Aaron Rai’s PGA Championship Victory is a Win For Diligent

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — We live in a superlative society, where anything we’ve been exposed to in the last five minutes gets the recency bias treatment of being the biggest or best there’s ever been.

In the aftermath of Aaron Rai’s victory at the PGA Championship, it’s an effortless narrative to maintain that he’s the most determined and most disciplined and most diligent player in professional golf, since there exists no strokes gained data to dispute this claim.

That’s what happens when a player achieves a career milestone. We take one noteworthy aspect of his identity and amplify it to an inflated extent, because these days it’s simply not enough to explain a victory based on someone playing better golf than all of the other competitors over four rounds.

It must have breadth. We need to supersize it.

Except, here’s the thing about Rai: He really is all of those aforementioned superlatives.

He’s the hardest worker in golf, whether he’s missing the cut in a few consecutive starts, failing to close out an alternate-field event or capturing his first major championship.

Again, there are no analytics to prove this point, so we’ll have to rely on the anecdotal evidence.

This, from two-time major winner Xander Schauffele, isn’t normal. It’s not the kind of story elite-level pros tell about their peers.

“At the Scottish [Open], I’m staying right on-site there,” he recalled. “I thought it was fun for [caddie] Austin [Kaiser] and I to go putt. Aaron is finishing up his little putting session at 9 p.m. and going to the gym at 9:45. This was three years ago. I think that’s what it’s about to be a major champion. You puts the work in when nobody’s looking.”

And then there’s this, from fellow pro Paul Waring: “I’ll never forget watching Aaron Rai do putting drills at 7 p.m. on the Wednesday of the 2022 Irish Open. It was hammering down, he was soaked and still stayed out. I cheered every putt he holed with a Guinness in my hand under cover of the terrace. Maybe there’s a lesson in that.”

There will be questions in the wake of Rai’s biggest career achievement. How did this happen? Why did he rise to the moment when more accomplished players such as Schauffele and Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm faltered?

The simple answers are that he just happened to hit a few world-class shots and hole a couple of unlikely putts in the most clutch moments.

What we watched unfold on Sunday afternoon, though, hardly tells the story. Those moments were only allowed to happen because Rai spent early mornings on driving ranges around the world and late nights on practice greens in the rain. They took place because he unceremoniously reached his 10,000 hours and just kept going.

Scottie Scheffler, the game’s best player, has eloquently spoken about performance being more compelling than result. He’s more interested in hitting each shot to the best of his ability than any sort of long-term tangible goals.

That’s both admirable and aspirational, but it’s not much fun to root for a process. We can raise a Guinness to the man honing his craft in solitude. It’s the 68-foot, 5-inch birdie putt, though — like the one Rai made on the penultimate hole at Aronimink Golf Club — that makes all the highlight shows.

Last month’s Masters Tournament was an occasion to toast excellence, as a generational talent won for the second straight year. This weekend’s PGA Championship has been an opportunity to celebrate doggedness, to bathe in the idea that hard work makes dreams come true and while practice might not make perfect, it can certainly lead to a perfect moment.

No one can explain that better than the man himself, the one who knows what went into the making of a major champion.

“There’s so much hard work and discipline that goes into acquiring the skills to become better,” Rai explained, “but you also realize that nothing is ever given in this game at any point, whether it’s a tournament, whether it’s a practice round, whether it’s even away from a tournament week.”

Not long after his victory, Rai was asked what’s next in his career and what he’s hoping to accomplish moving forward.

His answer, based on everything we’ve come to know about him, shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“I hope to continue to move in a pretty similar way in terms of practice, training, application towards the game,” he said, “and we’ll see where that takes me.”