Newtown Square, Pa. – After shooting a two-under 68 inches this PGA Championship first round, Xander Schauffele was asked a simple question: name your best shot of the day.
“You got me here,” Schauffele said. “I have no idea.”
The sequel was also fair. Did you hit a good shot while playing one of the best rounds of the day?
“Yes, I did.” he said thinking. “I did it … ESPN was never going to show this, but I hit it on the green on the 8th, I was getting a little bit of oil, and I was able to push it up to 2 feet and up and around with a headwind. So in my mind, that was a really big moment for me.”
From 60 feet to 2 feet for, on paper, the most unsexy thing in golf: a two-shot par. But there are some truths about this fantastic tournament, one of which is becoming a dominant theme: This PGA Championship is filled with things that the average sports fan can never appreciate. This is for the sick of golf. Ball connoisseurs. Those who understand what Damn Good Golf looks like even when it’s not in a highlight reel. Those people who, if you squint hard enough, see the slopes of an intricate green through their flat screen and tell you what the “grain” is and why it matters. People who can guess when a bunker shot might go in versus those who can barely stay on the green. This tournament is for people who know that an 8-iron isn’t hitting a chip with your 8-iron.
Those in the know watching Friday morning (from the office, of course) had to laugh at ESPN analyst Andy North’s reception. First, they probably know Andy North’s CV by heart. Second, they could appreciate his saying, “For those of you who just tuned in this morning, this is the PGA Championship, not the Open Championship.”
Cheeky as it may seem at times, what North was doing there is extremely important. His role is not so much a literal reporter on the course as his title suggested, but more of an internal contextualizer. And because of how great professional golfers are, their brilliance is often flattened by 1.) soft greens; 2.) mitigated conditions; and 3.) how it is conveyed through transmission. We’re trained as golfers to automatically rate shots that end up close to the hole, much less those that bend to a specific location on a certain square of these particularly tough greens. It happens in the Open Championship, at North Point, but it hasn’t always been that way in the PGA.
Think back to 2024, to Valhalla in sweaty Kentucky, where Schauffele, surprisingly, hit a ton of great shots and won the tournament. But he, again, might not remember much of it because the setup was directly similar to what the pros see week in and week out. The ball was played up and through the sky, and all the “best” shots landed within five feet of the hole and stayed there. A similar experience took place last year at the PGA Tour-designed (and quite wet) Quail Hollow. But this week looks like a departure from PGA Championship form, and my guess is that your best golfing buddies love it.
Aronimink asks players to be so, so patient. Doing as Chris Gotterup – owner of Round of the Week – has actually done better: realizing that golf at its highest level doesn’t have to be see the ball, hit the ball. But on the contrary, visualize the ball, see the ball, hit the ball, see the ball in the air, see the ball on the ground, wait for that ball to stop. Thirty feet from the hole, as Gotterup said Friday, can be a very good shot. Your aunt who only watches the Masters may never understand.
But if she watched this year’s Masters champion play the 13th hole on Friday, who knows if she’d realize just how tough she played the hole into the wind. Rory McIlroy bombed his drive down that fairway — a very good shot, not a great one — and then had to play a tasteful three-quarter wedge that flew halfway to the green and bounded along the ground until it ran all the way to the hole. It may have been the best shot played in Pennsylvania this decade. Auntie may not know what a relationship is.
Every year, the PGA of America has one of the toughest jobs in sports. Organizing your next degree after your Masters feels a bit like organizing a costume party two weeks after Halloween. Each year the standard is so universally loved in its permanent setting, Easter. But the PGA needs to pick venues nearly a decade in advance, it needs to produce something more difficult than the PGA Tour would do, but not so difficult that players find it unfair and hope Mother Nature treats them reasonably. So far, Aronimink is threading that needle, not pissing anyone off and bringing with him a Goldilocks style of golf, the world’s best players (and those who consume golf constantly) are determined. NO used for it.
Pros left the course exhausted from the test, but not overly disgruntled. Even the quick-to-complain Shane Lowry, who had just shot a 76 on Friday, said he wouldn’t share his shots because he knows a number of his peers are hitting great scores by hitting great shots, many of which are undervalued.
“The fans have no idea,” Lowry said. “They have no idea. The people sitting in the stands have no idea how hard it is out there.”
The way Aronimink and the PGA are doing it, on a shorter fairway than most, is with perfectly intricate greens that are fairly steep and hole locations that are firmly in the fairway. Lowry said a number of them feel like they’re on the convex hood of a car. Getting close requires a complicated understanding of how much a 54 degree wedge rotates compared to its 50 degree sibling. Dan Brown used the latter (a chippy 50) instead of the former (a soft 54) on Thursday, sitting short of the hole and curling it from 102 yards. Patrick Cantlay, a few hours earlier, but on the same hole, misunderstood the assignment, landed 2 yards behind the hole and ripped the ball 60 yards back.
Scottie Scheffler called this week’s variety of hole locations the toughest set since he joined the PGA Tour, added they were “kind of absurd,” but also said none of them were unfair. He validated those thoughts through several Tour-lifer bogeys, and both agreed, saying it was the hardest set of holes they’d seen besides Shinnecock Hills.
So go ahead – ask your friends what they know about Shinnecock. Some will call it the next US Open, in the Hamptons. Golf people will tell you that the course was so close to the edge in 2018 that it nearly caused chaos. What it does offer is unglamorous golf that is a little esoteric. You only know how good it is… if you know how good it is. The challenge it presents results in a lot of money, a lot of anxiety, a lack of patience and, almost always, a tired and absolutely deserving champion. It’s the kind of test the golfers in your life crave for more than one week a year. In 2026, it arrived a month ahead of schedule.
