There’s never been a PGA Championship quite like this one. Come Sunday morning there were 21 players within four shots of the lead, and eight major winners among them. Every one of those 21 and a good few more woke up thinking that they had a shot at winning the Wanamaker Trophy.
There was six-time major champion Rory McIlroy, 2022 Open champion, Cam Smith, the 2017 and 2022 PGA champion, Justin Thomas, the 2021 US Open and 2023 Masters champion, Jon Rahm, and on, and on, and on, all the way down the leaderboard.
And then there was Aaron Rai, a 31-year-old from Wolverhampton, the world No 44. Rai has won Tour events before, but his biggest achievement in major golf until this point was his top-20 finish in this tournament last year and a victory in the rinky-dink par-three contest they play the day before the Masters.
Well, it had to be someone. And by doing it, Rai has ended one of the longest-standing jinxes in golf. It had been 107 years since an Englishman last won the PGA. That was “Big” Jim Barnes way back in 1919, when it was still a matchplay event. The last four days – the last four hours – of the wait were the most excruciatingly tense of the lot. It has been a week of high-wire golf at Aronimink, which was set up in such a tough way that on Friday McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, the two best players of their generation, were left complaining about how tricky it was.
But like McIlroy said a day later, hard as it was, it made for a “helluva entertaining” day on Sunday. There was hardly a player in the field who didn’t fancy their chances. And when Kurt Kitayama, who started the day tied for 64th, went out in the morning and scored a 63 to rocket into the top 10, everyone knew there were plenty of opportunities out there for anyone good enough to take them. The flip side was that in a field as busy as this one, when everyone was pressed up against each other on the leaderboard, you’d be lucky to get away with one mistake, let alone two.
Rahm, Alex Smalley, and Matti Schmid all found that out the hard way. All three led the field at different points in the day, and all three fell away again after making a bogey at the wrong moment. One dropped shot always seemed to mean three steps back down the ladder. The remarkable part about Rai’s victory was that he made so many little errors in his first eight holes that he didn’t even seem to be in the running for a large part of his round.
It all turned when he made an extraordinary eagle on the par-five 9th. He hit his second shot into the heart of the green, to set up a 40-foot left-to-right putt. Rai once broke the record for making the most consecutive putts from 10ft (he made 207 of them, if you were wondering) but this one was an absolute brute. It turned like the second hand of a clock as it rolled towards the hole and in, and all of a sudden he was one-under for the round and right back in the reckoning. Rai walked off that green with renewed confidence.
And he did it at the very moment when everyone else in contention seemed to be faltering.
Rai split the fairway with his drive at the 11th, hit his approach to five feet, and made a birdie to take the lead. Then at the 13th he managed to splash out of a green-side bunker to set up another five-foot birdie putt. That took him to seven-under, one shot beyond what anyone else had managed all week, and two shots clear of the field. McIlroy and Rahm tried to chase after him, but the harder they reached after his lead, the further away it got. Aronimink’s not a course you can force, and while they were taking risks, Rai was playing with icy accuracy.
Rai picked up another birdie on the par-five 16th and then delivered the knock-out blow with another remarkable birdie putt from 68 feet on the 17th green that brought the fans all around to their feet roaring and screaming in disbelief. The sound was so loud it seemed to carry clean across the city.
Rai was three shots clear now, and had the luxury of being able to walk up the 18th fairway knowing that he was about to become a major winner. His final round was 65, three bogeys, six birdies, and that one glorious eagle, and he had covered Aronimink’s ferociously difficult back nine in just 31 shots. It put him three-clear of Rahm and Smalley, who were tied for second on six-under, and four-clear of Thomas, five clear of McIlroy, Smith, and Xander Schauffele. He had bested the strongest field in golf.
