After making his season debut at Maui's Sentry, Xander Schauffele missed the next two months due to a rib injury.
He returned to the competition at this week's Arnold Palmer Invitational, and seemed obviously rusty in Thursday's first round. Current World No. 3 filmed opening 5-over-77 on the first day, finding him in a position where he's out of the cut line and watched.
“You got kicked my ass,” Schaufele said with a smile.
“Yeah, that's not a lie, it's a difficult place to go back.”
He added that he felt “great,” but deep down he knew another round like this would snap an impressive winning streak.
Introduced this week, Shauferre made a straight cut of 57. This is a winning streak that goes back to the 2022 Masters Tournament. This is the longest active streak on the PGA Tour and the longest striped pattern since Tiger Woods made the 142 directly from 1998 to 2005.
Schaufele opened the second round on Friday on the par-4 first hole with birdies, adding two more par-breakers to the front nine. However, after turning at 3 under 33, the disaster occurred in holes 11 and 12.
He spotted the water in a second shot from the fairway bunker at 11am. This is an equivalent mistake to “hitting your face in a frying pan.” In the next hole, Schaufere made an uncharacteristic mistake from the side of the green, and wanted to make a birdie 4 there. Instead, it has been changed to seven.
So last year's PGA Championship winner and current Champion Golfer of the Year plunged the leaderboard to six overs with six shots, two shots on the cut line.
But in true Shaufele fashion, he bouncing off the hall on the 13th, 14th and 16th with a birdie.
“That's cool. I tried so hard to stop. I'm still doubled and sitting in a really nice place. It was an easy time to get frustrated,” Schaufele said.
“But I said at the beginning of the week that I had to go to a special place to play decent golf, so I had to dig deeper, so that was a good practice in that respect. [My caddy] Austin [Kaiser] And I'm definitely proud of our cutstrake. Is that what we're thinking? no. Usually, when you focus on winning, you make a lot of cuts and end up somewhere in between. ”
Jack Mirco is a golf staff writer who plays SB Nation. Follow him with x @jack_milko.
