There’s never been a PGA Championship quite like the one that’s played out at Aronimink this week. At the start of the last day, there were 21 players within four shots of the lead, and eight major winners among them, every one of them sure that they had a shot at winning the Wanamaker Trophy.
There was the six-time major champion Rory McIlroy, the 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, past Hideki Matsuyama, Justin Rose, Xander Schauffele, Patrick Reed and plenty of other contenders too.
And somehow, when it was all over, the winner was England’s Aaron Rai, who played the round of his life, a five-under-par 65. Rai, 31, was born and raised in Wolverhampton by a Kenyan mother and an Indian father. It had been 107 years since an Englishman last won the PGA Championship. That was “Big” Jim Barnes way back in 1919. Rai has broken one of the longest waits in major golf, and the last four days – the last four hours – were the most excruciatingly tense of the lot. It has been a week of high-wire golf on a ferociously difficult course, one which left McIlroy and Scheffler, the two best players of their generation, complaining about the set-up earlier in the week.
But like McIlroy said on Saturday night, hard as it was, it made for a “helluva entertaining” day on Sunday. In the morning, there was hardly a player in the top 50 who didn’t think he had a chance. And when Kurt Kitayama, four-over after three days and tied for 64th, went out early on Sunday morning and scored a 63 to rocket into the top 10, they knew there were plenty of opportunities out there for anyone good enough to take them. Kitayama’s round included seven birdies, and equalled the lowest ever scored on a Sunday at a major.
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’re lucky if you can get away with one mistake, and anyone who happens to make a second is as good as done for. Rahm, Alex Smalley and Matti Schmid all led the field at different points in the day, and all three of them fell away again after making a bogey. The remarkable part was that Rai triumphed even though he made three errors just on the front nine. When he made his third bogey in six holes on the eighth, he had slipped back among the also-rans.
Then his round turned on an extraordinary eagle putt on the par-five 9th. Rai hit his second shot into the heart of the green and made a 40-foot left-to-right putt that broke like the second hand of a clock as it rolled towards the hole. All of a sudden, he was one-under for the round, and right back in it. Rai walked off that green with new confidence. At the moment when everyone else in contention seemed to waver, he only became more sure of himself. He took control of the tournament, and refused to let go of it again.
Rai split the fairway with his drive at the 11th, stuck his approach to five feet, and made a birdie to take the lead. Then at the 13th he managed to splash out of a greenside bunker to five feet. That putt made him the first man to get to seven-under this week, and put him two shots clear of the field. McIlroy had bogeyed the 13th by blowing a drive wide right into the rough, while Rahm had dropped a shot at the seventh with a similar sort of mistake. Both men started to reach for the trophy, and the harder they strived, the further away it became.
Rai picked up another birdie on the par-five 16th and then delivered the knockout blow with another remarkable birdie putt from 68 feet on the 17th green. He 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. He had won three times on the European Tour, and once on the PGA Tour, but the closest he’d ever come to doing it at a major was when he won the rinky-dink par-three contest on the Wednesday of this year’s Masters.