NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — The last putt has dropped, the fans have vanished into shuttles and cars, and the sun will soon set over Aronimink Golf Club. Here at Golf Digest, we have triple-checked the scoreboard, slapped each other’s faces to ensure we aren’t locked in dreams, and grilled several harried PGA of America officials about the nature of time and finality. (One of us, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even consulted a Farmer’s Almanac, before realizing it was published in 1976 and written mostly in Dutch.) We have been meticulous in our research, thorough as thieves, and we are pretty sure—as sure as we’re going to be, anyway—that this thing is over.
Deep breath. Repeat the word: Over.
Why all this manic scrupulosity? It’s simple: We would like to say something definitive about the 2026 PGA Championship, and everything we have said up until this point has been wrong. Our confidence has been shattered, our worldviews upended, and many of us haven’t slept a wink in 96 hours. We’re getting paranoid; we’re starting fights on Twitter. All we want, as the second major of the year comes to an end, and before we pass out in puddles of anxiety and a dozen Citywides, is to finally say something true.
We pray we can get there; we pray there’s a path.
Our sins and errors are like breadcrumbs behind us, and we may as well acknowledge them before the jackals follow our scent and turn us into dinner. The only saving grace is that all the rest of you morons and buffoons were wrong too, and we’re hoping that buys us a little time. There aren’t many helicopters out of this mess, and like hell if we’re going to get left behind with the suckers.
FIRST: Everyone knew this course would play easy. Maybe if professional golfers were still playing with elephant femur clubs and balls made of human hair, a golden age-style Donald Ross course like Aronimink could stand up to scrutiny. But in the age of technological sorcery that makes the Department of Defense look on in jealousy, all this course could ever be was quaint. (Read the word “quaint” with as much malice as you can.) It’s fine for the architecture nerds to salivate over the “Philadelphia School,” which wasn’t even a real school or a real philosophy, but there are only so many times you can type the word “rolling terrain” before it shatters into meaninglessness as Max Greyserman drives the green on his seventh straight par-5 to reach 52 under and miss the cut by one. Hell, they even had one natural defense against the carnage, and then someone had the bright idea to cut down all the trees.
But then something strange happened, and this was the onset of precarity; our sanity slipping toward the abyss. Aronimink was more than quaint. It was the pasture of demons, the croft of baying hellhounds, the rolling terrain of horror. The ghosts here were mean. If you pried open the door of the stone cottage on 18, you’d find a thousand stacked skulls whose names had been lost to memory. Even Rory’s claim that it didn’t call for much strategy off the tee was belied by the sticky rough that put up more resistance than anybody expected. On Thursday, they came in off the course with thousand-yard stares and shellshocked psyches. Rory could only muster the word “shit” to describe his round, and even the guys who kept all their limbs, like Scottie Scheffler, told horror stories about pin placement and green contours and wind and cold.
Scott Taetsch/PGA of America
On Friday, the collective will was barely enough to push the lead from three under to four under. On Saturday, only one guy could even beat that, and none of us knew what to make of Alex Smalley with his studious speech and his ubiquitous mother.
And all the while, subtle drips of madness leaked from invisible phosphorescent stalactites above Aronimink. A South African named Garrick Higgo missed his tee time and began to question established notions of time in ways that started out nonsensical and then took on the dimensions of arcane, possibly extraterrestrial wisdom. It became a sport to pick on poor Higgo, but when we finished laughing and retreated to our corners, how many of us wondered: If someone tells you to arrive at 7:18 and you arrive at 7:18:30, have you not still arrived at 7:18? Long ruminant hours passed as the myelin sheaths on our nerves grew dangerously thin. Garrick, you iconoclast: God help us, we do know what you mean.
How could we handle Michael Block under conditions like these? We could not, but there he was anyway, rocketing as always between beloved and despised, and telling stories of self-pep talks in bathrooms that included the line “and there was no mirror, so I wasn’t looking at myself.”
Soon we were repeating this, empty of context, until it took on almost biblical weight: “And there was no mirror, so I wasn’t looking at myself.”
Uncertainty reigned, and at its chaotic apex, Jon Rahm hit a grass divot into the face of an old man.
He was exonerated. We didn’t have the energy to pursue it.
SECOND: The *$%&ing setup. Is it pure gaucherie to put pins on the top of a hill? Is it hackneyed to make men attempt difficult putts? Must we always revert to the supremacy of ball-striking, and must we separate pre-agreed wheat from pre-agreed chaff to attain legitimacy? Is it an affront to dignity when Aronimink dragged the knights of titanium into the forest of slippery greens, where the clumsy men could not draw their bows, and then stuck them in the soft underbelly with a rusty dagger?
(Also, may we ask: When players talk about pins being placed on the metaphorical roof of a car, are they constantly thinking of a Volkswagen Beetle? What sort of cars are they driving?)
Or, does that sort of setup have its own kind of beauty? Were Rory and Scottie wrong in their complaints, and was wise old voluble Padraig Harrington right in his Sunday scrum when he praised the dark wizard Kerry Haigh and his esoteric arts?
The issue was debated with great urgency and intelligence and burning rage online, and though we tend to side with the pro-Aronimink crowd on the merits, we really side with them for the expediency of watching these whining Fauntleroys brought low enough to taste the fresh bentgrass. Eat it up, you bleating sheep! The wolves are coming, and they know your name!
THIRD: The bunched leaderboard. We were told the lack of tactical options precluded big scores and small scores. You could make pars and bogeys, and that was it, and for three days we watched this odd amalgam of democratic socialist principles—the rich taxed into modesty, the poor lifted into comfort—all while trying to ignore that Bryson was hitting approaches into neighboring zip codes and pretending it didn’t matter that his pitching wedge was the length of a pole vault.
In these circumstances, who could break through? For a time, this narrative alone seemed to hold weight. We knew one real thing. And then the English grandson of Indian immigrants, the English son of a Kenyan mother, stole a march on the entire lot of them by playing an exalted, fearless kind of pressure golf when he had every right to crumble. Aaron Rai pierced our malaise and conveyed his message: You don’t have to be a superstar to have the courage that lets you keep walking when they open the door for you. The chase pack could only gape in the growing distance as he rejected the sluggish terms of engagement and simply, beautifully, soared.
Oh, our poor fried brains. Nothing is real, everything is fiction. What have we watched here? What bizarre play was conducted on this stage? Don’t ask us: We’re out of ideas. We’re depleted. We never want to come back to this place, but more than that, we want to live here forever.
Will we remember this PGA Championship in the morning? Will we write, will we call?
Maybe not often. But when we do, a single word will traverse the synaptic paths and land on the tips of our tongues, and when it emerges as sound, it will hum with the color of the admiration that breaks all resistance:
“Aronimink,” we will say, “you were weird.”
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