The 108th PGA Championship starts Thursday at Aronimink Golf Club outside Philadelphia, with 156 golfers in the field and a familiar question hanging over the week: can anyone stop Scottie Scheffler or Rory McIlroy?
Scheffler, McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Cameron Young are among the players expected to have a real chance to win, while Jordan Spieth is still chasing the career Grand Slam. Matt Fitzpatrick is after his fourth victory on tour this season and the second major title of his career, and there are 11 LIV Golf players in the field, including Tyrrell Hatton and Joaquín Niemann.
McIlroy arrives after winning a green jacket at the Masters for the second straight time, and Schlabach said he and Scheffler have combined to win five of the past nine majors. He also said McIlroy leads the tour in strokes gained off the tee at.854 and tee to green at 1.703, but will need to clean up his short game after last week at Quail Hollow Club. Scheffler played in the RBC Heritage and Cadillac Championship while McIlroy skipped both signature events, then McIlroy played in the Truist Championship last week while Scheffler stayed home.
Bradley, who won the BMW Championship at Aronimink in 2018, said the course can bite back around the greens. “What makes this place difficult are the greens,” he said. “So you really need to be able to control your distances, hit the ball in the fairway.” He added that “off the tee it's not extremely challenging, but the greens get really crazy and they are really mounded and hilly and just like a lot of northeast courses are like,” and that “to put the ball in the right spot is really important.”
Aronimink, a Donald Ross-designed course, has wide fairways, fewer trees and 174 bunkers, but the rough does not appear as thick or penalizing as it might have been. The club last hosted a PGA Championship in 1962, when Gary Player won there, and the setup gives this week a split personality: generous off the tee, exacting once the ball lands. Mark Schlabach said McIlroy is probably going to lift the Wanamaker Trophy on Sunday, and Scheffler is probably going to do the same.
That projection is not just about form. It is also about the gap between the sport’s biggest names and everyone else, a gap that continues to shape the majors while Brian Rolapp and the Future Competition Committee are expected to discuss how to get the best golfers playing against each other more frequently. For now, the opener at Aronimink is set up as a test of whether the best players in the game can turn another stacked major into a two-man race.
