The 108th PGA Championship opened its early-week media obligations in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, with Xander Schauffele among the marquee names set to speak before the first round at Aronimink Golf Club. The Donald Ross course, which last hosted the best players on the PGA Tour at the 2018 BMW Championship, is back in the spotlight this week as golf’s second major of 2026 gets underway.
Schauffele’s presence was part of the start-of-week rhythm that tends to define major championships before a shot is struck. The conversations around him were joined by Cameron Young, who has already won twice this year and arrived fresh off a win at the Cadillac Championship two weeks before the PGA Championship. Young tied for third in his PGA Championship debut in 2022, then followed with finishes of MC, T63 and T47, a run that shows how hard it is to stay near the top for long on golf’s biggest stages.
Young did not sound interested in making those results into a bigger theory. In his view, the work stays the same no matter how the ranking or the resume looks. He said that in terms of sustaining success, nothing really changes, adding that all the players do out here is try to get better each day. He also pointed out that world rankings reward what has already happened, not what comes next, a reminder that the sport resets every week even for a player coming in with two wins and real momentum.
That same pressure to keep moving forward followed Luke Donald, who is making his 18th PGA Championship start while preparing to captain Europe in the Ryder Cup for a third consecutive time. Donald said on Wednesday that he thought he would be done after Bethpage Black, but European players urged him to take the job again. He said he lives very close to Rory, lives very close to Shane and Matt Fitzpatrick, and also saw several players in Dubai in January, where they were positive about him trying to go again. That support, he said, made him stop and consider whether he should continue if his players wanted him to do it.
Donald’s remarks carried extra weight because the next Ryder Cup is still ahead, at Adare Manor in Ireland in 2027. He has already made a site visit there, while Jim Furyk has not yet done so and is expected to visit later this fall. Donald described the venue as a beautiful parkland course in the southwest of Ireland, set around a five-star manor house with a lot of history, and said he thinks it will be a tremendous Ryder Cup site. He noted that it is not a typical Irish links course, but said it is certainly a very good golf course, the sort of place that should suit the scale and pressure of the event.
For Aronimink, this week is another reminder of how quickly a familiar course can become a major-stage test again. For Donald, it is another step in a captaincy he did not necessarily expect to keep. For Young, it is another chance to prove that the two wins already on his ledger mean something in a sport that never lets a player stand still for long.
