Xander Schauffele is letting us in. Have you noticed?

Xander Schauffele sat back and pondered the question, his legs numb from the week’s walk and the post-celebration festivities that had just begun. Tucked away in his rental house, a few minutes from Valhalla Golf Club late Sunday night last May, the Wanamaker Trophy rested beside him.

“Do you feel lighter?” one of Schauffele’s friends asked.

“What do you mean?” Schauffele said. “Do I look skinnier?”

“No, no, do you feel lighter?” the friend said again.

Schauffele’s smile morphed into a smirk, the crux of the inquiry and what he accomplished a few hours earlier slowly hitting him.

“I do… I'm not going to lie to you.”

Last year’s PGA Championship was the site of Schauffele’s golfing breakthrough, the realization of all the promise he held but too often failed to showcase when the grandest tournaments reached their grandest moments. Major championships define legacies, and without one, Schauffele’s legacy was, at best, incomplete. At worst, it was nonexistent.

Schauffele preached process over results, but it weighed on him. He told himself “all kinds of things” to keep his mind from contemplating whether it would ever actually happen, whether his hard work would pay off. Then, finally, mercifully, it did.

Suddenly, his previous accomplishments carried extra weight, validated by this crowning accomplishment. He eschewed the “one of the best players without a major” moniker. It was a delicate mix of joy and relief as he shed the tired narrative around him and built up a completely new one. It manifested on the course. Within months, Schauffele convincingly won his second major at The Open Championship.

But Valhalla changed something in Schauffele, far more human and insightful than any consequential iron shot or putt. It changed the version of Schauffele that he allows the rest of the world to see.

Schauffele, by design, has been hard to know. In his first seven years on TOUR, he intentionally subverted the spotlight, retreating into what he called a “hermit” state. It’s safer not to let anyone in, even more so when the dominating question surrounding you is when you’ll win the big one that’s eluded you. That’s tiring. Why fan the flames when a steady dose of apathy can extinguish them? That line of thinking is not unique in sport, long filled with cookie-cutter athletes comfortable remaining unknown. Sometimes, that’s just who they are.

What made Schauffele all the more maddening is that we knew there was much more than he was willing to show. He wasn’t uninteresting, just uninterested in delving deeper. He would show glimpses in press conferences. Stories from fellow players and those close to him painted the picture of a player that could be a fan-favorite: witty, brash, intelligent, maniacal, quirky. Ask any player, caddie or cog of the traveling circus that is the PGA TOUR, and almost all will point to Schauffele as the funniest golfer out there.

“Xander, easily,” Collin Morikawa said.

That version was nonexistent when he stepped in front of a microphone. It was easier to give a non-answer and move about the day, wary that any vulnerable moment would be twisted by aggregators and the media illiterate. It’s best to be boring. At least that was Schauffele’s approach before Valhalla.

“He came out with this clean image of being boring,” Schauffele’s caddie, Austin Kaiser, explained while sitting outside the Harbour Town clubhouse last month, watching from above as Schauffele worked on the putting green. “He's not like that. That’s just the image he's trying to portray to the media so it doesn't look like he's a bad guy.”

What’s happened since Valhalla has been a break from that intentional portrayal. Schauffele hasn’t made a complete 180. He’s not begging for attention, nor has he transformed into a social butterfly.

But in the public eye, he’s finally himself.

“It was the majors, honestly,” Kaiser said. That was the turning point.”

Schauffele is letting us in. Have you noticed?

At the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday, his first start after Valhalla, Schaffuele arrived at his pre-tournament press conference early, sat at the podium and put his feet up on the table, laughing and chit-chatting with media as they walked in. The difference was immediately noticeable to the reporters in the room, used to their weekly sessions with Schauffele eliciting very little.

Asked if he felt freed up, Schauffele said, “I just played nine holes and probably shot in the 40s, to be honest. So I don't feel super free,” delivering the answer in his typical deadpan tone, cracking a smile at the end.

There’s the humor we heard about.

The substance came moments later. Asked a question he previously would deflect – if any previous close calls in majors had bugged him – Schauffele dropped his guard and let the world in. He spoke about how those pressure moments had previously caused him to speed up, that multiple holes would go by in an instant and he’d have little grasp on what he was doing and why. He thought back to 2018 during The Open Championship at Carnoustie, where he took a co-lead into the final round, then shot 40 on the front nine and cratered his hopes.

“It felt so fast,” Schauffele said. “Like I can't even remember the shots that I hit on the front nine, but I just remember the feeling of, like, we got to (No.) 10 and we're like, ‘What just happened to this tournament?'

“I was really immature at that time.”

We seldom heard these revelations from Schauffele before he won the PGA Championship, not yet ready to shed light on his shortcomings. Maybe it was just the afterglow of a major-championship victory, but it was the first indicator that something was different. Winning changes a lot, and Schauffele’s public presence was evolving.

At the Presidents Cup, Schauffele was the talk of the U.S. Team, driving the rampant wagering between teammates to up the competitiveness of their practice rounds. It’s weeks like this and the Ryder Cup that promote personalities, shedding the individualistic nature of week-in and week-out pro golf for an emotionally-charged team event. It’s where personalities like Tom Kim, Justin Thomas, Patrick Reed and Ian Poulter have emerged as fan favorites. Schauffele will never be as boisterous as them, but he carved his own lane in Montreal.

“Xander’s wild,” Tony Finau said.

“He's just been absolutely abusing (captain's assistant) Brandt (Snedeker) this week,” Max Homa said. “So it's been quite fun.”

Schauffele’s love language is light-hearted jabs. If he’s not dishing out insults, he probably doesn’t like you. And that week, Snedeker was feeling the brunt of Schauffele’s barbs while giving it out in return. Snedeker spent the week calling Schauffele, “Alex” (Xander’s full name is Alexander) and lobbing out side bets against Schauffele.

“Well, Brandt is not the sharpest tool in the shed,” Schauffele said.

In these moments, we saw the Schauffele that those close to him see every day.

“It's always funny when people say, ‘You get to see a different side of him,’” Max Homa said. “I fortunately and unfortunately get to see this side of him. He is a pot stirrer. He is witty, funny. He's just everything you'd want in a buddy. So it always irks me when people are like, ‘Oh, he's so boring.’ I've seen that so much. It's been fun seeing him be so successful this (last) year, and I feel like more has come out about how great of a guy he is and great teammate, all those things. He just talks a lot of ....”

It’s a two-way street. Schauffele often didn’t play ball during media obligations and other opportunities outside the ropes that could have shown a different side to him. He has developed a relationship with “Bob Does Sports," a popular golf YouTube channel, but only first appeared in their videos because his manager implored him to do it (Schauffele has since become friends with the Bob Does Sports crew). But Schauffele also wasn’t helped by the persistent, repetitive and sometimes lazy questions of when he would win again. There are only so many ways to answer the question and only so many times you can hear it before becoming jaded.

Schauffele’s transformation isn’t just unique to him. Brooks Koepka, now one of the most outspoken players in the sport, didn’t start like that. He, like Schauffele, was subdued in public settings, preferring his play to do all the talking. Koepka was generally cast aside as boring. Then he won multiple major championships, and we learned there was much more there.

“I feel like I actually do have a voice, and it will be heard, and I can do that now, where when you’ve only won once on the PGA TOUR, you can't really say the things you want to say,” Koepka said in 2019. “You haven’t established yourself; you haven't put yourself out there.”

Even for players who have remained understated, the shift after a win is noticeable.

“I think so,” Justin Rose said when asked if he was more comfortable being himself in public after winning the U.S. Open in 2013. “I was very grateful to have won a major because I also realized how many great players had not won major championships. So when I had that box checked, I was like, okay, great, we can now use that.”

It’s a paradox. Once you stop projecting a version of yourself that the public might like – or at least not dislike – is the exact moment that you become endearing for who you are.

Schauffele isn’t for everyone because he’s no longer trying to be. He is him: smart-assed and laid back but relentlessly competitive and maniacally focused on improving.

“I think he'll just keep settling into his skin the more he gets comfortable,” Kaiser said. “You could tell he has gotten way more comfortable in his skin around here because he's like, 'Alright, I've proven myself. I don't need to put on this image of "I'm out here to win."'

"It's like, 'I already won, now I'm out here to keep winning and be myself.'”

That’s a win for us all.