To win an Open Championship, you need a bag full of tricks to handle the unpredictability. For four days at Royal Troon, Mother Nature threw down the gauntlet and forced every player in the 2024 Open Championship field to use every tool in the bag and get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

When the difficulty was cranked up to expert level, only Xander Schauffele managed to find another gear down the stretch and prevail. It’s easy to look at Schauffele’s final round performance and chalk it up to mental fortitude. But that’s only one part of the equation. The tools have to perform under the gun as well.

In Schauffele’s case, every tool in the bag came up clutch in the big moments, especially the Callaway Chrome Tour golf ball.

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Of all the gear changes Schauffele made at the beginning of the season, switching from a prototype version of Callaway’s Chrome Soft X into Chrome Tour appeared to be uncomplicated.

“The golf ball is identical,” Schauffele said of the swap at the Sentry Tournament of Champions. “I think they just stamped a new logo on it.”

If the balls were “identical,” then why switch at all? According to Callaway Tour rep Kellen Watson, it was more about the subtle performance improvements seen during testing. More specifically, how the ball managed to hold its own in blustery conditions.

“With the improved aerodynamics, it was a no-brainer for him to switch balls,” Callaway Tour rep Kellen Watson told GOLF.com. “It’s one of those aspects pros notice when they’re testing on their own. For Xander, he was able to keep getting better in an area that didn’t require any major adjustments to his equipment. It was a compelling reason to make the switch.”

While the area package on a golf ball rarely garners the attention it deserves, Callaway invested heavily in the design of a new Seamless Tour Aero package found on Chrome Tour.

“Each ball will have a uniquely designed aerodynamic pattern, and it’s completely different from anything we’ve ever done, bringing our aerodynamics into a completely different zone,” said Eric Loper, Callaway’s senior director, golf ball R&D.

Callaway’s hexagonal dimple design remains a key part of the aero package, along with something else that won’t immediately stand out: a strategically placed spherical dimple adding consistency throughout the flight.

“By managing each dimple, it enables us to focus on the ball flight from start to finish, where the ball starts off fast but as it approaches the ground the speed has significantly decreased,” Loper said. “This has led us down this path of developing an industry first, it’s a combination of Callaway’s hexagonal surface geometry with strategically placed spherical dimples that provide stability through the entire ball flight. We’ve ended up with model-specific patterns that maximize distance and improve stability over the entire ball flight, which the player will see in a variety of conditions.”

Schauffele began ball testing in mid-October and immediately noticed how much easier it was to execute shots without doing the usual mental math to account for the wind direction. But ball testing at home doesn’t pay the bills. It wasn’t until he put it to the test in competition that he saw the same results under pressure.

“That’s when you know you made the right decision,” Schauffele told GOLF.com. “When you start to see the ball handling [the windy] conditions, it allows you to be more aggressive and trust that [the ball is] going to execute the shots.”

Since the switch, Schauffele has won the Open Championship and PGA Championship. Not bad for a guy who didn’t have a major to his name at the start of the season.

Schauffele’s trust in his Chrome Tour ball was on full display during the final round as he attacked Royal Troon with surgical precision. Even the tough shots didn’t seem to bother the 30-year-old — like a 173-yard flyer on the par-4 11th. With the wind blowing off the left at 17 mph, Schauffele extracted the ball from the tall grass and watched as it cut through the wind and landed softly on the front edge before settling within a few feet of the hole for an improbable birdie.

It’s the kind of shot that only reaffirmed his decision to switch balls in January. Shaking up a successful setup is never easy, but it makes all the hours spent testing behind the scenes worth it when the eventual outcome is major championship hardware.

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Jonathan Wall

Golf.com Editor

Jonathan Wall is GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com’s Managing Editor for Equipment. Prior to joining the staff at the end of 2018, he spent 6 years covering equipment for the PGA Tour. He can be reached at jonathan.wall@golf.com.