Gold medallist Schauffele ready for return to PGA Tour

American hopes to build on Tokyo success

Olympic men’s golf champion Xander Schauffele said on Tuesday he is ready to get back to work on the PGA Tour this week in Memphis after the biggest win of his career.

Schauffele secured a onestroke victory at the Olympics on Sunday and is raring to go for this week’s WGC-FEDEX St. Jude Invitational at TPC Southwind.

“Playing really well and obviously having a gold medal is just feeding my energy,” Schauffele said. “That’s the rush we really chase and it does feel good and it’s really rewarding to pull off and I’m ready to get back to work.”

The 27-year-old American arrived at his pre-tournament media availability with his PGA Tour credential hanging around his neck but eventually swapped it for the gold medal that was stuffed into his pocket.

Schauffele said he might not have had the medal with him if his swing coach father Stefan, a former decathlete whose dreams of representing Germany at the Olympics were crushed nearly 40 years ago when a car crash left him blind in one eye, had his way.

“My dad slept with it the first night, so I didn’t even have it with me the day I won it,” said Schauffele.

“He was going to take it to San Diego, he was going to take it back home to his house and parade around with his friends, but I told him I had a little media to do and I’m sure everyone wanted to see the gold medal here. Sort of my moment in the sun with it.”

After his gold medal triumph, Schauffele said he had some celebratory drinks and the next morning had breakfast with his maternal grandparents, who live in Japan and managed to get a hotel room next to his.

Schauffele, a four-times winner on the PGA Tour in search of his first major triumph, said that dining experience helped him get a better grasp of how big his gold medal triumph is.

“It’s pretty hard to impress someone who’s almost 90 years old and has been on this planet for a long time,” Schauffele said of his grandparents.

“They’ve seen a lot of things, and to see my grandpa and my grandma’s reaction when I pull out this gold medal, sort of it really was surprising, it shocked me.”

The golf calendar will have a different feel next season as the PGA Tour and European Tour on Tuesday unveiled a series of co-sanctioned events that will make it more flexible for golfers to compete on both tours.

As part of a strategic alliance announced last November, the tours said the Genesis Scottish Open, Barbasol Championship and Barracuda Championship will award points for both the Fedexcup and Race to Dubai.

The player field for the July 7-10 Scottish Open, which will retain its place in calendar the week ahead of the British Open, will be a split between members of both tours. In addition, there will be access for 50 European Tour members to each of two PGA Tour events in 2022 for the first time.

“With today’s news, I am pleased to say the PGA Tour and the European Tour are both stronger than at any time in our history, as we are positioned to grow — together — over the next 10 years faster than we have at any point in our existence,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a news release. “We are committed to continuing to evolve and adapt, and with our ever-strengthening partnership with the European Tour, to take the global game to the heights we all know it is capable of.”

In addition, the number of World Golf Championships events on the PGA Tour schedule will drop to two as the Memphis stop will shift from a regular-season event into the first playoff event, while the April 28-May 1 Mexico Championship will be a standalone event not under the WGC umbrella.

With a field of 132 players instead of the usual 72, the PGA Tour anticipates additional Mexican golfers in the Mexico Championship field as it looks to grow the game in one of golf’s key emerging markets.

The PGA Tour also said that after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the RBC Canadian Open will return in 2022 and be played June 9-12 at St. George’s Golf and Country Club in Toronto.