustainable. It just simply was not. Not if you can’t consistently guard and rebound.”

The task of beating top-seeded and well-rested Boston, starting Tuesday at TD Garden, is Indiana’s biggest challenge to date. The Celtics may be without center Kristaps Porziņģis for the start of the series, but they’re otherwise healthy. They’ve been the best team in the league all season. They’ve had a relatively easy path to the conference finals.

Yet here come the Pacers, playing with house money, still far from dominating the sports headlines in town. Next Sunday will be the 108th running of the Indianapolis 500, and there is a rookie guard on the WNBA’s Indiana Fever who’s, apparently, drawn some attention.

The Pacers will continue flying under the radar, and loving it.

(Photo of Pascal Siakam: Elsa / Getty Images)