Aaron Rai wins PGA Championship, first English champion since 1919

Aaron Rai closed the 108th PGA Championship with a final-round 5-under 65 and a 72-hole total of 9-under 271, pulling away by three strokes at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. The 31-year-old from Wolverhampton, England, won his first major championship and became the first Englishman to lift the PGA Championship since Jim Barnes in 1919, ending a 10-year run of American winners and becoming the first non-American champion since Jason Day in 2015.

The decisive swing came on the par-3 17th, where Rai holed a birdie putt from roughly 68 feet that effectively sealed the title. He had entered the final round tied near the top of a crowded leaderboard and finished with the poise of a player who had gradually moved from outsider to threat, then to champion, in the space of a few holes. It was only his 13th major start, a reminder of how quickly a player can rewrite the pecking order when form and timing finally meet.

Rai’s victory carried an even deeper historical edge because it reached back to the earliest days of the championship. Jim Barnes, born in Cornwall, England, also won the inaugural PGA Championship in 1916 and the 1919 event after a two-year break caused by World War I. More than a century later, Rai joined Barnes as the only English-born winners of the Wanamaker Trophy, a line of succession that underscores how rarely English golf has broken through at this level.

What made Rai’s rise feel almost improbable was how little of his profile matched the sport’s usual spotlight. He is known for wearing iron headcovers and playing with two gloves, details that have made him easy to recognize but not always easy to rank among the game’s bigger names. Before this week, his best PGA Championship finish was 19th in 2025, and early-year injuries had interrupted his season before he found form in the weeks leading into the championship. That combination of understated style, delayed momentum and sudden authority gave the win its force. Rai did not just collect a trophy; he cracked open a hierarchy that had kept English golf waiting for more than a century.