Scottie Scheffler arrives at the PGA Championship with momentum that was hard to imagine earlier this season. He won his first start of the year at The American Express by four strokes, then followed with runner-up finishes at the Masters and in his next two starts, giving him three straight second-place finishes entering Aronimink Golf Club in Newton Square, Pa.
That run has come after a slow statistical start by his standards. Scheffler was 42nd in approach after three consecutive seasons finishing No. 1, a rare dip in the part of the game that had separated him from most of the field. Even so, he was top 10 off the tee, around the green and tee to green, and 14th in putting, a mix that suggests his overall game is coming back together at the right time for a course that can punish uneven ball-striking.
The PGA Championship is being played at Aronimink, which has hosted three major men’s tournaments in the last 17 years and has not hosted a PGA TOUR event in eight years. That history matters because the course has already told different stories to different players. Justin Rose and Rickie Fowler are the only players in the field who also played in all three of Aronimink’s previous major men’s tournaments, and Rose has seen every version of the place. He won there in his course debut at the 2010 AT&T National, finished T15 when the event returned in 2011 and then lost a playoff to Keegan Bradley at the 2018 BMW Championship, a defeat that pushed him to world No. 1 for the first time and set up a FedExCup win the following week.
That blend of history and recent form is why Scheffler is again one of the central figures as the major begins. Mark Blackburn called him “a savant when it comes to how you strategically play a course,” and that reputation fits a player whose strength has long been forcing a venue to bend to his decisions. The question now is whether the cleaner approach play he has shown lately can hold up against a course that rewards patience more than hero shots.
For Scheffler, the timing could hardly be better. He was runner-up at Augusta National and has now stacked three straight second-place finishes behind a win to open the season, a sequence that says he is near peak form even if his early-season numbers never fully settled. Aronimink offers no guarantees, but it gives him a stage where course management, not streaks, will decide the week.
