For Olympic golfers, there’s 1 question no one can answer

SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France — That trophy Xander Schauffele played for two weeks ago at the Open Championship — we all know it. The Claret Jug, handed out to the Champion Golfer of the Year. He holds it for a year and delivers it back to the R&A next July. In the meantime, he’s taken countless photos with it, smoked cigars while cradling it, and drank red wine out of it just like he promised. He also drank tequila from it, hoping the agave spirit might sterilize the silver innards of the best chalice in the game. 

To the victor go these kinda spoils — and Schauffele is far from the first to prioritize imbibing after a win. He won’t be the last. The point here is, you knew all that was coming. Maybe not the tequila, but the rest of it. We knew the figurative prizes Schauffele was playing for, too. Legacy, history, etc. The fact that 233 players have won a major, but only 89 have won two. Everyone in golf knows that matters. We’ve agreed upon its significance. The players, the caddies, every past Open Champion who’s still kicking around in the game — even you. 

What we can’t quite seem to agree upon is what everyone is playing for this week. There’s no disputing that the Olympics is certainly worth something, but what is it worth, exactly? Where does winning a Gold Medal rank on the list of career accomplishments? How about a bronze? This question has become so common that it induces eye-rolls lately. Rory McIlroy has been asked about it ad nauseam. Months ago, and at the Scottish Open, and at the Open Championship and then here, at Le Golf National, on Tuesday morning. The answer is mostly unchanged. 

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“I’ve been asked this question a lot,” McIlroy said, “where would an Olympic Medal sit in sort of the hierarchy of my career achievements? And it’s something I probably won’t be able to answer until when everything is said and done.”

It was a safe answer, but also probably the right one. In the days of bite-size attention spans and the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately Internet discourse, it’s difficult to build significance when an event arrives on the schedule once every four years. 

Golf could have enjoyed decades of Olympic history by now, since it was supposed to rejoin the Games in 1996, but ran into a political mess when it was widely revealed that the intended host — Augusta National — maintained extremely exclusive membership practices. Read: zero female members and just one Black member at the time. 

Instead, golf at the Olympics didn’t begin again until 2016 in Brazil, where the field battled fears over the Zika virus. The sport pushed forward in 2020 before the entirety of the Games were postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic. When it was staged a year later in Tokyo, numerous players had either bailed from the idea or contracted Covid themselves, making them ineligible. 

Very little about golf at the Olympics has been orderly. And, we typically enjoy a lot of order in this sport. We’re working to get more of it, too. The Signature Events are the game’s best collection of talent, outside of the majors. Winning them is massive, and winning elsewhere is important, but winning a major is everything. Could a Gold Medal compare? 

“I’ve got this question a lot,” Jon Rahm said, “and I think that’s a great question for Xander Schauffele since he’s the only man recently to have done both.”

Fair point. Let’s ask the man.

“It is a good question but it’s tricky,” Schauffele began. “Golf was in the Olympics and then it was out of the Olympics. So I think a lot of the kids were watching Tiger, or if you’re a little bit older, you’re watching Jack or Arnie, the older legends of the game. You’re watching them win majors.

“It’s kind of different. For me it’s very personal. My relationship with my dad, the relationship my dad and I have with golf — a lot of it sort of surrounds his teachings of when he was trying to be an Olympian.

“The majors are sort of what I grew up watching. They are two very different things to me. I think the Gold Medal, it’s been marinating nicely. Maybe in 30, 40 years, it’s something that’s really going to be special as it gets more traction and it kind of gets back into the eyes or into the normalcy of being in the Olympics.”

There’s two things in there. Marinating, and personal. Olympic golf needs to marinate. To soak, over time, and see what stories the competition creates. Part of that is that is the second bit of Schauffele’s response. The Olympics, with its pomp, its nationalism, its individualism, is simply more personal than it is historic. That’s something we’ve probably learned the last few days. 

Rahm was at his wit’s end in 2021, the clear best player on the planet who texted negative for Covid-19 four or five times, only to have one positive test keep him from competing. He felt like something was taken from him. Jason Day had a chance to compete in 2016 but passed up the opportunity, and now he regrets it. He spent part of his Monday watching the women’s judo competition, awe-struck at the emotions of athletes at the end of four-year journey.

“To watch an athlete go through that emotion of trying to overcome a loss or overcome winning for the first time, winning a medal for the first time, is very inspiring to watch,” Day said. “So it definitely has changed the way that I view golf in the Olympics, and that’s why I’m very thankful for the opportunity to be able to compete here this week.”

J-Day wasn’t interested in the Olympics eight years ago. Now he’s hopeful to play in 2028, in Los Angeles, and is already thinking about 2032, back in Oz. He’d be 44 then. Rory McIlroy wasn’t interested in the Olympics eight years ago, either. Now, he sees it as a chance to stamp not just his season, but for the last 10 years of major championships that have evaded his grasp.

Clearly, golf at the Olympics means different things to different people. That may bother some who want to notarize its place in the game before any shots hit the sky, but beg of them some patience. And send them the words of young, strapping, ball-speed aficionado Nicolai Hojgaard. The Dane is just 23, which would have made him a third-grader when his sport of choice was added back to the Olympic charter. In other words, the idea of golf as an Olympic sport isn’t so foreign to him. And it has him geeking out.

“I’m getting goosebumps thinking about it because putting on the national shirt is a really special feeling,” he said. “I’ve had it in my amateur days representing Denmark and Euros and World Cup and all that, and it was some of my best experience in golf.

“To have that feeling now and that dream of getting a medal and getting back home, I can’t even think of how the reception will be in Denmark. Hopefully that will be something that transforms golf a little bit.”

It could be just the thing.