ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — After two months without competition, PGA and British Open champion Xander Schauffele set modest expectations at Bay Hill and achieved one of his goals at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
He gets two more rounds. The longest cut streak on the PGA Tour in 20 years is still intact at 58 in a row.
But it took more work than he imaged. Schauffele, who opened with a 77, was 3 under for his round through 10 holes when he ran into trouble. The 11th hole felt like getting “hit in the face with a frying pan.” The par-5 12th hole he described as an “absolute disaster.”
He made double bogey on both and was on the ropes. But he found birdies on a course that doesn't give them up easily, hitting wedge to 8 feet to a back pin on the 13th, holing a 30-foot birdie putt on the 14th and then from a fairway bunker to pin-high on the par-5 16th to set up a two-putt birdie.
A bogey on the final hole gave him a 71 — 12 shots behind 36-hole leader Shane Lowry — and made him sweat only briefly until it was clear he would make the cut on the number. This signature event has a 36-hole cut to top 50 and ties, plus anyone within 10 shots of the lead.
“I try really hard to not quit,” Schauffele said. “Even today going double-double sitting in a really nice spot, it was an easy time to get frustrated. But I said earlier in the week I’m going to have to go to a special place to play decent golf, and I had to dig deep. So it was good practice on that front.”
Schauffele is playing for the first time since The Sentry at Kapalua to start the year, taking time off to heal an intercostal strain and slight tear to the cartilage in his right rib. He wasn't expecting an immediate return to great golf. He wasn't wanting to leave on Friday, either.
Austin Kaiser, his caddie, joked that he only needed four more years to catch the record of 142 made cuts in a row by Tiger Woods from February 1998 to May 2005.
It's no less impressive. The streak is the sixth-longest in PGA Tour history behind Woods, Byron Nelson (113), Jack Nicklaus (105), Hale Irwin (86) and Dow Finsterwald (72).
“Austin and I are proud of our cut streak, no doubt,” Schauffele said. “Is it what we think about? No. But usually when you focus on winning you make a lot of cuts and end up somewhere in between.”
It's not that it hasn't crossed his mind on occasion.
Schauffele was on the ropes at the Scottish Open last summer, two shots below the cut line until making five birdies over the last 11 holes.
Kaiser had mentioned the cut streak to his boss the day before, so Schauffele was well aware. There was no panic in him that day at the Scottish Open, a sign of the confidence he had his game. Schauffele would go on to win the British Open the following week.
“I would have missed this cut a couple of years ago," he said last summer. He spoke that day about not having to persuade himself to be calm when it was going badly.
That's how it looked Friday at Bay Hill. He pulled a fairway bunker shot into the water on the 11th, leading to the double bogey. He was in good position just right of the 12th green when he chopped out over the green, left a chip short and took double bogey.
And then came the impressive answer.
“I had to dig deep,” Schauffele said. “I heard a birdie — someone birdied the next hole in front of me, Shane or Rory (McIlroy), and then someone birdied the par 3 as well. And I just told myself, ‘If they can do it, so can I.’"
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AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
Doug Ferguson, The Associated Press
