Aaron Rai won the PGA Championship at Aronimink with a closing round of 65, a total of nine under par and a three-shot margin over Jon Rahm and Alex Smalley. The Englishman claimed the first major of his career and became the first player from England to win the Wanamaker Trophy since Jim Barnes in 1919. The decisive image came on the 17th hole, where he holed a 68-foot putt that gave him a definitive cushion before the final hole.
The victory brought wider attention to a player recognised for details rarely seen in professional golf: he plays with two gloves, protects his irons with covers and has an almost handcrafted relationship with his equipment. Those habits go back to his childhood in Wolverhampton, to practice sessions alongside his father, Amrik Rai, and to a family that entered golf without any previous tradition in the sport.
The clubs his father cleaned with a pin
Rai was seven when his family invested in a set of Titleist 690 MB irons, clubs that were treated at home as items of huge value. After every practice session or round, whether they were dirty or not, Amrik Rai would go through the grooves of each club with a pin and clean the face with baby oil to prevent rust. When they were not being used, the irons were protected with covers. The habit followed Rai all the way to the elite level and he still keeps them “to appreciate the value of what he has”. On the PGA Tour, where almost no professional uses iron covers, he keeps them as part of a routine learned as a child.
The other image associated with Rai is the two black gloves. He started wearing them at around eight years old, when he received a pair of gloves and became used to playing with both. He also grew up practising through English winters, in cold and rain, and that practical choice eventually became a permanent feature of his game. That same year, Rai came through the three stages of the British Wee Wonders circuit and qualified for the U.S. Kids Golf World Championship at Pinehurst. There, he and his father discovered a training system that would shape them: adapting the length of the course to a child’s age and physical development so that he could get used to shooting low scores before moving on to longer layouts.
Amrik’s method: shorter courses to learn how to win
Amrik Rai took that idea into his son’s development. Before playing from the forward tees on a conventional course, Aaron Rai would start from shorter areas, sometimes from the fairway, so that the course had a distance that allowed him to make pars or shoot under par. The player later explained that he did not play his first round from the forward tees until he was 12.
That method also kept him away, for part of his childhood, from the more usual club-golf pathway. Rai competed in junior tournaments for his age group, but his father protected the process they had chosen: fewer comparisons with other children, more repetition in scoring situations and a development plan built around what they were working on together. Years later, the golfer summed up that period with a specific idea: he knew why he was doing certain things and believed in those reasons.
Rai’s family story also runs through his mother, Dalvir, who was born in Mombasa and moved to England as a teenager. While Amrik Rai closely followed his son’s sporting career, Dalvir carried much of the family’s domestic and working life, holding several jobs, including as a mental health nurse and an aerobics instructor. In 2017, Rai won the Barclays Kenya Open at Muthaiga Golf Club in Nairobi. Dalvir travelled with him and returned to Kenya for the first time since leaving the country at the age of 14. The victory came on Mother’s Day in the UK and ended with her walking onto the 18th green to celebrate the win. Rai later said it was the most special memory of his career.
A career built in stages
Before the major at Aronimink, Rai had followed a long path outside the main spotlight. He turned professional in 2012, played on the PGA EuroPro Tour, had to return to qualifying school and, in 2017, won three tournaments on the Challenge Tour, including the title in Kenya. Then came the Hong Kong Open, the Scottish Open and his first PGA Tour victory, at the Wyndham Championship.
The PGA Championship added another dimension to that career. After winning at Aronimink, Rai recalled the role of his parents and his team, and spoke about the pride of representing a family story linked to England, India and Kenya. In his post-round press conference, he explained that his grandparents, on both his father’s and mother’s sides, came from India, and summed up his identity with one line: “I’m very proud to be a mix of all of them”.
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