NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — The pin at the 10th hole at Aronimink is tucked next to a ridge with slope so severe that anything on the wrong side is playing to mitigate the pain. Most of the field, staring at that geography, aims for the middle of the green and moves on. There is no shame in it. The middle of the green is how professionals manage a golf course.
On Thursday afternoon to begin his PGA Championship, Michael Block hit his approach at the 10th from 200 yards to two feet.
That requires a rare kind of conviction. Maybe a little reckless cowboy in there, too. With Block, it can be hard to separate the two, which is exactly what makes him compelling.
The setup, for anyone new to this space: Block won the public’s heart at Oak Hill in 2023, the club pro from California, who hole-in-oned the 15th on Sunday and tied for 15th. The ovation he received walking up 18 was the kind that golf produces maybe, what, once a decade? He was omnipresent on social media. He had a nickname. Brooks Koepka won the Wanamaker but Block was the story.
And then, as American sports culture tends to do with its sudden saints, it ate him alive. The ham-and-eggs persona that felt authentic in the raw light of the PGA started to curdle under constant exposure. The story got told too many times. The story got told by too many people who had nothing to do with it. By the time Block became a fixture the commentary had acquired an edge—fond, but knowing. The kind of knowing that means we’re in on something now.
Darren Carroll/PGA of America
Block is aware of all of this. He is also, through 18 holes at the this PGA Championship, even par and very much in the conversation.
But the round itself is almost beside the point, the same way the shot at 10 was about more than proximity to the hole. What mattered was what Block said afterward, stripped of the polished cadence that briefly made him a divisive figure.
Standing before reporters, he talked about hiding alone in a bathroom between the 12th and 13th holes, trying to settle himself mid-round. It wasn’t rehearsed. It wasn’t packaged. It sounded like a man fighting to keep his footing inside the chaos.
“There was no mirror,” he said, “so I wasn’t looking at myself. But I said, You got this. I go, You’re actually pretty good, buddy.“
He was playing with Dustin Johnson and Rasmus Hojgaard. Johnson, one of the great athletes of this generation. Hojgaard, Ryder Cupper. Both were hitting it 50 yards past him on every hole.
“I’m just going, You got this, bud. You got it. It’s cool. It’s really cool. It’s kind of fun, to be honest.”
Block will be eligible for the Champions Tour in the coming months. For he and the other 19 club pros, making it here is the victory. He knows he likely can’t contend, and he does not need this the way the tour pros around him need it.
Which is precisely what makes him dangerous.
Darren Carroll/PGA of America
“I have zero to lose,” he said. “I’m about to be 50. I can see my wife and my kid up on the hill there right now, and my boss, they support me 100 percent. There’s zero losing this week.”
Block wasn’t working the room as much as someone who is saying things so impromptu that they can only be the truth.
“They don’t expect me to play well,” he said. “They hope I play well, and they know I could play well, but I could get last place, and I’m still going to be loved and have a great job and everything else, and that’s perfectly fine with me. That really gives you a lot of confidence.”
Most players at this PGA will torture themselves because their constructed sense of self ride with every shot. Block has a job he loves (even, as if he’s previously admitted, that job has taken a back seat to his recent opportunities), a family he’ll return to, a golf course in Southern California that would celebrate him if he shot 85 tomorrow. He is playing with house money so thoroughly that the house cannot touch him.
“I feel like I’ve got shots,” he said. “Like I feel like I’m coming in here as a 2-handicapper and I get a couple shots on the rest of the field.”
It would be easy, and maybe a little lazy, to compare Block to this city’s favorite fictional son, Rocky Balboa. But Thursday was a reminder that beneath Block the phenomenon still exists Block the golfer—and Block the person—who captivated people in the first place. Yes, he became overexposed. Yes, the story lingered a little too long. But most people, handed the same opportunities, would have squeezed every ounce from them too. Maybe we were a little too harsh on a man who was living through something he himself could barely comprehend.
And sure, it is only one round. Major championships have a way of restoring order. Aronimink will demand more, and so will the players surrounding him on the leaderboard. But this much is true on a late Thursday in Pennsylvania: a club professional who teaches golf for a living just outplayed most of the best golfers in the world over 18 holes at a major championship. Which is another way of saying Michael Block is exactly where he believed he belonged all along.
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