DUBLIN, Ohio — The weight of accomplishment in winning his first major title hit Aaron Rai only minutes after he completed his three-stroke victory in the PGA Championship last month at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, Pa.
It occurred during the trophy presentation when Rai hoisted the Wanamaker Trophy. The prize, donated by department store heir Rodman Wanamaker for the inaugural championship in 1916, is among the largest in golf at more than 29 inches. It also might be the heaviest, weighing 27 pounds.
Rai wasn’t quite ready for the immensity of the moment.
“I had heard stories about it, but I still wasn’t prepared for quite how heavy that it was,” Rai said with a laugh on Tuesday at Muirfield Village Golf Club, where he was preparing for the Memorial Tournament, his first start since his PGA triumph. “I was pretty comfortable for probably the first minute or so [holding it for photographs] and then after that I definitely started to feel it burning.”
Fortunately, he won’t have quite as much trouble with the version of the Wanamaker the PGA is sending to his home in England. The replica is only 90 percent the size of the original.
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Rai, 31, who is making his fourth start in the Memorial, is still coming to grips, so to speak, with other aspects of becoming a major champion. The victory was his second on the PGA Tour and eighth of his career worldwide, but nothing before he closed with a final-round 65 at Aronimink can compare. He needed some time for the win to sink in.
“I think it took a good few days, I think, for me to really get my head around it. I mean, I don’t think I still have fully. But the following morning it was just more of an excitement really. I only slept for four hours on the Sunday night. I slept really late and then I just couldn’t sleep in the morning either after I woke up. So I think just a lot of excitement. It was only really when my dad came to my house a few days later that we started to speak about it a little bit more that I started to kind of embrace it and let it sink in a little bit more. Yeah, it definitely took a few days to kind of get into that.”
Rai said he doesn’t feel different as a golfer, but being stopped by fellow shoppers in the grocery store was one clue that things had changed. Then there was another more significant clue.
“The royal family in England had posted on Twitter about the PGA Championship, which was a real surprise,” he said with wonder. “That definitely stood out.”
Now, so does Rai.