[Photo: Yoshimasa Nakano]
Xander Schauffele was born in a hospital in La Jolla that is four kilometres from the clubhouse at the Torrey Pines golf municipal courses. He played high school and college golf atop the cliffs, built a dream home 13 kilometres away and has competed in the Farmers Insurance Open in every season he’s been a pro, save for last year when he was dealing with an injury.
So, yes, he’ll be the first to admit he’s biased when it comes to seeing Torrey Pines and San Diego remain on the PGA Tour schedule in perpetuity – at a time when there is so much speculation about which tournaments will remain and which will disappear when the Future Competitions Committee (FCC) makes it recommendations sometime in the next few months.
On Tuesday (local time) ahead of the start of the last San Diego tournament that will be sponsored by Farmers Insurance, Schauffele admitted that he’s hardly the guy tying himself to a Torrey pine tree to save the event. But he also doesn’t seem overly concerned that the event is in danger of going away.
“I think I would feel like Torrey’s safe if you kind of look at the schedule, just from it should find a home because this property’s iconic,” said the 10-time PGA Tour winner. “It’s a beautiful property, it’s a big property, it’s a tough golf course and it usually has pretty good winners on it.”
Schauffele then pointed out the impact that Tiger Woods has had on Torrey Pines, and vice versa. Woods, who happens to lead the FCC, won here eight times, including the epic 2008 US Open, and in turn, people flock to the site from all over the world and television viewers can likely recall memorable holes and shots at Torrey as much as most venues on tour.
“I think Tiger single-handedly has made this property incredibly special in terms of a history in golf, just tying back to the ’08 US Open,” said Schauffele, who on-site as a youngster and scrambling to see Woods’ incredible Sunday putt at 18 in ’08. “You look at pretty golf courses that we have on tour, I’d say Torrey’s one of them. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was somewhere on the schedule.
“I couldn’t answer when or who would want to be a sponsor or something of that nature, but I think it’s a strong enough course and a big enough course, a championship course to be on the schedule still.”
With talk that the Hawaiian Swing’s season-opening tournaments on Maui and Oahu might go away permanently after this season, and with the San Diego event looking for a new sponsor, speculation turns to the remaining events on the West Coast Swing. Pebble Beach and Riviera already host signature events, leaving the American Express tournament and the San Diego stop as those more in question.
The Sentry, also a signature tournament and previously at Kapalua, seemingly would need a home, and the American Express is a three-course pro-am that wouldn’t appear conducive to hosting a limited field. That would seemingly leave Torrey Pines as a strong possible landing spot for the Sentry on the South Course. Tour officials are declining comment until the FCC delivers its report.
For Schauffele, with no Sentry at which to start the season, he skipped the first two events and begins at Torrey Pines, where, curiously, he has only two top-10 finishes in nine starts. He missed last year with a rib-cage injury that ended up creating a sluggish start and middling play that led to him missing the Tour Championship for the first time.
Schauffele called it a “bad year”, but it ended on a couple of very high notes. He and his wife, Maya, had their first child, a boy they named Victor, in late August, and in October, Schauffele shot 64 in the final round to win the Baycurrent Championship in Japan – the country in which his mother was raised.
Of what it meant to get that season-ending win, Schauffele said, “We had a kid, and, obviously, I’m going to take advantage and spend as much time with him and my wife. It was a big goal of mine to play well. So, I just know myself – if I didn’t play well in Japan, I would have been super-pumped to be there and be present [with him family], obviously, but at the same time something would have been just scratching at the back of my head of just like, ‘You suck,’ you know what I mean? You’ve got to play a lot better.”
