The PGA Championship arrives this week at Aronimink in Newtown Square, Pa., with Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy again carrying the center of the sport. They are the two dominant forces in men’s golf over the past four and a half years, but they have rarely met with everything on the line at the same time.
Scheffler has won four majors. McIlroy has won two. Together, they have piled up 86 top-five finishes and 111 top-10 finishes in that span, a run of consistency that has left the rest of the field chasing the same two names. Since Jan. 1, 2022, there have been 114 PGA Tour events with at least one of them in the field, and the pair has won 30 of those tournaments.
The numbers matter because they show how often one or the other has been there, and how rarely they have been there together at the exact point where a tournament turns. There has not been a single final round since the 2023 BMW Championship in which both Scheffler and McIlroy began the day within three shots of the lead. That is why the idea of a true head-to-head major finish between them still feels unusual, even in an era they have controlled.
Scheffler came close last month at the Masters, making a Sunday 68 that lifted him from T7 to one shot behind McIlroy with four holes left to play for McIlroy. It was a reminder that the gap between them can close quickly, even if it usually does not stay closed for long. Their recent history has swung both ways: Scheffler’s 2022 Masters win came after McIlroy shot a backdoor 64 to jump from ninth to second, while McIlroy’s 2022 Tour Championship win came as Scheffler collapsed.
That mix of comfort and pressure is part of what makes the week at Aronimink worth watching. Scheffler’s major victories have often come in control rather than chaos. His two Masters wins in 2022 and 2024 were by three and four shots, respectively. His PGA Championship victory was by five shots, and he won the Open Championship by four. Three of those major victories came after he led by three shots following 54 holes.
The same pattern has made Scheffler hard to pin down in a duel. He owns nine major top-five finishes in this window and 17 major top-10 finishes before he turned 30, a pace that has made him the most reliable threat in the biggest events. McIlroy, for his part, has framed the standard in plain terms, calling Scheffler “the bar everyone is trying to reach.”
For Aronimink, that sets up the week’s central question without needing any extra drama: whether the major championship that has usually belonged to one of them can finally become a shared finish line. The pga championship tee times will determine who starts together and who does not, but the larger issue is whether both men can still be standing on Sunday with the tournament in reach. So far, that has been the rare part.
