Xander Schauffele won three out of the four matches he played in the Ryder Cup. He and Patrick Cantlay were lethal together, as they have been in the previous editions of the event. In fact, only their pairing won the opening foursome match, while the rest of the teams faced big defeats on Friday. However, despite their excellent form, Schauffele & Cantlay couldn’t overpower the pairing of Jon Rahm & Tyrrell Hatton on Saturday. And the 2025 Baycurrent Classic champion believes he’s the reason behind his team’s downfall against the LIV Golf duo.
After winning his first PGA Tour title of the season in Japan, the 31-year-old sat down for a press conference when he was asked about his singles win against Rahm on Sunday. Schauffele told the media, “I thought at the Ryder Cup I played pretty solid, I let Pat hang in our second alternate match or foursomes match, I played really poor there and let him down, but the other rounds I felt like I was starting to kind of play some good golf. It’s very high stakes, high-pressure golf, and I started to hit some shots that I wasn’t really hitting throughout the year.”
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Cantlay & Schauffele struggled to overcome the threat of the European duo. Despite their best efforts, Rahm & Hatton ended up winning the foursome match on Saturday 3 & 2. And while Patrick was pushing hard to help his team win, this was probably Xander’s worst performance at Bethpage. However, he still wasn’t that disappointed because he got to take his revenge against Rahm on Sunday, winning the singles match on the day by the biggest margin, 4 & 3. And that’s the positive Schauffele took out of the event.
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“I think the whole tournament, even though we lost, for me personally, I was able to hit a few shots in high-stakes moments that sort of gave me a little bit of confidence for sure.” The excellent performance in New York certainly helped boost Schauffele’s confidence. And even though he didn’t directly say it, the confidence gain certainly contributed to his first PGA Tour win of the season at the Yokohama Country Club.