NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — As an amateur golfer, I aspire to play boring golf.
I want to keep my ball in the short grass unceremoniously.
I want easy, uneventful two putts.
I want to hit the middle of lots of greens, and avoid disaster when I don’t.
I want to make my short putts whenever they come.
It’s what made Aaron Rai the perfect winner of the 2026 PGA Championship.
He’s the king of boring golf—and I mean that as the highest compliment. He’s average-ish distance-wise but very accurate. He keeps the ball in front of him. His superpower this week was finishing first in Birdie Conversion percentage. That’s his game. He put himself in position often enough, and when the putts happen to fall, he finishes well.
Carl Recine
And that was the formula on Aronimink’s tricky greens, which were so complex that not even the best players in the world could figure out how to attack them in any risk-free way. Combine this with the lack of penalty hazards off the tee, and it had the effect of making no real difference in positive separators (things I can do more of, like hitting more long drives) and negative separators (things I can do less of, hitting fewer drives into hazards).
This week, it was only the negative separators.
- Avoiding the rough: Approach proximity from the fairway was about a foot better than tour average, but approach proximity from the rough was about 4 feet worse than tour average
- Avoiding three-putts: Players three-putted almost double as much this week as during average weeks (4.8 percent vs 2.6 percent). Of the six players tied for first in that stat, five finished inside the top 10.
- Avoiding ‘double chips’: There were multiple incidents of players missing the green from greenside bunkers and chips because they cut it too close with the slopes. It’s one reason why scrambling percentage was a whopping 15 percent lower this week than on average weeks.
And I thought that was cool, because it proved a true, deep examination into the fundamentals of the game that often get overlooked. It wasn’t about doing the extraordinary this week. It was, as former PGA of America Teacher of the year Jason Baile likes to say, about doing the ordinary, extraordinarily well.
Few players do that better than Aaron Rai.
1. Learn how to see straight
Earlier this week I walked past the practice putting green and saw lots of players hitting lots of putts—and one player not hitting any.
Justin Rose gets up to all sorts of interesting things. He’s a professional golfer in the truest sense of the word. He looks for edges everywhere, and when he does, he does so intentionally. He knows what he’s going to practice, why and how before each session. The rest of us may not be as good as Justin Rose, but we can adopt that approach.
On this occasion, he was working on seeing straight—yes, really. His coach Phil Kenyon had aligned a series of tees in a straight line towards the hole. Rose would set up to the golf ball, track his eyes up and down the line, then reset.
7. Keep your hands close
This was an old Jack Nicklaus tip: You can’t keep your hands close enough to you during your swing.
It’s a good one for amateurs: When your arms get too far away from your body on the downswing, you’re equally as likely to come over-the-top (higher handicaps tend to do this) or get the club stuck behind you (lower handicaps tend to do this).
And I was thinking about it as I saw it pop up everywhere this week.
Rahm works on it in the backswing by keeping a towel under his right arm. His hands tend to lift out on the takeaway; a few swings like this keep them “moving with his body,” his coach Dave Philips says.
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Hideki Matsuyama was working on a similar feel on the downswing. Hands in closer to his body, with the club out.
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Like anything in golf, you can overdo it. But generally speaking, it’s a good thought to remember.
8. Body checkpoints
Andreas Kali, who coaches rising Danish star Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen, has been helping me with my golf swing, and shared an interesting tidbit that you can spot in literally every pros’ swing.
“When your arms are pointing to the target [on the release], I look for the hips to be ahead of your chest and your chest to be ahead of your head.”
Michael Reaves
9. Par-3 strategy *kinda* exists
Hunting for unique game improvement tips means being OK with striking out. And this week, I struck out on one of my ideas: Par-3 strategies.
Turns out, par-3 strategy and approach shot strategy is exactly the same. Dead end on building out that idea, but Scottie Scheffler’s caddie Ted Scott did supply some helpful breadcrumbs….
“The process for the shot is the same, but par-3s themselves have certain designs, so the strategy is about knowing what to do on each of those designs.”
Alright, I can work with that! Stay tuned.