The X Factor

fonly his junior football coach had played him as a striker, golf may never have been gifted with the excitement machine that is Xander Schauffele. The 5-foot-10, 79-kilogram American was perhaps better built for the world game than the game he ended up choosing.

Schauffele – the son of a German-French father and a Chinese-Japanese mother – was a prodigious football talent. Aged six, he could juggle with both feet. He was a tremendous competitor. And the sport was in his blood, with both his great grandfathers playing professional football in their home countries of Austria and Germany.

But in Scripps Ranch – a city suburb of San Diego, California – Schauffele was toiling